Lunch

During the week, class ends at 12.30 every day. I usually head to the student cafeteria for lunch shortly after I get out of class. The cafeteria is really crowded at that time, but I'm getting used to standing in a clump waiting to order, and then waiting to get my food. I usually order from the same area everyday, so the cashier man recognizes me and calls me if I haven't heard someone announce my order.



This is one of my favorite dishes. It's called di san xian gai fan. Di san xian literally means "three treasures." It's appropriately named; the three treasures are potatoes, eggplants, and green peppers, and those three things are so good. Gai fan, I learned, means "over rice." I'm happy I learned that phrase, because I kept getting rice on the side, and getting charged extra as a result. If you get your meal gai fan, there is no extra charge. I was putting my food on my rice, anyway, so gai fan was just convenient on top of everything.

This dish tastes so good. The sauce isn't really overpowering, and it's a little salty. The potatoes are thinly sliced and stir-fried in such a way that they absorb all the flavors of everything else cooked with them. Also, the eggplant skin is amazing. It gets slightly blackened during the cooking process, and the texture changes so that it's a little chewy while still being soft. The green peppers stay crisp, but get cooked enough not to aggravate my raw vegetable allergies. The dish is really perfect for me.

I've also been drinking bubble tea fairly often at meals. That's the purple drink with the black dots at the bottom in the photo. I like the taro kind of bubble tea. It's sweet and good. My favorite part of it is the bubbles, though. They're chewy, and the cafeteria puts a ton of them in the tea. I'm glad that they're aware of the fact that too few bubbles in bubble tea makes the whole thing pointless.

Now don't you want to visit China? There's so much good food.