Chinese Food Daily Diary: Day One

Without a doubt, the biggest question I get asked is, “What is the food like?” followed closely with, “Is it anything like Chinese food back home?”
And here are my answers: Fantastic! Not at all.
Of course there are similarities between western Chinese food and real Chinese food such as lots of rice, noodles and veggies but even the basics are different. For instance I was never a big eggplant fan at home. The big bulbous purple veggie never tasted very good to me no matter how it was cooked. Now I eat it at least once a week and it was one of the first vegetable names I learned to say in Chinese.
If I could send some real Chinese food to each and every one of you, I would because it is that good. But I can’t. I can do the next best thing…show you pictures! Every day for the next week I will take a picture of my meal and put it up here for you to see. Sometimes I don’t know the exact name of the food I’m eating (sometimes I don’t even know what the ingrediants are!) but I will do my best to describe it to you so you can get a good idea.
So here goes!
Breakfast:
I have the same breakfast almost every day. It sounds boring but I’m usually rushing out of the house to get to class and don’t have much time. In the bowl is a small container of yogurt with peanuts, raisins and banana chips in it. (The red thing is dried fruit, although to be honest I’m not exactly sure what type of fruit it is. It’s very sweet.) Sometimes I have toast but I only butter one piece as butter is quite expensive and hard to find here. And in the cup is tea of course with a fresh slice of lemon.
Lunch: When we go out to eat at a restaurant we never know what we are going to get. We can read enough words to know what the main component is (pork, beef, chicken) and what style it is (rice, soup, noodles) but that’s it. So we pick dishes in which we recognize about 40% of the words and hope for the best. This is what we ended up with for lunch.
On the left is bamboo shoots with red peppers and small pieces of pork. We are big fans of bamboo shoots which are fibrous but not too chewy. On the right is fried egg with tomatoes and green onions. In Chinese style we share the dishes and don’t have individual plates. Instead we each have our own small bowl of rice which we use as a resting point for our food before eating it. (That’s what it is all discolored. It is sauce from the food.)
We also got our favorite food, small potato pancakes. Potatoes are not a typical food for all of China but are more common in our area and we love these little fried pancakes.

Dinner: We eat about one meal a day in the school cafeteria. There are many cafeterias on campus, but we only go to the third floor cafeteria which some refer to as “the Cadillac of cafeterias.” Instead of grumpy old lunch ladies spooning gobs of slop onto our plate, the third floor cafeteria looks more like a marketplace. It is separated into 9 little sections and each sections specializes in a different style of food. You order (they have pictures) and they cook it up fresh for you. This cafeteria is also known as the “expensive” one but the average dish costs about 7 yuan ($1) and clearly worth it.
My dinner was fried chicken pieces with a tomato sauce on top of a plate of rice. It looks kind of like sweet and sour pork, but it isn’t as sweet and syrupy. Instead the tomato sauce is more like thick campbell soup.
When you eat at the cafeteria you inevitably see someone you know, either a student or a fellow teacher. Tonight we saw two teachers and we all ate together.
There are only 6 foreign teachers on the campus besides us so running into them is very coincidental and doesn’t happen that often.