food

I have been here for nearly 3 months now and have cooked twice, and this cooking only involved pasta and bottled sauce.  Luckily restaurants here are so cheap that eating out twice a day is no problem, apart from being a bit bad for you.  The food here is good, there is a wide range of food to try, some of it is great and some of it is terrible.  Xuzhou’s central location in China gives rise to its nickname ‘the gateway to the four provinces’, with the four provinces meaning the four main parts of China, and these also represent the four styles of Chinese cooking.  With Xuzhou’s location it gets a lot of influence from all four provinces, but it also has its own local styles.  If you look up Xuzhou on wikitravel, the first thing it says to do is get a dog meat taco, I haven’t seen or tried these yet.  Luckily dog meat is fairly expensive and a bit fancy so you won’t usually get it by accident.  You will however get some things by accident, there are these great street barbeques you get around town called shao kao, where they cook meat and bread and fish on skewers on these long thin coal barbeques and then bring them over to your table to finish off on another barbeque before you eat.  I visited one a few weeks ago with some other teachers for a meal, and we ordered a selection of skewered meats and some bread and vegetables, we started eating and got to the chicken skewers which we wrapped up in tortillas, Charlie and I eat ours down and Dan took one bite and said ‘that’s not chicken’, he was right, it was testicles.  Charlie had very sneakily realised that that was no chicken but continued to eat just so that he could see the look on our faces when we realized what we were eating.  Luckily I eat mine obliviously just thinking it was very soft and spongy chicken, and had finished before Dan bit in to his and saw Charlie’s smile and put two and two together.  Apart from that the meal was really good.

There are basic restaurants where meals start at 40p, and places where you can order a steak for £20, and similar to Thailand I find there is a general rule that the less money you pay, the better the food, the expensive western style restaurants give terrible quality western dishes at pretty much the same prices as western countries, or you can buy some dumplings on the side of the road that will cost next to nothing and taste great.  There is also a big divide in portions, Chinese restaurants give massive portions, so it’s always best if you go with several people, being so cheap you can quite happily order four or five different dishes between two people and get a shock when a truck load of food arrives.  The western restaurants on the other hand cost a truck load, and the portions are not so much smaller.  However I’ve just been to a fancy European restaurant tonight and got goulash soup, garlic bread, Caesar salad, a pizza, piece of cake and a coke for £10, which isn’t really much to complain about, but for the same price I could buy 40 of my favourite eggy bread sandwiches, which is over a month of lunches,

I went to a fish restaurant with a Chinese friend, we ordered some fish soup, some Xuzhou sushi style fresh fish and a turtle.  The soup came and it was nice, a bit boney but that’s alright because in China every meat is boney, you just spit the bones out on the table and enjoy your meal.  Then the sushi style raw fish came, it looked like they had just put a fish on a plate, especially as when she put it down on the table it started flopping around, its fins were still contracting and you could see its mouth and gills moving.  I’m pretty sure it was dead, because its head had been cut off and when the waiter opened the fish up, it had been gutted and prepared so that the flesh was lying there inside.  Disgusting.  I was very happy when my Chinese friend seemed to be as shocked as I was and told them to take it away and bring back just the flesh, we had it with a wasabi type sauce and it was delicious.  Shocking to think though that the idea of the dish is to eat it out of something still moving