Eel waffles

Tonight I ate out at a 'western' restaurant again, the third time I've used a fork and knife since I got here. Though the restaurant offered some Chinese food options as well, it was western in it's decor - red couches surrounding the tables and Christmas decorations, including a 'Meery Christmas' (sic) sign on some of the windows. I ordered spaghetti, and a waffle. To be honest, I didn't know it was a waffle when I ordered it, I thought maybe it'd be more like a crepe. The options for topping were: eel, meat, fruit, or honey. I opted for the first, which turned out to be something of a sweet eely mush spread on two quadrants of the waffle, with whipped cream and an quasi-marachino cherry in the center.

The Chinese have a strange attitude towards sugar, I find. They don't have this clear cut idea that it belongs after the meal, in a course called dessert. My spaghetti was sweet. My friend ordered fruit pizza, which was sweet. I also tried to explain that having fruit - which included apples, pears, and candied cherries - on a pizza with cheese was strange. And, tomato sauce on pizza is something of a must (though this was absent from, and indeed did not sound appealing with, the fruit topping). The last time I was at a western restaurant, they served watermelon and an apple salad with the 'steak,' and cherry tomatoes with the cake.

It's not just in foreign foods that sugar is put in weird places, but in Chinese food as well. There are 'sweet and sour' dishes, but these taste quite different those in the US -I find them to be better described as sweet and garlicky. Popular ice cream flavors include milk flavor, various kinds of beans, wheat, and green tea. This sweet bean idea - strange at first - I quite like. And the milk ice cream is decent too. The other two ingredients most notably and unfortunately absent in the diet here are cheese and chocolate. Neither have a long history here. Cheese is not found in any traditional Chinese dishes, and I have yet to see anything beyond a processed American-esque cheese in a store or restaurant. (Oh to be back on the French organic dairy farm for a few days.....). You can buy chocolate, but it's expensive and not very good. The couple times I have tried to eat chocolate cake, though the color is decent, any flavor is hardly noticeable.

Fortunately, though I miss these foods very much, there are a million new and developed flavors to stimulate my taste buds and make up for it, most of the time.