On the Food Front

One of the most interesting parts of visiting a foreign country is the incredible array of strange (and often disgusting but sometimes heavenly) food you get to try...or chose to ignore. Beijing Goal #1: go ahead, try it. So far I have not been toooo adventurous in this department mostly because there is always something delicious to try and I don't like wasting meals on food that could be a hit or miss...but I'm working on it. Last night for dinner I had some bai cai, chicken, spicy bean sprouts, fried banana and pineapple rice at a minority restaurant. The chicken was 90% bone, 5% fat, and 5% meat? I wouldn't recommend the specific dish we had, but they might have served us the scraps since we are waiguorens, or foreigners. Everybody knows foreigners love scraps! Or maybe they just don't know how to reject them. The spicy sprouts were a complimentary dish and absolutely to die for! Recently I have developed a taste for spice that I have decided to further explore in Chinaland. Lets just say these sprouts were more red than white. As far as the fried banana was concerned, there is nothing more tasty than warm and gooey snuggled in a layer of deep fried sweetness! We ordered this dish for the table after everyone realized they hadn't eaten fruit in three or four days...Finally the pineapple rice. Imagine the angels taking everybody's favorite carb, rice (right?), and bestowing upon it the taste of the Caribbean then serving this dessert-like wonder as an entree. And to top it off-- you had to scoop the rice out of the carved out pineapple itself. It was a pulpy mixture only suitable for the emperor himself (and five waiguorens). Finally, probably my most exciting moment today was lunch. I ate a sandwich. But this was not just any sandwich folks, this was a donkey meat sandwich. Yes, that is not a typo. Not weird enough you say? Fine. But you should all know that red donkey meat is super good, and I would have finished the sandwich except I couldn't get past all the fat and tendons. So now I am supplementing lunch by chowing down on some grapes I froze in the communal fridge.