Chinese Fast Food.....Yum.

Gentle easy day. This week I don’t have 100 essays to grade from my writing classes so spent the day I usually am ensconced with my red pen and instead worked on power points for the next few weeks while Rick went to teach his extra hours. Since he has oral English and no homework to grade he has 12 hours per week to teach. I just have 8 hours to teach….and then 90-120 essays to grade.

It is warmer. A week ago today it was sleet and snow, and the government turned off the heat 3 weeks ago! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XjvykyVRE Look at this Youtube site if you want to see what a friend described trying to walk on the wall in the snow last week.)Today is 70 and the flowering trees are bursting.  But the wind is whipping the bushes to the ground and the dust off the Gobi is blowing. We biked around the pretty lake on campus, with ancient walkways and pagodas and ducks and weeping willows and bright pink and white blossoms.

We also went to one of the little fast food places on campus. It takes a while to find the local joints. We are quite cognizant that it is a travesty to eat at McDonald’s sitting in Beijing, but I can recognize the arches and even if it is in a language I can’t read, I know what a picture of a hamburger looks like. But after 6 months here we have finally found a place we can get to which sells food we ate almost every day in Taiwan 30 years ago.  It is only a little bit larger than our living room. One side has shelves with lots of greens, tofu, meat, sprouts, etc. You load a bowl with what you want and then they boil it for you. I don’t buy this. I can’t figure out how to season it. It just tastes like boiled greens. I don’t know what I am doing wrong, but I steer clear. Instead Rick gets a pita kind of bread with meaty bacon in it for 70 cents. I get a beef rice box. It is wonderfully Chinese shredded beef, with some good greens with a hot pepper and some sort of pickled vegetable, rice, and also a tea egg. (I should figure out how to do tea eggs. Do you just boil the egg from the beginning in tea and they turn out brown and lush. Or do you boil them and then soak them in tea?) I get a rice box that will feed me about 3 times for about $2.50.  My kids would just love this place. It would evoke so many memories. A gentle easy day.