I have always loved Chinese food, so I was really excited to get out of Yemen for a while to come here. I gotta say, the food experience has been a mixed one for me. Our first tour guide told us that the Chinese eat anything that flies in the sky except airplanes and anything that crawls on the ground except babies. He should have added anything that can be pulled out of the water… They eat snake, scorpions, jellyfish, insects, and anything else that was once alive. Two people asked if I could believe that the Japanese eat fish raw, they were horrified at the thought. Of course they wouldn’t think twice about eating fish heads or chicken cartilage… It’s a little challenging to find reasonable food for a westerner here.
I went to a restaurant today for lunch. Like the others I had been to, at least half of it was seafood. That narrowed it down for me considerably. I say this mostly in jest, but it seemed like they made many of their dishes by fishing through our dumpsters. All sorts of entrails, tripe, feet, and heads were featured. The really curious thing was that there wasn’t any mention of the rest of the animal sometimes. One dish was mostly goose intestines, but there wasn’t another goose dish on the menu, what happened to the rest of the goose? They listed chicken livers, hearts, intestines, and even cartilage, but I never once saw chicken breast listed. Hell, I’d be happy with the thighs! It’s as if they prepare meat the opposite way we do, eating all of the stuff we throw away…
When we were on tours, they would always take us to restaurants that serve food for westerners. I’d say the quality overall was pretty low, I got much better food back home. I have had sweet and sour pork, chicken with cashews, spring rolls, and a number of other things that I would get back home, none of which was as good as I was hoping for. The best meals I have had here have been the Peking duck (you can’t go wrong with that, and it’s really cheap here) and my time at the cooking school. Of course I cooked some of the food there! That reminds me of a traveling hint that I had forgotten until jut now. Wherever you go, in the US or outside of it, and you want to eat well on a budget, look for the culinary schools. They always have a restaurant, and it will be pretty good and cheap. I’m going to have duck again tonight, and I may try to find a more western place tomorrow, my last day…