Up Close and Personal Part 2: Food, food, and more food

Chinese food.  Oh man, this topic could fill a textbook.  Because China is such a huge country, there’s no simple way to summarize their food.  Over the past five months in China, we’ve gotten pretty well acquainted with regional food but still have so much to learn!    I’ll dig into what the differences are between Western Chinese food and authentic Chinese food, what we regularly eat in our province, and a bit about food throughout the rest of the country.

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Market madness, Moped meltdown, Major decisions

Yes, it killed me a little not to be able to finish the alliteration! 😂 Anyways, the last couple weeks have been pretty relaxed here.  No extra days off means spending the weekdays teaching and going into ultimate sloth mode on the weekends.  No complaints about that!  This past Saturday we did venture out to the market, which occupies the town’s main streets every 5 days.  We’ve gone to it before but never for very long, so this time we dedicated all morning to checking out every street it spills onto and trying lots of new food.  Hopefully these photos give a little glimpse into the colorful and fast-paced madness of our local street market.  All this time at home also gave us a chance to reflect on what we want to do when our contract ends in January, so be sure to get all the way to the bottom to find out what we decided!

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“Our food is moving!” – Eating and Exploring in Hangzhou

For those who’ve never heard of Hangzhou before (us, until 3 weeks ago), it’s Shanghai’s next door neighbor and the capital of Zhejiang province.  Shanghai is so big and important that it basically makes up its own province, but they call it a municipality.  Yikes, China is confusing! Despite its obscurity in the West, Hangzhou actually boasts 9 million residents and several tourist attractions.  We spent two days there visiting Tommy’s old college roommate, Bin Yang.  He was a great guide, showing us the highlights and introducing bizarre and delicious new food.

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