I’ll take the Beijing Duck and a Side of Lung Cancer:

The Food!

I feel like I need to explain my take on Chinese food in the states before I explain my take on the food. I like Chinese food but I’d generally only eat it once a month, my favorite is Kung Po Chicken a little spicy, a tasty sauce, chicken, peanuts and rice what more could you ask for (other than bacon). Generally I avoid the strip mall Chinese food preferring to eat at places like P.F. Chang’s where I know chicken is actually chicken (meow). I hope you can now imagine the nightmarish eating situation I have found myself in where I can’t speak the language, read the characters, and everything they serve is part of an animal that we wouldn’t consider eating in the states.
Also I think it’s important to note that if I don’t succeed in learning this crazy language I will get my PHD in chop sticks by the end of all of my time in China. At our second meal in China I was struggling with my chop stinks after dropping half my meal on my shirt and the other half on the table the Fu Yen (waiters) brought over a fork for me so I’d be able to eat some of my food. I’m actually not that bad with the chop sticks I was just having an off day. Speaking of the Fu Yen it amazes me but in China in order to get the attention of anyone on the wait staff you simply yell Fu Yen and they come running there’s very few manners when it comes to working with a person in a restaurant. We actually have had the waiter or waitress leave a table that was ordering to tend to us and have had a waiter/waitress leave us while ordering to tend to another table.
Our first dinner was great we were escorted by ambassadors of University to a local restaurant where they ordered for us an assortment of local favorites and traditional Chinese cuisine. When we walked into the restaurant I was greeted with what I will call my first smell of China (you know how the beach has a smell, the mountains have a smell that’s what I mean so fair I’ve found two China smells I’ll tell you about the other later on). It’s a difficult smell to describe but I am going to do my best so work with me and use your imagination and I’d say close your eyes but then you’d stop reading. Picture yourself opening the door to your grandmother’s house (for the sake of this description your grandmother is 75 years old and smokes two packs a day and so do all of her friends that hang out at her house with her all day). Grandma’s house is very comfortable, her friends all welcome you by yelling what appear to be nice things at you but they all appear to be drunk (or at least it sounds that way cause you have NO idea what they are saying) and the furniture is great it’s about 25 years old and has been soaking in smoke since the day it arrived at grandma’s house. After sitting down and taking your coat off you have time to realize there’s another faint smell in the distance is it ginger? Or chili? The smell is alluring with a sweet yet spicy flair that you can’t quite put your finger on it because of the damn smoke! In a nut shell that is what I will from here on refer to as the first smell of China, you smell it in restaurants, bars, houses, apartments, and pretty much any building there are no rules or laws regarding where you can and can’t smoke.
So now back to the food. Most restaurants serve the food family style (so if you are planning to visit be ready to share) large platters that are easily enough to feed one person and often times can be shared. Our first dinner a couple of dishes stand out in my mind the first being the “mashed potatoes” which our hosts agreed is one of their favorite Chinese foods. I used the quotation marks because I have never had a potato that tasted like that before and hope not to ever again. Deliriously tired (been awake at that point for 25 hours) I bit the potato off my chop sticks hoping for a warm salty reminder of home and I get a stone cold sugar crystal mush, having taken about three spoon fulls of “the mush” I had no choice but to eat every sweet cold bite.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved peanuts, from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to peanut butter cups to salted in the shell I’m a peanut guy luckily for me the loose translation for Beijing is land of the peanut. In about 25% of the dishes here you will find peanuts or use peanut sauce. So if you are allergic to peanuts I wouldn’t book a trip to China anytime soon.
Peking Duck or Beijing Duck is one of the most famous Chinese dishes and one that needs to be tried. I can’t tell you how they prepare it all I know is that every 5 or so minutes throughout our meal another dish would magically arrive on our table until a chef comes out to our table rolling a cart with a golden brown duck (the entire bird minus the feathers) getting his final ride to our stomachs. Our chef begins to slice the bird into thin slices of meat which are served to us on a try that features a ceramic duck head at the end of it. Individually we took what look like tortilla wraps and places the duck in the wrap along with carrots and other vegetables wrapped it up like a burrito and ate it. Once our chef had taken all of the meat he was kind enough to chop the ducks head off the remainder of the body and then cut the head in half for anyone that wanted to eat duck brain (I think our duck brain went to waste).
Overall the food has been great a lot of rice, noodles, vegetables, and meat (breakfast meat is big hard to find a donut). I am developing my favorites Kung Po Chicken I love; unlike in the states where you get a ton of random vegetables mixed in with the chicken and peanuts it’s mainly the key ingredients rather than a lot of fillers. I’ve found a restaurant that I can get my Kung Po Chicken for around 20 RMB (about $3) and can usually have let over’s (there’s no tipping or taxes in China on most goods and services). There is also a shrimp dish that I’ve had once and need to figure out what it is because it was AWESOME we got a huge pile of shrimp (probably 50 shrimp) that were in a sweet sauce for about $3.
The restaurants I’ve been eating at so far are what I would call the middle of the road Chinese restaurants not by any means the nicest but by no means the cheap stuff. I need to get a little bit braver and start trying some of cheap local restaurants where you can get noodles and meat for around 6 or 7 RMB (about $1), the other guys have been eating dumplings at one of these places in the mornings and I’m not quite there yet (I’ll post a picture of what these places look like soon). I have tried cow tongue (served cold) and it was actually really good I guess you put enough seasoning on something you can make almost anything taste good.
I think I’m rambling so the last thing about the food here is paying. This goes for most of China not just restaurants all transactions are paid in cash as hardly anywhere accepts credit card (might be part of the reason why China is able to buy all of the U.S. debt…) and a lot of places require that you pre-pay for food. It’s fun at bill time because the restaurants won’t split a bill and if you dare try to pay a 20 RMB check with a 100 RMB bill they won’t take it unless you show them you don’t have anything smaller.

Alright I need to go study some so I can throw some knowledge into my next blog. Hope everyone back home is doing well please let me know if you have any questions or anything anyone of you want to know.