吃饭 (Food in China)

** I originally wrote this post over a week ago but never published it, so I'm backdating it. That way it doesn't look like I forgot about my blog for a week, even though I did :P **



In the second of my daily-life segments, I'm going to cover what we eat around here, since "how do you like the food?" is probably the question I've been asked most by people back at home.

Cafeteria Food
There are more than ten cafeterias/restaurants open to students on campus. They're pretty easy to find even if you don't speak Chinese, because they get very busy at meal times. Almost all of them are of the pay-for-each-dish variety, although there are a few set-price buffets as well.

Breakfast
Aside from a few notable exceptions, breakfast is the one meal I always eat in the cafeterias. The most common breakfast food by far is 包子 (baozi), or steamed/fried buns, pictured below. They range from thin buns with meat/vegetables inside to thicker ones with red bean paste (tastes much better than it sounds). You can also get 鸡蛋 (jidan, hard-boiled eggs), 面包 (mianbao, regular/fried bread), and a bunch of other things I don't know the names for, most of them soup-like. My standard breakfast is three or four baozi and some 豆浆 (doujiang, soy milk), which is exactly what I've put together below. This costs less than ￥2 (~30 cents).



Lunch/Dinner
As at home, lunch and dinner foods are essentially the same thing. Most of the stuff at the cafeteria is some sort of meat (usually one of chicken, beef, pork, duck, or lamb) with vegetables. But some of the cafeterias have dishes unique to a particular type of cuisine. One of our favorites is a teppanyaki-like skillet where you choose a type of meat to be served with rice and vegetables. It's made to order, so it's always hot, and it's only ￥7.

There are plenty of different drinks in the cafeteria, including water, juice, tea, instant coffee, smoothies, and beer. Most of these will run ￥2－3, or a little more for beer. My favorites are peach juice, green tea, and pineapple juice.

Basically, it's really difficult to spend more than ￥10 ($1.30) on a single cafeteria meal. We also eat out at plenty of restaurants around town. One of them even has an American-style breakfast (eggs, bacon, pancakes), which was a welcome surprise after a few weeks in Beijing. Even our most expensive meals (usually roast duck with plenty of sides in a fancy restaurant) rarely cost more than ￥50 a person, which is less than I would spend at Chili's.

So to answer the question, I love the food here. I've yet to have any adverse reactions to the Chinese food, and there is enough American-ish food to hold me over indefinitely. We even found a pizza place called the Kro's Nest that does pretty good imitation Chicago-style pizza. Add that to the standard selection of McDonald's, KFC, Dairy Queen, and Starbucks in every shopping mall, and you can easily forget you ever left home.

Class is wrapping up here, and in a few days we will catch a train overnight to Shanghai. I'm pretty excited, but a little upset that our time in Beijing went by so quickly. But I had a great time and am ready for a change of scenery. More on that in a few days!