More food ramblings

I just read Jon's previous blog post and I though it was a little harsh. Which is funny because all I do is bitch and moan all day about the people staring and the smoke and the spitting and the smell of the bathrooms. So I guess he is justified. It's really not such an awful place but we have only been in big cities and it's just a culture barrier I'm sure. I've tried to come up with some positives about this country so far:

1. It's quite easy to be vegetarian here. We just use our book to point to some phrases of dishes they may have and we've only gotten strange stuff once. In Shanghai we ordered "corn cakes." Sounded simple, similar to crab cakes, right? What came out was something akin to a funnel cake you get at a carnival. It was an absolutely gigantic, fried 3 inch high disc of crunchy something, with some corn kernals on the bottom, covered in colored sprinkles and sugar. The kind of sprinkles you find on ice cream. Not the kind of thing you eat with eggplant and rice. We couldn't stop laughing and weren't sure how to go about eating it. We ended up ripping bits off with our hands and using chopsticks afterwards.

2. Food is cheap. In most situations we average $2 or less per person per meal. And we usually only eat 2 meals a day.

Ok, most of you at this point have noticed most of our writings and pictures revolve around food. For those of you that know me well, did you really expect anything else? For me, this is first and foremost a culinary adventure, as most of my life is. Why I don't weigh 500 pounds is a mystery. Somehow we managed to eat a great meal at a street vendor in Shanghai right after we walked past women at a similar stall stripping the skin off live frogs. Some people say you can judge a country by the way they treat their animals....

That's my random 2 cents for the day. I know my mom likes when I write. Big shout out to Sheryl.

Gay