Friday night, my roommate, the Taiwanese girl and the Japanese girl who lives on our floor decided to cook a huge meal for all of us. They told us it would just be like rice and veggies and maybe some chicken, but it soon became clear that there was much more than that. We had rice, kale, something like potato salad with sausage, scrambled eggs with onion and green pepper, chicken with onions and each a cup of miso soup with tofu and some kind of Chinese vegetable in it. By the time we were done, Joanna and I thought we might actually explode. They actually let us help wash the dishes, and just as we were about to go back to our own business the Japanese girl brings this beautiful tea set into the room and starts serving coffee! And all they wanted in exchange for all of the work was for us to cook spaghetti for them sometime this week....that should be both entertaining and hilarious. There will be pictures.
It is funny, though, how culture has so much to do with food. I feel involved in the Chinese culture when I'm ordering a special food that you can only get here or walking down a market side street like last night. I wish I had had my camera with me last night. We turned off of Fuxing Road and ended up in this tiny street with vendors on both sides. One guy was yelling at us to come look at his stuff, so we did. He had an assortment of live water creatures, i.e. fish, crabs, shrimp (yes live shrimp) and some other things I did not recognize. Other stalls were selling fruits or vegetables and I'm pretty sure most of the people were speaking Shanghainese (the crazy Shanghai dialect that Mandarin/English speakers cannot understand).
Later, as we were wandering, we ran into the guy who runs this amazing barbeque stand at night. He has an assortment of meats and vegetables on skewers and you just pick out what you want, hand them to him and he grills them for you! It is super cheap, delicious and an all around good thing. The first time we tried this, he was very low on meat products, in fact I got the last of whatever it was...when we went back last night, Joanna informed me that she had ordered me chicken hearts last time. Thanks Joanna. Actually they weren't that bad, but it was kind of weird to think that I literally ate a stick of chicken hearts. Anyway...he actually had chicken breast this time with a delicious spicy glaze and cauliflower and asparagus and mushrooms (Joanna ate the mushrooms....I still don't like them).
Pick your poison.
Heat up the grill.
Grill delicious snacks.
Wait for delicious snacks.
ENJOY!
Seriously...these are like the best things ever invented. I love it. And it's super cheap. We got eight sticks for roughly $1.50 which is crazy! The only other bit of news to pass on is that we finally saw the first cockroach in the building last night. It's not like we expected that there wouldn't be any cockroaches, we just hoped against hope that we didn't have them. But there was definitely one scuttling around the common area last night. Ew. Guess I will have to thank Mun more profusely for picking up after me (she has to be one of the sweetest people I have ever met!).
Anyway...I'm sure I will have a lot more to say over the week as we will actually have time to do some exploring of Shanghai (not the area around school)! Yay!
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