CHINA
Country Overview:
“Love the food, hate the government”
I arrived in China in May 2013 and left August 2020. I taught English for awhile, did my master’s of politics & foreign policy at Tsinghua University, worked for a year at China Today, and then two years at Xinhua News Agency. I spent most of my time in Beijing, but also traveled to Shanghai, Wuhan, Inner Mongolia, Shenzhen, Panjin, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Qingdao, Xi’an, Sanya, Macau, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
This was a stir-fry type dish
Don’t ask me what’s in it, because half of it is either unrecognizable or unpronounceable
It's 10pm, I just got home, and I'm eating donkey.
I know this because I asked some guy what kind of meat it was and he mumbled, “Chicken - no, beef - no, pork - no. Uuuuuhhhhh IT’S DONKEY!!! Yes yes, donkey!” He looked like I should have given him a gold star or something. #Iheartchina #it'sdelicious
Despite the fact that I don’t know what they are, these things are delicious.
There is like a cheese, scallion and egg (tofu?) mixture inside a doughy center and a fried outside
1st picture was my first dinner here in China
The guy who picked me up at the airport got me settled in at the hotel, then left. Great. I was starving and had no way to communicate. So I went back to the school and asked if he could help me out. He took me to this giant place in the basement of a mall that has tons of Chinese food. You load up money on a card, then when you want something, you just tap the card against the machine and it deducts the costs and they serve you your food. Besides the sweet/sour chicken with rice, I had no idea what the other 3 bowls were.
Sometimes I know what I’m getting, and other times, I don’t. For example, the yellow stuff in the bottom picture came with what I ordered and it was like a gelatinous tapioca pudding without any flavor. After struggling with chopsticks and rice, I asked my buddy what the Chinese word for ‘fork’ was and he said, “They’ll just give you chopsticks anyway”.