Today was a low-key day but a successful one. We found an amazing market! We ventured west of where we are staying. It was more of your stereotypical china area…and it was great. We walked around this market that had everything possible. All the fruit in the world, fresh noodles, fresh herbs, bags of spices, fresh fish (some alive, some not) and meat. The meat was just laying there raw, you could pick a pigs foot or a rack of ribs. Everything you could ever want to cook an amazing meal, was in this market. They also had little places to eat.
Two places stick out in particular…. One had about 10 trays of food already cooked that looked amazing and you could select what you wanted and then eat it there or take it to go. This is the place I originally wanted to eat at but when you have 5 Americans just looking at your food and a group of people just staring at you while they are eating and no one coming to help, we decided to take our business elsewhere. So we went around the corner and had amazing dumpling soup. It was so good and fresh. Basically it was whole in the wall in this market with two tiny tables, a lady with two pots of boiling water, some shelves, and a lady folding dumplings. I didn’t and still don’t know what this soup is called in Mandarin so I pointed to a woman’s bowl who was sitting there eating and said one and somehow I am not quite sure how but I was able to convey that I wanted it to go!
After we all got our soups Adam bought some fruit (strawberries, cherries, and oranges) and we were going to eat in the park but it was starting to rain again so we just went back to the guys room and ate there. This Soup was fantastic!!! I think possibly one of the best ever. The fruit was also delicious. I usually don’t like cherries but I decided to try them anyway…and they were very good.
After we had just pigged out on all of that we decided to cut open the honey pomello. This was a task in itself…this melon was about the size of a cantalope but the skin wasn’t as tough but all we had was a pocket knife. We had no idea what to expect from this melon, but it was scrumptious. It was like a grapefruit but a little more sweet and a little less bitter. We wanted to figure out what we were eating exactly so we Goggled it and found out its not even in season right now…I can’t even imagine what it tastes like in season if it was that good out of season.
With all of that local market food and the fresh fruits we are hoping we don’t end up sick over the next couple of days.
We went out for dinner as a large group including our professor Dianne. Everyone is calling it an early night tonight because we have stayed up late the last couple of nights.
It is interesting that this is starting to become my temporary home. At first it felt like I was just visiting since it was new to me. I wasn’t use to the little things like everyone staring at me because I am American, and not being able to communicate 100% but now it is just part of the day. I don’t notice the stares as much. I have been using a lot of hand signals with my broken Mandarin to communicate and I have noticed a number of times when I am talking to other people in my group from Purdue I am starting to talk with hand signals to get my point across…like I said its becoming part of daily life J
No comments:
Post a Comment