So, food in Pingxiang. In short, it’s very good. If you don’t mind chillies in everything and the occasional bit of toad.
There’s a lot more variety in food than I thought there would be so we don’t get bored of it. Though I do still miss things like milk, cereal and real bread. The bread is very cunning here, no matter how normal it looks you can guarantee there's some sugar in there somewhere.
For breakfast, if you can be bothered to get up that half hour earlier, there’s a nice lady on Backdoor street who sells both steamed and boiled dumplings (baozi and jiaozi) with no way of telling what’s inside. Sometimes it’s meat, sometimes pickled vegetables, sometimes chopped up hot-dog. But it all tastes good and who doesn’t want a lucky dip breakfast at 7am?
That's a bucket of chilli sauce, by the way. Perfectly within the grounds of health and safety.
Lunch is in the canteen and is also a bit of a gamble. Generally I avoid the meat but pigs’ ears sometimes disguise themselves as mushrooms and we think they put extra bones in the fish just for fun. Vegetables are ok – cabbage is apparently very important to the Chinese but they manage to make it taste nice.
Lunch is in the canteen and is also a bit of a gamble. Generally I avoid the meat but pigs’ ears sometimes disguise themselves as mushrooms and we think they put extra bones in the fish just for fun. Vegetables are ok – cabbage is apparently very important to the Chinese but they manage to make it taste nice.
We usually go out for dinner as it would probably be more expensive and definitely more disastrous to cook for ourselves. Dinner is a really social thing for the Chinese: you order dishes between the group and share them all. Chopstick skills are essential here. Most restaurants serve the same type of food so we order our favourites: xiao chao rou (stir-fried pork), shou si bou cai (hand torn cabbage) and mao dou (fried soy beans), to name but a few.
Punk, our favourite restaurant owner buddy and fellow teacher at the college (Punk is a busy man), has made us an English menu, so we are branching out with leek, chilli potato, interesting beef and the like.
Sometimes we go out to a speciality dumpling restaurant in town. We finally worked out that you order them in portions of 6 so were able to stop accidentally getting piles and piles of them. Being forced to finish dozens somehow detracts from the pleasure of the dumpling experience.
Then there's hot pot. Hot pot is a Chinese speciality, originally from Sichuan province (and no.5 in the Rough Guide’s list of ‘34 things not to miss in China’, don’t you know) and it’s very popular. There are only a few hot pot places in Pingxiang and if you go to the most popular one you actually have to fight a bit for a table. But it’s worth it. It’s basically a big fondue type meal with 2 different soups boiling in the centre of the table to cook meat, fish balls, vegetables, tofu and all good things in. In the case of hot pot it really is the more the merrier as it seems to be cheaper the more people that eat. Just another confusing Chinese discounting scheme.
Fast food wise, the Chinese like fried food. Of course, the students will lie and say they don’t, because they don’t like to appear unhealthy, but the presence of a KFC on every corner in the big cities suggests otherwise. At the bottom of Backdoor Street, fake KFC, or 'Marks' Chicken, is great, but you can’t trust the menu as they just printed it from KFC and don’t actually have the same food in. Then there are other, cheaper unhealthy options. On backdoor street, fried-food lady will fry pretty much anything, on sticks, in a very delicious manner. And this bread stuff is amazing.
