this week has been boring…

…so I’ll talk about food.

I love the food here. It is weird and wacky, and often delicious. On our trip to Xi’an, breakfast the first day consisted of strawberry Ritz and Nestle chocolate milkshake in a juice-box (style) container. The Ritz is unlike anything I’ve seen in Canada. Think oreo cookies, but with Ritz crackers instead of chocolate cookie and strawberry cream (or orange, etc.) instead of vanilla filling. Sounds disgusting — and it kind of is — but it’s addictive. And at least the Ritz aren’t all individually wrapped, like most other cookies you get here.

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Today I went for lunch alone, so I could indulge my craving for fried rice and spice. I found a Sichuanese restaurant that had big flames drawn on its eaves, so I figured it was the right place for me… That is, until I opened the menu to be greeted with an alarming number of “ass meat” dishes (along with the usual turtle, ugly fish*, and bullfrog pages, which I tend to skip — except to gape, very un-PC-like, in curiosity). This really wasn’t what I was in the mood for for what was technically my first meal of the day.

(I was also pretty skeptical about the suspicious number of ostrich dishes on the menu, since I’m pretty sure ostriches aren’t indigenous to Sichuan.)

I ended up ordering fried beef with fried chiles and my beloved(ly bland, in comparison) egg-fried rice. It was delicious, but the chile peppers seemed to be more for show than everything. Sure, half the dish was peppers, but they and the beef were both pretty dry, so not much of the spice actually made the transfer to the (deep-fried, breaded) beef. When I got the remainder of my meal “da bao” (wrapped up), I got a whole container filled with peppers. Nice. (I guess that counts as a vegetable, right? I’m totally eating a balanced diet here.)

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(*Although I have to admit, in my experience, the ugly fish are usually the best tasting. Hello, monkfish? Weird, spiky, Italian prawns? You know what I’m talking about, D.)