In my time overseas, I’ve eaten some strange food. Most of the time, it’s fairly straight forward. Dograma, for example, is a Turkmen meat and bread stew. While it may sound odd, the ingredients are obvious and it’s actually really good. However, Chinese food is a very different story. And I don’t mean sweet and sour chicken or pork stuffed spring rolls, either. I mean the real stuff.
WAIT WHAT?! PANDA EXPRESS ISN’T REAL CHINESE FOOD?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN?!
No, it’s not. Not at all. I’ve never even seen sweet and sour chicken in China and fried spring rolls are only available at the Vietnamese restaurant down the street from my apartment. Instead, Chinese food often has a lot of cloves, star anis, fennel, cardamom, and chili powder. Some of the food I’ve had has been really good, especially Yunan food, which is a lot simpler and seems to have more Western ingredients. Some of the food I’ve had, though, has been… interesting.
During the school year, we had an Experiential Learning Week and I signed up for making documentaries. Over the five days, we travelled around our area of China filming and taking photos. One day, in the mountains of Hong Kong, we were visiting a Buddhist temple and a huge Buddha statue. For lunch, we ate at a vegetarian restaurant (cuz Buddhists don’t eat meat). I would love to tell you what we ate, but I don’t even know.
As you can see below, there’s a yellow tofu something that was the best dish in my opinion (although I still would not eat it again). There were also oddly slimy mushrooms😳 and crispy rolls with vegetables and tofu inside. And two more tofu dishes with unidentifiable extra ingredients. The other dish, slightly above the yellow one, was some sort of tofu salad I’m guessing. Then, there was the Purple Thing. Unfortunately, I don’t have any good pictures of this one, however if you look at the second photo on the very right side, there’s a brown fried something. That something is purple inside and I don’t know why or how. Someone else in the group thinks that it was taro, so that’s what I’m going with. It had a jello-like consistency (I tried it) and I felt like I was eating something from another planet. It was a flavor I have never experienced before.
Besides the different tofu dishes, there was a vegetable soup that was pretty good and white rice. That’s pretty much all I ate. And the tea was pretty good. A few of the other kids enjoyed the food, although they didn’t know what it was. Most of them bought cup noodles at Seven Eleven right after lunch.
While I didn’t much care for the food, many people really enjoy it. If you’re one of those people, no judgement, that’s awesome! It’s not my thing, but that’s okay! I really do recommend that you always try things, because even if you don’t like it, you still gave it a shot. And if you do like it, you just found a great new food! I’m always willing to at least take a bite, and some of my favorite foods have come from trying something I thought I’d hate!
Have an awesome awesome awesome day and happy late 4th of July!🇺🇸
Way Out Wanderer 