Campus lunch - not as bad as advertised!

My new colleague and I had been warned, by students, by Chinese colleagues, by Western colleagues: Don't eat at the university cafeteria. The food is terrible. So we stayed away. And we stayed away. And we tried the other three restaurants near campus. And we stayed away.

Our Chinese colleague and lunch buddy, kept asking us "have you tried the cafeteria?" We finally agreed to go. And were pleasantly surprised. The trick is not to go to the first floor, but to the partitioned off section of the second floor where you get a menu and table service!

We ordered a lamb dish, with potatoes and beans in a soup. Omelette with shallots, pumpkin fries and an eggplant dish.

The pumpkin fries had been recommended by a colleague. I quite liked them. The pumpkin here is very nice, the same taste and quality you get in Australia, nothing like the bland, tasteless excuse for pumpkin you get in London. The batter is done with preserved duck egg yolk and some kind of flour, so the flavour is quite strong and salty. They often come served with sprinkles on top – the same sprinkles you put on fairy bread. Random!

The eggplant in China is fantastic! I keep trying to replicate it at home and failing utterly. Whenever I try to stir fry eggplant I get an undercooked gloopy mess. This was perfectly cooked, with the eggplant in discrete bits, I guess cooked first, then fried separately, then added to the dish? Must find convenient Chinese friend who can cook eggplant and show me the secret. Hmm....who to ask?

I think we will return to the university cafeteria!

Weekly staff meetings: otherwise known as “Dinner”

My first official food blog opportunity – and I forgot to take a picture before we ate. As you can tell, the food was very good! The best part was eating 10 dishes between 7 people and each paying GBP2.40 including beer!

We have a great time choosing food: "That looks good! What is it? Umm... I think it might be chicken. Oh. It doesn't look like chicken. Maybe it's eggs – does the character for egg include chicken? I don't know. Let's order it anyway!"

My colleagues are an interesting assortment of ages, nationalities and temperament. And we all come to teaching from very different backgrounds. We also delight in discussing the school, the students, and swapping stories about the craziest things that have happened in class. We compared excuses for absence: "I have to go and drill lake cores in Tibet for three weeks as part of my aquatic geography major." "I've been studying magic with Harry Potter and I have learned to make a cloak of invisibility so even though you won't see me, I will actually be in class." "I have to go to Yunan for a week to visit the observatory for my astronomy major." And they say Chinese students have no creativity!

Gotta go, my particle physics reactor needs a tune up...

 

To eat in or to eat out. Hmm.......

My kitchen in Beijing is smaller than my mother's walk in wardrobe.

And eating out in Beijing is ridiculously cheap. So I thought a good way to keep friends and family updated about my adventures would be a food diary. I hope to also include some cultural things and sightseeing adventures, however the main focus of this blog will be food. If you are not interested in food, then I suggest you stop reading. Now. Go on, go and find something more productive to do! Like check the prices for tickets to Beijing. :)