Shenyang Food!

As I promised, here's a special post just about the food in Shenyang!

First off, it is true that Shenyang is a big city, so there are a lot of international restaurants in the city itself. However, Su Jia Tun is not in the heart of Shenyang. It is on the outside in areas that were, until recently, very rural. As a result, I don't see much international food. I get a lot of Chinese food.

That's not to say there's no western food. The convenience stores around my apartment have some western snacks. Snacks like this:

Yes. Texas Grilled BBQ Flavor.

I'm pretty sure this is milk and honey flavor.

The Texas grilled barbecue chips actually did taste like grilled steak! The milk and honey chips... I don't think that flavor goes with potatoes.

Anyway, there are all kinds of restaurants around my apartment, too. One of the more popular ones is called Wine Bar, where they do not serve wine. They do serve shawar (I think spelled that right???), which is basically little pieces of meat grilled on a stick. I eat there a lot (because it's crazy cheap to eat out in Su Jia Tun). Here's one of my typical meals. See if you notice anything odd about it:

In case the picture is too small, let me point out some of the oddities. First of all, the meat on those shawar is, I think, the goose they sell. Yes, their goose is my favorite. Then, those little pieces of bread on metal skewers are baked buns, which my roommate and I ordered completely by accident. And fried rice, of course. As for the glass of soda, it's apparently common to get a one-person-sized bottle of coke and then pour it into what is basically a shot glass.

Then, do you see the extra dish set behind my food? I don't know if you can tell, but it's wrapped in plastic. You have to open a new set of dishes every time you eat at Wine Bar. I assume this is their way of keeping the dishes clean. I've heard from folks around here that there's no guarantee the tables are clean in some of these restaurants, and someone told me that it's wise to dry your utensils yourself, because there can be problems with waterborne bacteria in Su Jia Tun.

Anyway, that's one kind of restaurant. There's another kind where you get dishes that WeChat translates to "Griddles".

My roommate and I found these because, as we were walking out late one night, shopping, we happened to walk by one where a fabulous smell was wafting out. We'd already had dinner that night, but we agreed to stop by there the next night.

When we got there, there was no English menu (there almost never is anywhere that I've seen in Shenyang, including all the KFC's), and there were only pictures for a few of the things we saw on the menu. I liked one, and my roommate liked another one. So I pointed to the one that she wanted first, and the waitress nodded. Then I pointed to the one I wanted, and the waitress gave me a very strange look and said a lot that I didn't catch. I was confused, but I figured she didn't have a problem with the first thing we ordered, so I shrugged and pointed back to it. She was fine with that.

It turns out she must have said something like, "You don't need two of these for just the two of you", because the dish came back and it was this giant bowl on top of a candle, which she lit to keep the food warm:

To my delight, the one we got was chicken, potatoes, and onions, which is one of my favorite combinations. We ended up sharing that bowl and chop-sticking it out onto bowls of rice.

I have since brought everyone I can back to that restaurant, because I can't go by myself since I can't eat an entire griddle alone.

Incidentally, if you ever want to know if a restaurant has food that isn't raw or doesn't have, ahem, odd delicacies, just go in an ask for guo ba ro. (I can't tell if it's gu or go, so I just say a sound between the two of them.) Guo ba ro is this fried pork in a sweet and sour sauce. Most foreigners love it.

What's interesting, at least to me, is that this same restaurant with the very Chinese griddles also has the only international dish that I know of on the street. But it's not an American dish. It's not German. Nor is it Japanese, Korean, Thai, or anything else you'd expect to find. Care to guess? Anyone?

Courtesy of WeChat translate... it's haggis. Yes. Haggis. That obscure sheep dish that Scotland is either famous or infamous for. I have not had it. I probably will not. But yes. Haggis.

Anyway, there's a store in China called Metro, and it's reminiscent of Costco. It has those mega take-home, freeze, and thaw meals that Costco is famous for. It actually does cater to the international community, so you see a lot of different countries. But I was rather impressed by some of the stuff that, I assume, is meant for Chinese consumers.

Such as:

I really do wonder how to cook this...

I have no clue what meat floss is.

From the international side of things, though, this made me smile:

The Wartburg was the castle that Martin Luther hid in after the Diet of Worms, where he famously said, "Here I stand." Duke Frederich, the Protector of Luther's province, staged a fake kidnapping to protect him and hid him in the Wartburg for a while. 

Shenyang still has an international community, even in Su Jia Tun, so if you're willing to walk a while, there are some cool places to eat. One popular place is the Korean Barbecue.

This was actually one of the places that surprised me most, because of how it works. What happens is that you order raw meat and then grill it yourself on the coals:

I was thinking at first that no restaurant in America would allow its waiters to serve the customers raw meat (and the raw meat in America is probably safer than in China), but Mom reminded me about Melting Pot, where you stick the meat in oil to fry it. I guess it's about the same thing.

Anyway, that's the food from Shenyang. If I ever figure out how to cook Chinese food, I'll make a post about that, but for now, I'm contenting myself with eating out and enjoying Chinese take home ramen. 

Shenyang!

Yes, I did make it all right, but I’ve been very busy. But I figured that, since it's been over a month since I arrived, it was time for me to make a post.

I've only been to one tourist-type place, which will get its own post later, so this is mostly a blog about how my life has been here. I have lived abroad before, in Ireland, but then I was basically living in a college dormitory, so it wasn't really the same.

First off, Shenyang is a provincial capitol, but that doesn't make it anything like other capitols I've been to. To show you what I mean, check out the satellite image of Su Jia Tun, the district I live in. In the Google satellite image, it's mostly farmland. I think that picture is a few years old, because there are many more buildings now (for example, I found my apartment complex, and there are lots more buildings now than there were when that picture was taken), but it's not too far off from what it looks like now - a combination of farms and skyscrapers.

To give you an idea of what I mean, my apartment is 33 floors tall (and I'm on the 33rd floor), but when I go downstairs and step out of the gate, there's a farm of some kind right outside the walls. I don't know what they're growing, but I've seen people harvesting it. Also, along Nan Jing Nan Jie (the major north-south road in Shenyang), I've seen several patches of corn squeezed in between the buildings. There's even an actual corn farm right across the street from the school I work at.

Nang Jing Nan Jie

Nearby

I remember how city-fatigued I was when I landed in Reykjavik, back in 2015 (I cannot believe that was over three years ago!), but I just don't see that happening here. It's a city, for sure, with all the nice commodities of cities, but it's so spread-out and far-flung that it doesn't really feel like a city of 8 million people.

And then there are all the skyscrapers - they all look same!

There's a game called Hotels that my brother and I used to play, and it has all these hotel buildings you put on the game when you get enough money. All the buildings around here remind me so much of the buildings in that game.

Then... this is the view we get:

Chinese tap water is unsafe to drink, rather like water in most countries besides America (and the eastern half of America is debatable). So the solution is, of course, bottled water. But one practice that is very common is to have those office water dispensers in your home:

All I do is walk down to the nearest convenience store, point to one of the water tubs, and show them my apartment number. They deliver! This is a nice dispenser, too, by the way. The "hot" tab actually does have hot water. We've started making morning coffee without needing to boil any water.

Then, there's this picture:

I was surprised when I saw that. It looked like the birds we see in backyards in America! According to my father, that's a Eurasian siskin. (Back home, we have pine siskins, which are notoriously stupid birds. They're the ones always flying into our windows.)

And, this is where I stop for now. Don't worry, I have three more posts about Shenyang coming soon, and then I have even more fun stuff to talk about. But for now, I'm signing off, because I have to get back to work!