I came here with the expectation that I would have no idea what I was ordering in a restaurant. What I had not expected was how difficult it would sometimes be to order anything at all!
Here there are a lot of cheap eating places which are more like our idea of a canteen than a restaurant - the food is prepared and you can just point to what you want, be given a tray and take it to your table. A few times I have been out to eat on my own at one of these local canteen-style restaurants. You would think that it was possible to order food just by pointing and paying. But I have had several very frustrating experiences when the waitress has questions which I can't answer, and instead of making a recommendation as I have asked, she just stares and does nothing. Last time I was rescued by another waitress who came along to see what the problem was. "Oh, you want a fish dish, a vegetable dish and some rice. I'll bring you a fish dish, a vegetable dish and some rice." (Phew! Thank you!)
As you probably know, for Chinese meals everything is served at once. The soup is on the table with everything else. Sweet food is uncommon. I don't consider myself to have a particularly sweet tooth, but last week I did find myself craving some cake. Everything is cooked on the hob rather than in the oven. They have buns and bread but they are steamed rather than baked.
I have learned that in the "best" households, at the beginning of the meal you serve a drink with the food, and you only serve the rice when people are about half-way through their meal. You keep the cups filled with tea and you place the teapot so that the spout points away from the table.
Traditional breakfast is rice cooked in lots of water, like a cross between porridge and thick soup. I would say don't bother!
I have tried lots of different things while I'm here. I'm told that the food is quite different from what you get in a Cantonese restaurant in the UK, but not being a foodie, I'm afraid those kind of subtleties are lost on me. Chinese food is basically lots of communal dishes with individual bowls of rice. One dish which I do remember was lotus root, which was bright yellow and delicious. I have also had Beijing Duck and Beijing water dumplings, which were very nice. And I have eaten whole shrimps. People here don't find it particularly strange that I prefer not to eat meat; their meals are more vegetable-based than most European food anyway. So I have had a lot of fish and vegetables. Tofu-based dishes are also very common and a few of them have been nice enough to be worth eating. So far my stomach has not objected to the egg, which is good, because there has been quite a lot of that. As far as I know I've only eaten chicken eggs, but there are lots of other kinds available in the supermarkets.
At one family's house there were lots of appetizers before the meal. These included cubes of dried meat, pieces of dried tangerine which were the size and shape of glace cherries, dried plums, pistachio nuts and chocolates.
There are lots of fruit and vegetables which I don't recognise. And the shapes are also quite different from what we have. "Egg"-plants are common but they are either long and thin, more like cucumbers, or spherical. There is a variety of pear which is shaped exactly like an apple. And the peaches are huge - maybe 10cm in diameter. Lots of different kinds of melon and marrow are available, and a vegetable which looks like a corrugated cucumber.
Above is what I wrote while I was in Beijing. Here in Nanjing I'm with different people. We are eating at more expensive restaurants and my stomach plays up after each meal. I'm trying to work out strategies for getting what I need. Chinese people are convinced that there is a type of food that is the cure for every illness, and it's hard to make them believe that I know what my stomach will cope with better than they do.