Worst Kept Secrets

I feel bad that I don’t have more food stories. Food is arguably the most exciting thing about living in China, since it’s so different, weird, and frequently terrifying, and I’ve really been falling behind on that particular adventure. I’ve been eating a LOT of western food. Quality western food, too - we rotate between Ciao Italia, Les Sens 5, and Swede and Kraut pretty regularly, and call them the Italian restaurant, the French restaurant, and the German restaurant, respectively (accordingly, Macdonald’s has become the Scottish restaurant), and it’s damned good food.

Don’t get me wrong, Chinese food is good. There’s a restaurant right across the street called Gold and Silver that has a HUGE menu (with English), and I’ve only had a few dishes there that were bad calls. The trouble with Chinese restaurants is that it’s really best if you can find a posse to go with, to maximize communal dishes. Everyone gets a bowl of rice and some chopsticks, and then everyone scavenges off the dishes in the middle of the table. It’s just not quite as satisfying with one or two plates of food. So there’re a lot of sandwiches in my diet. I guess I do have fried noodles for lunch pretty regularly, so I guess that Chinese enough.

But a while back I went with Leif, Lily, Chris, and Lily’s family to a restaurant called the Fat Little Sheep, and it was interesting enough to talk about, I guess. It’s a hot pot restaurant, which I think is Mongolian. Here’s how it works: the group orders plates and plates of raw veggies, raw meat, lily roots, mushrooms, eggs, stuff like that, and then a huge pot of boiling broth is brought to the table, and you start throwing stuff in and fishing it out.

The raw meat was alarmingly appetizing in appearance. Anyway, we got one side of our pot mild (for me) and the other spicy (for everyone else). And the broth stuff was GOOD - there were garlic cloves, ginger and all kinds of tasty things in it. I tried some of the spicy stuff, and it wasn’t hot, exactly, it just felt like I’d dripped battery acid down my esophagus and I choked on it.

After the meal, we found the little seed thing that was causing the battery acid taste, and everyone else was all manly and eating them raw. I refrained, after watching everybody turn colors, start crying, whimpering, etc., and I felt good about myself for not succumbing to peer pressure. The waiter told us its name in Chinese, and explained that it would make us very strong.

It’s a pretty fun way to eat, although I recommend being better with chopsticks and more competitive than I am, because you’ve really got to barge in there to get the good stuff. I kept winding up with things that I thought were hefty chunks of potato that turned out to be straight ginger. I don’t remember the last time I cried that much during a meal.

In other news, I’M ON VACATION!!! Tomorrow’s classes are canceled due to weather, and so I’m more or less home free. All I’ve got left to do is my television debut tomorrow. I feel good about it; I mean, I’m still a little worried, but after the five hour rehearsal today, I’m slowly becoming more comfortable with the moves. Fortunately, there are at least two more hours of repetition before we go live. I’ll try to stay extremely aware during the whole thing so that I can describe it accurately for you. Yeah, China.