Yantai, China: July 16, 2008

It’s hard to believe I’ve been here one month and only have another 3 weeks to go. Time has really flown by, but in one of the good ways.

I’ve adjusted more to the food than I thought, or at least the eating practices. I like eating with wooden chopsticks more than forks or spoons now and if we have to eat at a place that gives us plastic chopsticks or worse, metal ones, the looks of distain are never ending. Environmental friendliness is a good thing, and I know Asia’s bamboo forests take a heavy hit with all the disposable wooden chopsticks manufactured from them, but plastic is just too hard to eat with. It hardly picks up the food and metal ones are even worse. I have secured my own 3 pairs of wooden chopsticks so I don’t have to use forks all the time when I go home.

Hot tea is served at every meal instead of any sort of water (or any cold beverage. The Chinese are really adamant about not eating cold stuff with food-it makes you sick) I think my soda addicted classmates have gotten used to the warm Pepsi by now. It bothers me no longer though. We went to a Korean restaurant for lunch yesterday and they served chilled water with the meal. I couldn’t drink it. Then I realized that I made my own tea in a thermos when I ate instant noodles in the room. Now I have to find a cheap but sturdy teapot so I can continue to drink proper loose leaf tea. The idea of tea bags has become abhorrent to me. Thank you China for ruining my ability to drink liquids like a normal American, haha.

I love my Korean friends, but I’m afraid I just don’t like their food. Maybe if I wasn’t fretting over the fact I can’t drink anything but tea at meals or eat with metal chopsticks (seriously hard to do, and all Korean restaurants seem to use metal chopsticks…) it’d be easier to like. But who knows…I’ll just have to go to Korea and find out the right way. It’s probably Chinesified Korean food I’ve been eating anyhoo.

Usually when I keep journals I mention a topic more often than others because it makes a big impression on me. This has almost always been food. And while I can say that the food is definitely a new experience (and I can now almost read a Chinese menu-something I’m rather proud of) Yantai has shown me the power of rain and what happens when a campus isn’t designed to drain. The walkways are all vaguely like trenches and when it rains, it rains really hard (and can do it all day long), so that the sidewalks can have ankle deep water covering them. It’s no wonder the mosquitoes are more numerous than ants.

That last statement is actually a lie; I’ve seen a lot of ants here lately. I think they must have sprayed for bugs because there are a lot of large bug (cicada, grasshopper, beetles) corpses that just kinda dropped off the trees and the ants are carrying away their carcasses. I’d look at them longer but other people stare at me even more when I’m looking at dead bugs than when I’m just walking back to the dorm.

There are also HUGE spiders here. No exaggeration we found one in a web that was about the size of a ping pong ball both in depth and diameter. I tried to take a picture of it but the size of it isn’t really captured appropriately. We’d see these giant webs that looked like they’d been vacated only to realize days later that the spiders just come out at night. There is also some version of silk tunnel spiders in all the bushes. They build a little canopy of silk in their part of the bush and live there. I counted about 20 on a single small bush one day. It’s all rather fascinating. Once, when I was walking back with my teacher he asked me if I like spiders, since I was looking at a bunch of them again. I said yes and he said Chinese people like them too cause they taste good. -_-;