hungry?

i guess it would be silly to try to document what i do every single day i'm in China. but, some interesting things have been going on this week, obviously, because it's my first week here. so i'll do my best.

I guess one thing that you might be interested in is the food. I believe I already mentioned the ridiculous amount of oreos i've consumed. I'm running dangerously low on them and have started rationing them. Today I bought some bread and peanut butter (Chinese skippy brand?) so hopefully that will tide me over until i'm able to actually go grocery shopping for real. Although...I just busted it out and the bread has a really, really strange taste. Good thing I brought a thing of multi-vitamins....

Anyway, the Chinese food so far has been good, although we've had a bunch of things that I didn't particularly enjoy. At our orientation at the hotel downtown on Thursday night, we partook in a Chinese banquet. I really love the idea of having everything being family style, with lazy susans in the middle of the table...but you've got to be really aware of what everyone else is doing before you try to spin it around to shovel something onto your own tiny plate. And I love (yes, LOVE) using chopsticks. I haven't used any other utensils since I've been here (well ok, i used a Chinese spoon once) and it's working out really well. I've only made a few messes on the table clothes....

The food at the banquet was overall pretty good, but there were a couple of tofu dishes that were pretty gross...and I tend to like tofu. Apparently it is tradition to serve soup as the second to last thing at dinner, and we were lucky enough to get some disgusting dessert soup that looked like egg drop soup but was REALLY sweet and had big tapioca balls in the bottom of it. needless to say, it didn't go over well. I made a point to try it, but...no thank you. Imagine a thick, eggy, sickeningly sweet bubble tea. At our other dinner at the hotel yesterday there was something that we all thought was a dumpling....but it wasn't. It was something slimy and unpalatable, but my friend and I decided not to pull and America's Next Top Model and spit it out. That would have been poor form. Honestly though, I don't know if I've ever eaten something with such a disgusting texture before.

As for breakfast, I haven't actually had a real chinese breakfast yet, and I sort of doubt I will any time soon since I'm responsible for my own breakfast here in my apartment before school starts. I didn't partake in the breakfast served at the hotel yesterday morning because it wasn't open when my roommate and I went down there. I did hear that they served some sort of dumpling, a hardboiled egg, rice gruel, and a plate of pickled eggs and pickled vegetables. Actually, on Wednesday morning, this girl Shannon that i've become friends with and I went to one of the street vendors in our area and got a sort of egg/green onion flat bread thing. it was sort of spongy in consistency, and very thin. I have no idea what you call it, but it was good even though it was really greasy. and it didn't upset my stomach at all, so that was a plus. Actually, I haven't yet had any incidents with things making me sick. I'm prouder at this feat than I probably should be, because I'm sure that something horrible is going to hit me any day now.

Today during our orientation here at school, we ate in the cafeteria. Since we live on campus, the school allows us to eat lunch for free in the cafeteria during the school days. Some of us decided to try it out, and aside from the fact that we were told that everything has loads and loads of MSG, it really wasn't that bad. It wasn't that good either, but I am obviously not someone who will easily pass up free food. Obviously.

I realized that this post has been mostly complaining about the food. I don't mean to, because I really have eaten a lot of good things. It's just harder to describe them because half the time I didn't even know what kind of meat I was eating. I will assume it wasn't cat or dog, but who really knows. We ordered one dish of sauteed pork in a garlic ginger sauce that was really delicious.

Hopefully things will just keep getting better....