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.

Street food: fried noodles

I used to have the idea that street food was dirty and cheap and something to avoid at all costs. But in fact I'm started eating it regularly, now that I feel my stomach has mostly adjusted to Chinese microbes, and I'm becoming convinced that it's one of many alternative, tasty ways to eat in this country. Even rather upstanding Lanzhou denizens, and especially college students, enjoy it. Just outside the university gate nearest to where I live lies a street lined with carts and cooks at most hours of the day. In the morning it's filled with 'breakfast' carts - e.g., people selling steamed or fried buns, egg and scallion crepes or thicker 'pancakes', rice porridge and soy milk. Over the course of the day, the composition of the carts changes, and slowly (at least I think it's slowly, but I am still getting a handle on the operating hours of the various carts) these become replaced with carts serving up fried rice or fried noodles, dumplings, cold thick rice noodles, lamb kebabs (a bit of meat grilled on a stick), or offering grilled corn or sweet potatoes. There's also a common type of stand with many types of vegetables and meats on sticks, which you select and then get fried , spiced, and chopped up for you to fill that bread which resembles pita but is much denser than pita. These kinds of stands aren't everywhere, and there are certain intersections where they congregate and create a rather lively atmosphere and quite a lot of choice for dinner:

I guess I try to be careful to only eat at stands which look clean and where other people are eating, and eat food which has just been cooked. In any case, tonight I ate fried noodles on the street near the gym I've joined (more on that in some future post). It's pretty cold these days, and so I hesitated, listening to the nearby KFC also calling, but the prospect of those steaming hot, just cooked fried noodles drew me nearer. I ordered my small bowl and sat down, while waiting, to be served, a small bowl of 'soup' which I'm pretty sure is the water previous customers' noodles were boiled in (strangely ok...). Feeling a bit warmer, I decided to photograph the production process:

Cutting strips of dough, this lady hand-pulls my noodles

and chats with me at the same time (see video below).

The noodles are in to boil.

Fellow customers

Various spices in the bowls on the left, the raw ingredients
(e.g., cabbage, beans, peppers, onions, tomatoes) in the baskets.

The chef fries the raw ingredients up with the noodles and flavors them with who knows what, though I know the ingredients include tomato paste, oil, soy sauce, and likely MSG (see video 2)

The table is set with everything I might need: the white kettle contains vinegar, the metal kettle contains 'soup' to drink, the white jar with lid has a hot pepper sauce, the blue container has single-use chopsticks, and the green bin has a roll of toilet paper serving as napkins.

My noodles arrive in a bowl covered with a clean plastic bag so that after I finish the bowl can be reused right away without washing, and if I want to take my noodles away I can easily transport them in the bag. The small bowl is my 'soup' to drink.

Sorry the videos are sideways, but I can't figure out how to rotate them. And please don't laugh at the first, the lady just happened to choose the moment I was filming to ask where I was from and to compliment my Chinese...

Mountain bbq and ma jiang

This past weekend, Yuri's friend invited us along on an outing with her fourth-year accounting class at the university. To celebrate the start of the Chinese national holiday (because of which I have no class this week), they had planned a bbq on top of a mountain just outside of town. Of course this wasn't your American burgers and hot dog bbq. It was a Chinese version roasting a huge variety of things, from meat to tofu to lettuce, which we first all worked together to put on metal skewers.

Climbing Xujiashan

Preparing eggplant and potato skewers

Cutting tofu skin

Wrapping tofu skin around lettuce and skewering it just right

So that it looks like this

And this

Finished skewers of lettuce wrapped in tofu skin, plus rice cakes

Tofu and potatoes

Waiting for the coals to get hot

After dipping them in oil and various spices, including hot pepper, everyone grills at once

Lots of hands :)

Most of what's on the side looks like tofu, with some rice cakes and hot-dog like meat in the center

After most of the food had been eaten, we started grilling bread and then spreading a spicy oily paste inside. The girl on the right is Yuri's friend Zhouye.

Yuri enjoying a grilled, spicy crab stick

Learning ma jiang, with the help of the guy on my right


After the meal, everyone relaxed to play games of cards and ma jiang. I can't tell you how excited I was to find out that ma jiang is basically a complicated rummy-like game. It's so nice to learn a new game/skill that you know you'll enjoy working on and getting better at for many times to come.

View of the Yellow River and power lines on the way down

Finally back at the bottom, taking a rest with Bin gui