Episode III: The Food in Shanghai

Well, I was going to impress you with pictures of every imaginiable kind of food, all of which is readily available in Shanghai and most of which I have personally sampled, but for some reason the blogger website is being stubborn. So what you get instead is my simple and inadequate description. If the site's mood suddenly decides to improve, maybe the pictures will come next time.

So I met another vegetarian, and she and I have been hitting the Shanghai vegetarian restaurant scene pretty hard. (Which makes it sound a little like we've been smoking pot, I know, but our version of the pursuit of enlightenment doesn't carry a mandatory 15-year sentence in China...). The Chinese can do amazing things with food, and thanks in part to the Buddhist side of their long heritage - lots of monks who don't eat meat and have enough free time to play around with wheat gluten - they can do amazing things with fake meat as well. Really, this stuff tastes just like the real thing. Vegetarianism has apparently been enjoying a recent trendiness in the East, and Shanghai has some amazing vegetarian restaurants. We usually have to wait for at least half an hour for a seat, even on weeknights, which might irritate us if we didn't find it such a big part of the experience. It's rare to have to wait for a seat in a vegetarian restaurant back home.

Somewhat more intimidating curiosities consist of the dog meat served in the Korean restaurant down the street, which I obviously didn't try, and which nobody who did try actually liked, toast served topped with nothing but chocolate syrup, and pigeons served with their heads still on, eyes in and all.

There are plenty of western-style restaurants here too. I've never seen so many KFC's in one place before. Of course, I've never seen a lotus-root salad served at a KFC either. McDonald's has kiosks on street corners and on the banks of the river, like little ATM's for ice cream cones and french fries. They also serve taro root pies alongside the apple ones, which for the record are delicious. And in Starbucks yesterday I had a green tea and red bean mousse cake, which was great but which I'm also guessing they would have a hard time selling in the states.

Oh, and of course my favorite food in the world...red bean baozi, little steamed buns filled with sweet read bean ground into a delicious paste. There's a little shop down the street that sells the best ones ever, which makes me absolutely ecstatic because, to be honest, red bean baozi are 80% of the reason I came back to China in the first place. You just can't get them in the states. And so cheap! Three buns costs me less than 20 cents U.S.

Last year I lost ten pounds when I came to China. Somehow I have a feeling I won't be experiencing the same problem this time...unless, of course, people keep ordering dog meat. Then I may never eat again.