Won't be Starvin' in Harbin

Note: This post was written on August 29th, but I just now have internet access to post it.

First of all, I should inform you that if you comment/have commented on my blog posts, I won't be able to read the comments because I cannot access the blogger website from China. I do have access to my email, however, so feel free to contact me at jhg45@georgetown.edu or jarrett.gross@gmail.com.

As many of you know, one of the most important things to me in my everyday life is eating good food, hence my problem with Leo's. Fortunately, from my experience in Harbin so far, the food is wonderful…well most of it at least. In the thousands of years of Chinese history, they don't seem to have figured out breakfast yet. I can't say what I ate this morning at our hotel, but I can say that I didn't eat very much of it. It was a buffet of steamed cabbage, some type of cold noodles, and an extremely dense type of cold bread.

Aside from the breakfast at our hotel, however, the food has been quite good here. My best experiences have been at the small hole in the wall restaurants that I've tried with the other CET students in our first days here. As I mentioned earlier, the noodle place we went to on our first day here was great. The dish I ordered was really spicy; I knew that the last two characters in its name meant "spicy noodles," but I just found out today that the full name was "numbingly spicy noodles." The name was definitely fitting!

Today I discovered a coffee shop about two blocks from our hotel and Dorm 6 with free wireless internet. The coffee and espresso drinks are priced at American prices, but it's such a quaint little place that I see myself spending a lot of time there this year. I'm debating about not even getting internet access in my room and just using it there because the process involved in getting an internet connection in the dorm is incredibly complicated. Anyway, after the coffee shop, I had lunch with a few new friends at a bao place across from our hotel. The mushroom and pork baozi that I had were delicious. I never thought I would say this, but I think it's better than Wow Bao…no escalators with jumping water though.

For dinner today we went to a little restaurant that we had seen yesterday called "California Beef Noodle King" (spelled "Caifornia beef aoodle hing" or something like that under the Chinese characters). I wasn't too hungry, but once again the food was good, especially this dish with eggplant, potatoes, and peppers over rice. The one thing about the food here is that it is all rather similar. I'm hoping I don't get sick of it or it will be a long year.

My classes started yesterday, but I don't have time to write about them right now...I'll keep you posted.