Before moving on and talking about other little bits of food, I thought that I would just add a quick note to Jessica’s last post. I love college football. One problem that I have always had though is that I am from Missouri, which doesn’t really ring out as a football power house. The college that I went to, being an engineering school, hadn’t won a football game in the two years before I arrived and did not win a game the whole time that I was there. I have a Google page and an MSN page that I log into to get key news and sports information that I am interested in. I have always had the University of Missouri listed as one of the teams to follow. You could usually find me on Saturday or Sunday looking over my shoulder to make sure that no one was looking while I logged on to see how the Tigers had done that weekend.
This season was of course different though. You don’t ever really have to know anything about college football to know that Missouri came within one game of reaching the national championship. Who knows if it will happen again, or how well they will do next year. I may have to go back to always looking over my shoulder when I check scores and articles. But in the mean time, here is a sight that I really never thought that I would see in my lifetime…just too bad it didn’t last.
So anyway, back to food...
The grocery store that we normally go to is right across the street from our apartment. It has always amazed us at some of the advertisements that you see that are in English that you just chuckle at, or sometimes even better the products that they actually are selling over here (see the flavors for potato chips in the last post). However, the one that always trips us up though is the meat area of the grocery store here.
The delivery and selling of meat products is pretty interesting over here. It doesn’t matter if it is a big chain store like the Carrefour or Pines that we go to, or one of the local Chinese markets or even side street markets: The meat is basically just dropped off and put into large piles for people to pick through. In the smaller city that I work in, it is hilarious to see some of the Chinese people actually start to fight over the meat when it gets dropped off.
Anyway, at the Carrefour where we normally shop, it is more like you would find in the States. That being said though, there are still some pretty big differences. For instance, the fresh fish area is a little more open and not as sanitary. In the pictures below you can see the open fish meats, the tanks that you can get live turtles out of, another counter of fresh fish, the fish heads (for soup).
All around this area, there are also fish and crab tanks that the boys like to spend time looking at. It is interesting to explain to them how people will buy the fish and take them home to cook them and eat them. Just seeing the looks on their faces makes for a fun time.
Then, there are the meat counters. Most of the pictures that I took didn’t turn out too well, so I will go back and get some more at another time. Again, it is similar to the States: You just pick out the meat that you want, take it to the butcher type of person, and they wrap it up for you. One big difference though is that you pretty much just pick through it all by hand (your own) and then take it to be packaged. We on the other hand are not as adventurous as this. We pretty much only buy the pre-packaged meats. We pay a little more for them, but at the same time we don’t have to go through the theatrics of getting the meat like this…
In other food news, Jessica has mentioned before that Maddox has taken a real liking to Chinese food. At first, we thought that he just liked the idea of eating from chopsticks. However, it really doesn’t matter if it is chopsticks or not, the kid just likes Chinese food (suits me though, as I do too). The big favorite though is rice. Doesn’t matter if it is fried rice, rice noodles, of just plain steamed rice; Maddox likes them all.
A few days ago, we decided to go ahead and let Maddox try and eat the rice by himself. I am not sure how much rice he actually was able to eat, as you can see in the pictures below he was at least as much on the floor as he was eating. Afterwards he came into the kitchen asking for a ‘towel’, as he wanted to help clean up the mess that he made. As you can see though, things just got spread out more.
The big news to share though as it relates to food is a recent discovery that we have made in Shanghai. A couple of weekends ago, we were walking around an area on the other side of Shanghai from where we live called Hongqiao (Hong-Chow). We knew that there was a large international grocery store there called City Shoppe, so we were looking for it when all of a sudden we stumbled across a Cold Stone Creamery. It was like experiencing a little piece of heaven right here in Shanghai. Even better was that the following weekend, we found another one in the People’s Square area of the city. They have waffle cones, waffle bowls, our favorite ice creams, our favorite toppings, everything. Unfortunately though, it has become a recent addiction.
I know that there is so much more that is more interesting that you could see when it comes to food. For instance, on nights when I am staying in Wuxi and walking around the downtown area, you can see people along side the streets that have small grills hanging off of the back of their bikes that are cooking small animals that are tied to skewers. I could tell you about some of the ‘snack’ shops on the sides of the busy streets that have things like duck tongue and chicken feet for sale. I could even spell out the meals that I have had to endure during the countless supplier visits over here. I guess that I will try and get some pictures of those and get them loaded as well. In the mean time, this stuff will just have to do...
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