I've rated these foods using five-star system. The blog site won't support the perfect little five-pointed stars  in one of the wingdings fonts, so big asterisks will have to do. There is a photo album of the foods that I could actually find photos of.
DUCK AND LOTUS SEED SOUP_*** it was my first duck but had a bit of a strange flavor, the lotus seeds were good but I wasn’t so excited about the dates or the vertebrae and other various bones.

FROG LEGS_** it didn’t taste bad it was just disturbing to see the spotted skin on the meat I was eating, and the meat bone ratio was very low, tiny little bones.

LOTUS ROOT_***** when cooked it has the crunchy texture of raw potatoes, it grows with a nice pattern of holes in it and comes in white and purple.

DRAGON FRUIT_***** it’s beautiful and easy to peel. The flesh is white with hundreds of tiny black seeds. It tastes like a mix between kiwi and jicama and goes through faster than corn.

JACK FRUIT_***** it’s easily confused with durian (which has a foul smell). It could easily be used as a weapon. After opening, you cut out the clusters of flesh, inside each one is a large seed.

MANGOSTEEN_***** who knew that mangoes came in teenages? Choose a firm one, break off the stem, crack it half, and scoop out the white flesh (it looks like citrus fruit).

SAND WORMS_** they didn’t taste bad but the texture and just knowing that it was a worm was enough for me. I only ate two. They’re only found in Beihai, southern Guangxi.

HALF-COOKED SHRIMP_** picture large whole shrimp skewered through the tail up to the head, dipped in boiling porridge for about 1.5 minutes, and served hot. I bit the head off.

GOOSE LIVER_* I just don’t like liver. The texture is horrible and pasty almost and the flavor is just not for me. I took one bite and watched the others eat whole pieces.

MUSHROOM STEAK_*** it came on a plate covered in gravy looking like a nice thick cut of pork. It was rubbery and flavorless but the gravy helped.

APPLE VINEGAR_**** I choose apple “juice” over milk. It was so tangy and flavorful with a rich aftertaste, it seemed concentrated. When I was told it was vinegar that was all I could taste.

CHICKEN FOOT_** “it tastes like chicken” runs true. It’s just a cooked foot that you eat the skin off of. I had one toe. I kept thinking of that chicken standing in its own poop all its life.

SNAKE_** it was served as a three-inch section with the abdominal cavity emptied in a bowl of broth, I took a couple bites but didn’t want to eat the skin and there were so many bones.

CORN JUICE_***** two pitchers of OJ turned out to be a hot thick creamy corn drink (yeah for colorblindness). Tastes just like corn on the cob but in a smooth hot beverage.

CORN CANDY_***** it’s a chewy yellow candy shaped into little corn cobs and it tastes like corn. Corn syrup is used to sweeten so many things, why not corn candy?

PIG EAR_* sliced into thin sections you could see the layers of skin and other tissue. It tasted like pork but was way too tough and chewy and practically all skin.

LYCHEE_***** easily peeled it is a translucent fruit with a pretty red shiny pit in the middle. The flesh has a zippy flavor and liquid/solid/gelatin texture that reminds me of the purple grapes in my parents’ yard.

Chinese table manners are much more lax than those in America. It’s perfectly acceptable to reach all the way across the table and grab a piece of something with your chopsticks. When eating meat it’s normal to put the whole chunk in your mouth, work the meat from it, then spit the bones out right on the table or bowl or plate. Slurping is ubiquitous. Slurping soup, sucking noodles, and sucking the meat from bones happens in every meal.

One of my friends from work, Li Ning, had a bunch of us from the office over for the evening last night. We barely fit around the table and the food dishes barely fit on the table so most of us just held our rice bowl and picked what we wanted with our chopsticks. In this case, it was perfectly acceptable to spit or put your bones directly on the wood tabletop, forming neat piles. So the Chinese are much more flexible and accepting of how you choose to consume your food. Practicality trumps high society dining in this country, and it’s a refreshing change!

In general the food in China is always served hot. I never realized it but I associate hot meals with dinner or more formal occasions and associate cold foods with lunch and breakfast. Every meal here is served hot so it feels rather formal to me. I sometimes wonder if eating hot food is a sign of wealth or prosperity because it represents controlling fire, having cookware, having a sheltered place to cook, and being able to afford or raise your own meat.

Chinese food doesn’t waste any part of the animal. Almost every dish I’ve had with meat in it contains the bones. They seem to just chop up the animal and cook it instead of carefully removing the meat from the bones before cooking. Chen Yu told me that meat without bones is just very boring. They also eat all of the skin and fat along with the meat. Some dishes are nothing but chunks of fat. Intestines, ears, feet, liver, heart, head, are all eaten, I’ve even been told that penis is very good.

A bowl of rice accompanies just about every meal as well as a bowl of “soup.” I would call it broth because it’s a very light meat stock usually with nothing in it but the broth. This is the beverage that is served with the meal. Sometimes tea is the primary beverage in the nicer restaurants or is just a supplemental one.

 During my first hour in Nanning Chen Yu and Shao Lu took me to lunch at a nicer sit down restaurant with waitresses. I had been traveling for 25 solid hours and it was super humid and in the 90s F, the last thing I wanted to drink was hot tea or soup. I asked for a glass of water through Chen Yu. The waitress brought me a glass of nearly boiling water. Chen Yu was shocked that Americans don’t drink hot water, even in the winter! I finally got a bottle of cold water. I was so thirsty. Now I take a nalgene bottle full of water with me. It’s hard to get cold water but room temp is much better than hot.

You may notice a small little piece of paper with some Chinese characters on it stuck to the edge of your noodle or soup bowl. Did someone go crazy with stickers in the kitchen? No. Make sure your bowls have these little stickers, it means that they have been cleaned. Clean is good.

Last night was my first party at someone’s apartment. Li Ning is one of the women on my floor and she invited several of us to her apartment for dinner. She lives in a huge apartment complex (lots of buildings but not tall buildings), on the opposite side of Nanning from me. I took a taxi with Dr. Han (Han Wenbing) and Fu Chaohua. After we got there we had to go buy a watermelon to bring, there were lots of little stores in the apartment complex though, good urban planning!

Li Ning’s apartment was on the 6^th floor of a seven-story building, no elevator. There were about 10 of us overall. I went up to the roof deck with a few people while the others cooked. Li Ning has a 5-year-old son whose name I can’t remember, Zhou something. He was so fun. I chased him, growled, and tickled him. He was quite fascinated with me and was very rambunctious. Li Yan Ping brought a folding card table and mahjong set out to the deck. Dr. Han and Li Yan Ping taught me mahjong! It took about an hour, but they were able to explain all the rules to me in English. Wow. Zhou was playing for a while, playing with the tiles, not playing the game. We played until the sun set and it was too dark to see the tiles. We actually played for quite a while using our cell phones as lights! I won my first mahjong game!!! It’s nothing like the mahjong computer games I’ve played in the US.

After the darkness drove us inside we found Zhou playing with colored wooden blocks with a couple of people. They looked perfect for Jenga so I told them about it and we played a round. It was fun but I forgot that when you remove a block you have to put it on top.

We all gathered around the table and ate dinner. There was rice, pork fat soup, broccoli, cucumbers with vinegar, some sort of chive-looking green that wasn’t chives or onion, stir fried chunk of duck, stir fried chunk of pork, stir fried chunk of duck, Coke, Sprite, beer, and OJ. They served me first as the guest and gave me an extra helping of fat from the soup (it’s the best part right?!). I gave it all to Fu Chaohua. The broth had the signature Nanning smell/taste to it. I downed it quickly to get it out of my bowl and eat something else. The meats were barbecued and quite good. I only ate a drumstick of the duck and chicken. I figure that when being served meat I should only eat what looks familiar! Most of the chicken’s organs were on the plate with the meat. Zhou had to sit by me and only spilled barbecue sauce on me once; I caught the drumstick before it landed on my lap.

Afterwards we went into the living room and sat on wooden sofas and talked. Someone brought the card table down and we played mahjong for a while. I won a few more times! Watermelon was served as dessert and was very good.

I asked if we could take photos before we left so we took a couple using the timer and then a few of my co-workers wanted a photo with them and me. They also had me take a couple photos with Zhou. He is so cute. It was so fun to play with a little boy. I love my nieces but little boys are different. I rarely see any of my nephews and they’re not that old yet.

It was very interesting to observe Zhou and how everyone treated him. The adults were all so patient with him, letting him do whatever he wanted (within reason) even though it was inconvenient for them. He could count to at least 20 in English and of course his Chinese was much better than mine. He loved to smile and had the child haircut of shaving the head but leaving a rounded patch in the very front. I got the impression that Chinese people revere their children and are very patient with them, even if they’re not theirs or doing something they shouldn’t be. I wonder if that’s because they are only allowed to have one child per couple. I can see how that would affect how people treated children, they are more of a rare gift than American children, so many of whom are from unwanted pregnancies. Li Ning had him calling me “uncle Bu,” for Bushman.

I had a meeting on Saturday afternoon at work. I got up early that morning to go see the Olympic torch relay and run some errands. I went with Shao Lu and his girlfriend, English name Katie. To get back for my meeting I took one of the three wheeled motorized taxis for the first time. Shao Lu told him where I needed to go, I can tell them the address in Chinese but they navigate by landmarks instead of addresses.

Because I had my cameras with me I took out my camcorder and recorded the ride until the battery died! It was so funny. This video can give you an idea of what the traffic and street life is like. It cost me 4 yuan to go about 1.5 miles in the heat, that’s about $0.55 for a 5 minute ride. If all three of us were heading the same direction we would have taken one of the car taxis.

I left Chicago at 8:59pm on Monday and arrived in Nanning at 11:10 on Wednesday. 25 hours (20 of them sitting on planes), four airports, three airplanes, and two baggage checks later I arrived in Nanning. Just in case you haven't heard, if you're checking two bags the second one will cost you about $25 and if they're over 50lbs. the fee is $100 per bag. And if you're ever in LAX late at night and you haven't had dinner just forget about it, all of the terminal restaurants are closed. 

I bought my plane tickets via the internet 10 weeks before I left yet at both LAX and the Beijing airport I was told that I wasn't booked on my flight. Both ticket agents had to go talk with their supervisors and eventually they found my reservation, or just made one up for me. Who knows what ticket agents do, and why does it take them ten minutes of clicking their mouse buttons to check someone in?

I made friends with the two Chinese women I was sitting next to on the flight. They were very friendly and helpful and gave me their phone numbers. One of them, her English name is Alice, told me to call if I need anything because she felt responsible for me having met me on the plane!

The international terminal, terminal three, in Beijing is a brand new building just in time for the Olympic Games in August. It was AMAZING. I took some photos with my phone.

I was told that I would have to claim and check my bags again at LAX but not in Beijing but that was completely wrong. I got through immigration just fine but never really went through customs because no one was there. We all had to put our own luggage through an x-ray machine on the floor though. Maybe the government keeps an x-ray video of everyone's luggage?

Air China still serves full meals on their flights. On the flight from Beijing to Nanning I had the choice of a “Chinese or western” meal. Regrettably, I chose Chinese. There was some slimy hot rice that I didn’t like and hard-boiled egg that was pickled and black and vacuum sealed in plastic. The fruit cup was good.

It was a hot and very humid day in Nanning (which is true everyday). Three people had come from Hualan to pick me up in a tiny car. The four of us and my four bags barely fit in the car but we made it.

My final project for my urban design and culture class in the fall semester of 2007 was a redesigned Chinatown in Chicago. My teacher, Tingwei Zhang, complimented my work and in the hallway after class asked if I'd be interested in working in China for a year. You just never know how doing your homework can affect your life!

Preparing to move to China was crazy. I had to find an English version of Chinese labor laws regarding foreign workers in order to find out what documents I needed for a visa. I ended up sending a PDF of my bachelor’s degree, resume, passport, and photograph to Hualan Group, the company I was going to work for. They had to take those documents to two government agencies who prepared my work permit and visa notification. My ignorant mailman in Chicago never delivered these documents but I finally ended up with them after three trips to the post office (I thought the whole point of the USPS was to deliver your mail to your residence, silly me).

I’d previously gone to the consulate in Chicago and asked what documents I needed so I was confident in going there with the two documents they described. I got a phone call the next morning. The signature on my visa notification from the Labor Office in Nanning was not registered with the Labor Ministry in Beijing. I don’t know who sold their baby but somehow my company got the Nanning office to fax another one directly to the consulate.

So I went to the consulate to pick up my visa. They told me that there was a problem (and that the phone number on my application had been disconnected which was not true). I needed a medical examination to obtain my visa. Once again my friend in China located the appropriate form and I was lucky enough to get an appointment with a doctor the same day. After waiting a couple days for my x-ray results I finally went back to the consulate on Friday morning and gave them my report feeling not so confident about getting my visa this time.

They told me I needed a letter from my doctor before noon in order for my medical report to be valid. The doctor who had done my physical (the first time I’d ever met him) didn’t get in until 1:30. Through another clinic scheduling miracle I was able to go see the doctor again and fax my letter to the consulate. I tried calling for the rest of the day on Friday to make sure they received it but no one answered and there was no more room on the message service. I finally got in touch with a human four minutes after the consulate closed. He said that he couldn’t help me. I needed my visa on Monday because I was leaving that night and I spent all weekend hoping that they got my letter, that it was ok, and that they didn’t need any more documents. I went to the consulate early Monday morning and finally got my visa.

Five months ago I went to class to give a presentation and now I live in China!