I'mmmm Baaack!

Alright, I know it's been a while since I updated this thing. Ive been... busy. But for now, I'm back. After reading my last post, in which I went on at great length about the things that irritate me here in China, I felt it would only be appropriate for me to list the things I like the most about living, working, and simply existing here. I am afraid that my last post may have given people the impression that I don’t like living here, but that is simply not true. As you’ll see from the very first thing on my list, China speaks to many of the things I enjoy most in life. In fact, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t currently engaged in an internal debate about whether I will come back after I finish my contract here or simply extend the contract for a bit and stay a little longer. But that’s for later. On to the list:

THE FOOD

Everyone from my best friends to even casual acquaintances knows about my love for food. I would travel back in time just to shake the hand of the person who coined the phrase, “the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” The sheer percentage of time that I devote to thinking about food explains more than I’d care to admit about my personality, including the glacial pace at which I tend to make decisions, eat a meal, and perform other basic functions in life. So it should be no surprise that the quality of the food here and maybe even more the availability of food here is a major selling point of this country. I love the fact that I can get good food pretty much any time I want, wherever I want. Many of the restaurants close a little earlier than I’m accustomed to eating dinner (ten o’clock anyone?), but that’s not usually too much of a problem. There’s always street food. Some people might worry that street food isn’t very clean or whatever, but it actually tends to be cleaner than getting food from a restaurant. You can stand there and watch the people cook it, so you’re pretty much assured that nothing will get into your food that you might not want in there.

When you order food from a restaurant, or if the school you work for happens to order food from a restaurant for you, there is a chance that you might end up with something in it that has more legs than most of the animals you’d normally find in your food. I suppose it could be classified more as an insect than an animal, but semantics aside, it still shouldn’t have been in my food. I suppose I should be thankful that it wasn’t alive or something and of course that I found it before I had consumed it or part of it. The restaurant graciously allowed me to have that meal for free. Of course, if I wanted another meal in its place, I had to pay for it. So basically, they offered me a free cockroach. There was talk of getting a new restaurant for lunch orders, but since we moved to this one because the previous restaurant left the same six-legged gift in someone else’s meal and chances were good that whatever restaurant we switched to would have the same problem, there was some shoulder-shrugging (including mine) at the staff meeting and ultimately no change was made. For the reasons I just gave, it wasn’t much use causing a ruckus. I just pick through my food a little more carefully these days. Perhaps some of you think that this is gross, but I suspect that there’s probably worse stuff in most of the fast food in America. I trust the people working in the kitchens here more than the disillusioned, possibly malicious and/or incompetent teenagers working behind the scenes in many restaurants in America.

However, that being said, I will admit that the conditions at some of the restaurants can sometimes be less than, ahem, sanitary. As it turns out, cockroaches are not the only living creatures to frequent many of these restaurants. I went out one night with a bunch of friends to celebrate someone’s birthday. We went to a restaurant that the other guys have been to before. For some reason, they had a big problem seating us. Now I know there were quite a few people in our group, but there were tables all over the place, most of them large enough to suit us. They moved us from one table to another, but nothing was right for them. Then they decided to move us to our own room. So we started walking in and settling into seats in this room when someone spotted something in the corner. You know what it was? A pile of poop. There was a big pile of cat poop in the corner of the room. But the most unbelievable part of the story? The other guys started to sit down and call seats on the far side of the room. Fortunately, someone regained his mind long enough to suggest that we leave the room and sit somewhere else. We eventually did so and I ate enough spicy food to send me home to the bathroom in the middle of the work day the next day.

Anyway, disgusting anecdotes aside, I love the food situation in this country. I just bought an entire meal today for about 15 RMB, which, after accounting for the recent jump in value of the RMB against the dollar, is a little over two dollars. It’s hard to knock any country in which I can get a meal for the equivalent of about two American dollars, even when I’m not actually making dollars anymore. It doesn’t get much better than that.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the second thing on the list of things I like most about China:

THE JOB