Real Chinese Food

Yeah, a big surprise that I would be documenting our food here :)



Here are some of the goodies we got from everyone for the Dragon Boat Festival - zhongzi and hard boiled eggs.


Street Food

Here is a candid pic of my favourite breakfast ladies that I snapped with my cell phone . They are there to make me food almost every day. While I may not be their only customer, I am certainly one of their most dedicated. On the first day that I realized that they did actually take a day off, I was left spinning. Who would feed us now? Luckily, there’s another cart like theirs just behind them and they've made a pact that one of them will always be there to feed me.

One of the advantages of being a regular is that I only need to say yi ge or liang ge to tell them whether I need one or two sandwiches today. It really makes everything a bit less of a challenge. Besides, they get to laugh at my attempts at counting in Mandarin. Thankfully, I don't have to count beyond 6 in the transaction.

Here’s the rest of the process. First, I have to get over being Canadian. Here, if you wait patiently for your turn, like a polite Canadian, you starve. People are budinskis here. If you are new to the crowd already waiting, the Chinese way is to walk right up to the front and order. Never mind that I’ve been waiting patiently to be acknowledged so I can give my order. I have often been left with my mouth gaping because I don't believe that someone just cut in on me. How rude! The ladies are so busy, they just hunker down and make the sandwiches so they can’t do crowd control too. Luckily, they found out that I’m a teacher and who’s kidding who, I’m an oddity here because I look Chinese but can’t speak it. With my special status, they usually notice when I get there. But sometimes, like this morning, I had to just speak up and fight the "I'll-just-wait-here-quietly-till-you-have-time-to-take-my-order" urge.

Here is the production process. The lady on the right (with the purple apron) stands there cracking eggs and cooking the small pieces of pink “meat” on the griddle. She puts it off to the side of the surface when the food is cooked and goes on to make the next batch. The lady of the left reaches into the tan cooler box (a white Styrofoam cooler that has been “reinforced” with packing tape) for a freshly baked bun. Once, I witnessed some anxious moments when they ran out of buns and had to wait for a guy to ride his bike from down the street to deliver a new batch of fresh buns.

The buns are filled with the fried egg, some pink meat and fresh veggies that she grabs from the white trays in the cart. There’s sliced tomatoe, cucumber and lettuce. She also paints on some sauces and shakes some spices (dispensed from drink bottles with holes drilled in the caps). It’s quite a production line. There are lots of hungry students to feed so they rarely get a break. There is a white bucket in the foreground that you drop your money into to pay. If you need change, you help yourself from the bucket. This makes it more hygienic presumably so the ladies don’t have to be touching the money.

Here are a few other food options from the street right in front of our apartment complex:

These are some watermelons and unknown fruits from our fruit lady.

Then there are these noodles. In front of this couple are individual cooking elements for each order of noodles.

On a totally unrelated but funny topic, boyfriends / husbands often carry their loved one’s purses. Such gallantry! I haven’t quite convinced Don to carry mine yet. Nor have I been able to get him to agree to matching t-shirts. Another sign of love in this country.