a post about food (and more photos)

i had some reservations before i decided to come to beijing about the food - can you imagine eating out for every meal for almost six weeks? neither can i. i expected to find exotic and wonderful cuisine while i was here, but i feel like i've been at home, minus really good fresh produce. chinese food all the time has been difficult to countenance, so we've resorted to mcdonald's, qinqing kuaican (a clone of mcdonald's that tastes almost the same), bad italian food, subway, and japanese food. i must say that the soba noodles i've had at the canteen and the japanese noodle place we went were quite delightful, because they're so different from normal food - just noodles and broth and some other stuff that doesn't include copious amounts of grease. it's true that i've had some great new things - such as the sour milk (sugar added) that comes in ceramic pots with a straw, little corn-shaped breads with custard inside, and red-bean filled popsicles. but there's a lot of cheap food here, such that i miss my supermarkets back home. my mission during my time off in beijing after the studio is to tackle as much different food as possible (minus the scorpion and silkworm cocoon skewers near the forbidden city, that is...). non-chinese food in china has been a disappointment thus far. most of the food is unpalatable because the people producing the food don't understand the basic techniques of the cuisine being served, or the food is just chinese traditional foods prodded into the shape of other cultural foods. there's a nice french-chinese bakery near the campus that sells very chinese food in french shapes, like madeleine-shaped chinese sponge cakes.

let me talk a bit about the canteens. we now know most of the canteens, from the four-floor canteen near our dorm to the one that serves a-la-carte food (ie, it's already on plates that you can just grab). we've been going to one that's close to campus, which serves slightly different food (like fried dough filled with chipped pork, and dumplings...oh, dumplings, i could eat you all day long, all year long), and more recently, the one that serves food already on plates. the latter is great because it solves the problem of never being able to tell the food server how much you want. buying dumplings is great because you can just hold up the number of fingers for how many you want, but you can't really do the same for tomatoes and eggs with rice. the other day i had a bowl of cold noodles (wheat? soba?) with a super-salty sauce on them with beef and star anise. pretty good, though still a bit salty for my tastes. the only drawback of this canteen is that there are no dumplings!

and...i've put up my photos from our vacation last weekend. here they are:

july 1 - yungang grottoes, hanging temple, wooden pagoda
july 2 - wutai and temples
july 3 - pingyao

plus photos from today's hutong housing. i presume i'll have even more photos after i explore them with jessica and v when they come next week.