Food (Part 1): An American view

Let's just get it out there-  Chinese food would have been awesome.  But Americanized Chinese food, made by Chinese folks who had never been to America, well that sort of sucked. I'm sure I would have been burnt out on whatever, eating the same thing for 9 days.  If I never see another Luna bar, it will be too soon.  However, some options were better than others.

Breakfast was (with one exception) always awesome.  They were at our western-style hotels, so they had eggs, something that resembled bacon, yogurt, etc.  The only exception was the day we had an early morning flight from Beijing to Shanghai.  They packed us breakfast for the road-- a hardboiled egg, bottle of water, and some sort of bologna & mustard sandwich.  Um, ew?

We did have Peking duck one night. Something new to me, and no one really knew how to properly eat it.  So the waitress came over, did a demo (slapped it, some onion, some bean sauce into a pancake, and rolled it up) and it happened to be on my plate.  Holy onion.  That was the only night that my stomach felt sketchy, and it was seriously just the straight raw onion.  Or it could have been that the duck was made out of fiberglass.

Without a doubt, the staple at every meal was rice.  We had to ask our guide what some of the stuff was (pork? chicken? duck? alien?) but it was somewhat identifiable.  Quizically, they often served tofu & chicken in the same dish.  So the vegetarian couldn't pick out the tofu since it had chicken juice in it, and I couldn't pick out the chicken since it had tofu juice in it, dang that soy allergy.

One night we attempted to get Pizza Hut after a particularly inedible dinner.  We asked our guide for a regular cheese pizza. When the delivery arrived, it was loaded with all sort of stuff: veggies, meats, you name it.  Apparently a "regular" pizza to Chinese folks means the equivalent of our garbage pie, and what we were looking for (cheese, sauce, crust) is "vegetarian."  Vegetarian to us means veggies.  Oy, it wasn't the end of the world and I happily ate a piece of Chinese Pizza Hut. Who else can say that?

Kudos to Kristin for telling our guide that we wanted coffee.  She took us to Starbucks in quaint little Hangzhou!  It was just as burnt and overpriced as it was in the States.  It felt like home.