School Dinners

The school dining room has three rows of long tables, with stools attached. All students and members of staff are assigned two metal bowls and a metal spoon. This was pretty much the picture of 'Communism' I'd had in my head before I got here. We all sit side-by-side (the staff eat after the kids, fortunately - I don't want to start the afternoon with rice in my hair) after taking our bowls to the window of the kitchen and being served our food. Once we've finished, we go to the sinks outside and wash our bowls. Unfortunately we don't have grey overalls to wear while we do this, and there is often chatter - though I don't understand the vast majority.


The food at the school is generally quite nice. Pretty bland, but I don't really mind that - and it's healthy. We get 3 meals a day free-of-charge so you can't really complain. Breakfast is usually noodle soup, but it does very sometimes - occasionally we'll get a rice-version of porridge, or a sweet bun with warm rice milk. Today we had a kind of rice and chicken broth with a bread roll. I say bread roll, they were pretty different to the kind of bread rolls I'm used to. They were entirely white, and really springy. They basically tasted like they'd not been cooked nearly enough (Anna, you'd love them). I commented on the difference between English and Chinese buns to the other teachers, and they explained that they'd been steamed rather than baked. Fair enough. Still not very nice though.

Lunch and dinner always takes the same format. There will be three different dishes in the kitchen, all fried: one is simply green vegetables, the second is generally a mixture of one or two kinds of veg and some meat, and the third can be anything from meat to potatoes to weird blocks of egg. In the dining room there's always a massive rice cooker fulled to the brim and some kind of watery soup. This all sounds a lot worse than it tastes. After ladelling my rice on top of the veg in my bowl and taking my place among the troops, I was munching away on some kind of mushroom affair and was looking at the girl next to me as she ate her soup. It was a pale green, with bit of something-like-spinach in. But as she lifted out her spoon to take the next mouthful, I noticed that it had a whole chicken foot on it. I am not kidding. And she put it into her mouth, whole, and started chewing. I stopped eating for a while and my friend Anna (not the same Anna that likes to eat dough) who was sitting across from me got up to go and get some soup. I grabbed my bowl and hastily followed, and as she went to serve herself I hissed 'are there chicken feet in this?' she looked at me and coyly asked 'you don't like chicken feet?'

She's got a point I suppose, I haven't ever tried one. New experiences, and all that. But then she pulled out the ladel with this claw-like foot, all bleached and bloated from being boiled in this green soup... I just couldn't do it. Gross. I ladelled some of the green liquid from the top of the pot, being sure to avoid any lingering toes, before resuming my place in the ranks. I ate a few spoonfuls, merely to save face, but seriously - chicken feet?