this kind of post feels so dull by now

But here are some Chinese dishes that we ate for my friend's birthday at a restaurant that had fake grapes hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the meal, they gifted us (since we spent more than 50 yuan, approximately $6) a box of kleenex. "japanese tofu" is, I think, made with fish and tofu mixed together, but I've given up on thinking about it. It's very silky and shaped like a scallop and fried with a very light crispy exterior. the sauce at this particular restaurant was sweet and salty and full of pinenuts and mushrooms. In the background is a big flaky pancake that was filled with mushrooms (a yunnan special variety, I think) that gave me pause for the second time that evening as a meat scare. The other dish (not pictured) was basically octopus, except that it was a mushroom of the sea. Next is spring roll shaped crispy deep fried bundles filled with - an amatuer's guess - slightly sweetened purple taro paste. Dip in another slightly sweet and slightly sour sauce, which was the color of every chinese take-out sweet and sour sauce ever made. We also got a free fruit platter which was ornate, but vague and maybe lazy. It gave me the impression of a swan, but without all the effort.

Here's the thing you recommended I order because it doesn't have any meat in it.

Here is all the meat that wasn't in it:

To be fair, I'm counting "blood tofu" as meat.

role reversal

I've probably already mentioned how they put crystalized sugar coated tomatoes on birthday cakes, but here are some more examples of gender-bending fruit and vegetable, sweet and savory notions that challenge my American ideas about freedom. First, corn is huge in China. Host sister's favorite candy is a corncob shaped soft candy (though it's also available in a hard candy), of which there are about 6-7 different brands, just for this specific candy! When I was poking around in my Indonesian friend's fridge, I found corn yogurt, which, in addition to a frightfully accurate corn flavor, also has small kernels floating around in it. When we were at Carrefour, we also saw fruit pizza. I guess at this point, fruit pizza is more like something Cafe Flora serves, and less like something I should make fun of China for having, but...?? maraschino cherries!?

Have you seen Transformers?

I'm pretty sure in the movie they take a normal (hot rod) car

and then you push a button, or make it angry or something, and then it turns into a robot:

Transformers is what happens when you go to be a turn-of-the-century (read: child from little house on the prairie?) foreigner extra on the upcoming and star-studded Yunnan based TV series "Zhu family garden." It involves being told the night before that you will leave from school at 7 in the morning and return that evening. It's a 3 hour drive to "location", so you figure that the filming will be short, hilarious and painless, (getting you back in bed by a reasonable hour) but it secretly involves 3 hours of driving, 1 hour of waiting, 1 hour of dressing and makeup, 5 minutes of eating, 5 hours of filming, 2 more hours of driving, 1-2 hours of waiting including a little ravenous eating, and then 3 more hours of filming (and then 4 more hours of driving - with an hour of walking or waiting in the middle). don't add up the numbers, just trust me that we had 'a wrap' at 1:30 in the morning, and arrived back in Kunming at 6:30 this morning.

I can make this relate to food, to be blog-appropriate. Because, if you were wondering (like I had initially), after the general debacle, whether or not it was all worth it for the two free meals we might obtain during the course of the filming, allow me to introduce

exhibit A (mostly unidentified meats peppered with meat juicy veggies),

and exhibit B (town slop hall for set swine):

If I'm not mistaken, this plant is the size of your torso

We ate (in limited portions, of course, since anything more - and anything delicious - is shang huo and necessarily bound to make my throat hurt and cause forehead breakouts that make going to the chinese spa a painful pimple-popping nightmare) these dr. seussian oversized stems and flowers of the taro root, if my internet dictionary translation is to be trusted. It tasted like I dug it out of a marsh, but was flavored in such a way that that wasn't an insult.

for the middle aged and the aged

rose-flavored lotus root powder, with rose-flavored jelly stirred in. free samples! this was the staple product in the beach town where I spent 1.5 hours of my 9 hour day getting there and back. every shop was a lotus root powder specialty shop, and every stand in front of every store was also selling lotus root powder. Also, you might not be familiar with the beach food sold by every old lady on the shore. It's potato country, but it's also crabs country.

mimsie take note

this chinese latke is made with grated lotus root and glutinous rice powder. "it is a waste of time, and lotus root", but host mom will make it when lotus roots are on sale.

mi xian

The ingredients for the regional rice noodles that are served everywhere are fairly standard place to place, but the set up in the area where we vacationed left more hands-on (felt like freedom. yet we take these freedoms at the expense of what others?) for the diner. at the noodle part of the stand, you can choose vermicelli, pad-thai sized, or wide rice noodles, which the stand owner boils for you, and then adds broth (and meat, or not. and green onions and cilantro, or not, you missing-out-koreans). Then you get to take your bowl over to the table with the add-ons, which typically include: raw garlic in its juices, ginger in its juices, vinegar, soy sauce, hua jiao powder, MSG, salt, chili powder, chili paste, chili salt, sometimes fulu/lufu (the aged tofu), and some sort of pickled vegetable selection (mostly radish). then you sit at a table with maybe your friends and maybe some strangers and take toilet paper from a plastic toilet paper holder because you've started sweating.

liang fen, regionally acceptable

Of course, it made the Koreans pouty because it had cilantro in it, but the combo with lime, chili, peanuts and ginger, was a winner. Not pouty, excited. Plus the ice kept it (and us) cool on the raging hot afternoon, and the whole dish was juicier than when I had its fast-food counterpart (see: it's not cucumber, I'm so mad) at the food court. Washed down with this coconut red bean tapioca drink, and another, slightly more milky and jungly rendition of the fruit on ice treat.

Zhong Yao

Two weeks ago I tried to take some chinese cold medicine preventatively while all my classmates were getting sick. When I didn't get sick that week I gave myself pats on the back for about a week straight, until I caught a cold, and started rounds 2 and 3 of my medicines. I guess since Chinese medicine is "safe" and "doesn't have side effects or interaction problems", you can take as many as you'd like, which I did, according to the different suggestions of teachers, pharmacists, host mom, and host sister. At that point, I was eating most of them like candy (the throat syrup took the flavor recipe precisely from the Swiss Ricola tooting brothers), and when I came back on the bus last night I impulsively bought a chinese medicine "carsick paste" patch at the bus terminal. Then my korean friend told me about a kid that put a whole patch on instead of half a patch, as is recommended for children, and went crazy.

glutinous times 89.6 degrees farenheit

I got back yesterday morning from a 3-day (4 night if you count each way on the night bus) trip to Xishuangbanna, a region in the SW of Yunnan, and just a skip and a jump away from the rest of SE Asia. There is a heavy Thai influence, but it's no thailand. It is a wealth of sticky rice, so I spent most of the trip trying to find room in the gullet for just one more deep fried piece of important business. The winners were as follows: deep fried patties made of glutinous rice powder, banana, and coconut (upper right), and glutinous rice cooked in a bamboo tube, which didn't have a particularly memorabe flavor, but the novelty was quite enough for me.

Meat litmus test

Last week (I'm sorry, but have we had this conversation before?), host mom encouraged me to have just a taste chicken foot ('don't be afraid'). I tried, in my best attempt at cross-cultural politeness to sassily and light-heartedly put my foot down - "no. no. no. it's meat!", at which point host mom gestured surprise and reassurance: "no, it's not meat! there's no meat on the foot - it's just [scaly, pocked] skin and [claw] bone."