Blue Box Blues

As exciting as the offer to go out to your favorite little hole in the wall restaurant is back home in good old Chicago, the offer here in China does not evoke the same excitement. Rather, it usually involves a sigh followed by a question of “where do you want to go today?” The answer to that question is usually a list made up of names for random restaurants around our school: Big Red, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the Kosher place, dumpling place, or Something VS Something place. As we discover more hole in the walls, I’m sure the list of ultra awesome and creative names will increase. Anyways, along with the short list of immaterially different hole in the wall restaurants, our entre choices usually consist of rice or noodles topped with some sort of meat in a sauce and are usually limited to the scarce number of pictures on a restaurant’s menu.

A little outside eating area we go to often. It's quite cute at night.

Some days we get enough courage to go attempt a new place but doing so requires a true desire and patience. Usually, these new places do not have picture menus at all since we had already discovered those locations earlier on. If we are lucky, when we walk into a potential new regular dining establishment, there will be someone eating something delicious looking that we can point to and say “one of this one please”. Otherwise, we can try and orders an item from my list of 8ish items that I’ve had waitresses write down after voting them as an “I want to eat this again” meal. If we are feeling even more adventurous, we make up combinations of words such as “chicken” and “vegetables” and “rice” as if they were refrigerator magnets and see what happens.

Either way, when you hungry and you just want to go and eat, sometimes this eating arrangement leads to frustrations. There have been many days where I’ve eaten cucumbers and fried rice, or simply nothing at all because ordering didn’t work out: either the food that arrived was awful or I simply couldn’t order in the first place because I got too frustrated with them saying “mayo (don’t have)” or babbling on in Chinese and pointing to other things that I just walk away and deal with the hunger.

Our go to fried rice with ham.

We’ve found a few western restaurants along with an authentic Indian restaurant here, but they are all the way downtown. We try to head down there twice a week or so to get a dose of “normal” food as we call it and kind of recharge our batteries. It’s these little trips to eat western food that keeps us going, well at least me anyways. I was told there are a couple of pizza places within a 10/15 minute bus ride from our school, so I think we will start visiting those too, once we get one of the teachers to show us where they are.

In the worst case scenario, on days when we can’t handle it anymore or are not in the mood to order food like refrigerator magnets, we know we can always cave and go eat Blue Box. We have not yet reached that point, but it’s really comforting knowing that in a few short minutes, we could have a hot steamy bowl of fake covered cheese noodles and they are guaranteed to taste just like home! :)