Food in China!

Ni How!

So far, we've seen lots of buildings but for some reason I'm more interested in blogging about the food we've eaten so far. I was kind of worried that finding things i could eat would be difficult but I've been pleasantly surprised.

Breakfast is the coolest at the university. When we first arrived it was 5 in the morning and we later went to the dining hall and had breakfast that looked much like lunch: rice, pickled and cooked vegetables various breads and stews. There were also these really cool breads that were stuffed with red bean paste.

tasty...

The next day we went to the other breakfast stand (there's a lot of places we can use our meal cards), they have much more interesting things there...

here's what i had the second day:
















Its bread fried around an egg one side, normal fried bread on the bottom and lettuce with some special sauce inside. It was really good, especially with warm soy milk or jasmine tea.

the next day i had something even better:















It was basically a crepe cooked right there on the spot that was mixed with green onions, various sauces, egg and crispy bread...mmm.

For lunch and dinner we usually go to the restaurants on campus, there's a normal one much like the Chinese restaurants back home, you sit down, order a lot and everyone shares. There's also a market place where you an get small stuff to snack on and an "American style" restaurant that's really not too good. I got a tuna sandwhich from there one day and it ended up being really small and surprisingly sour, but still edible.

The most exciting thing about the city is the AMAZING amount of halal/Muslim restaurants all over town, with over 80 million Muslims in China, its not very surprising the capital is dotted so abundantly. We went to a place walking distance from the campus several nights ago. The food was "chinese" in nature but very different at the same time, definitely middle eastern influence. I think the owners were either Turk, Turkaman, Uzbek or something like that. Maybe even Mongolian, but they definitely weren't speaking Chinese the whole time we were there.

The main food they specialized in was lamb. In fact, most people might not know it, but all lamb in China is usually halal because its all comes from the Muslim regions of China (from what Owen has learned). We ordered mostly lamb kabobs grilled on small metal skewers in bit-size pieces with plenty of fat (donbeh)...mmm.

There was also this dish that had small flat noodles in tomato sauce with bell peppers, it tasted like ravioli and was amazingly good. We also had kidney kabobs, not too bad to being with, but weird aftertaste.

I guess that's all the food for now.

Ehsaan