Food, Taxis, and Bartering

I just went to a cooking class so today seems to be a good day to explain a little bit about Chinese food. Today, we made jiaozi. Jiaozi and baozi are very popular here and are basically dumplings with chopped meat or vegetables. Delicious! I have been eating a lot of rice and noodles, but have also tried some very strange foods. They have a lot of green vegetables, all kinds of meat (most of it with the bones still in), and not a lot of sweets. Sweet bean paste is kind of like their chocolate and we have had watermelon every day for dessert in our dining hall. I would also just like to point out that health and restaurant standards here are much lower than in the US, and I now see why Chinese restaurants in America are the way they are. That's what they are used to!

I will now share some "food highlights". At the Lan Club we had stinkhorn (see picture), which is basically a very stinky white fungus with a strange texture that is considered a delicacy in China. As you can see, we only got a very small piece at the best restaurant in Beijing. Look it up on Wikipedia. Along the way we also had duck tongue, chicken feet soup, Peking Duck, caramelized pineapple kabobs, seeing live scorpions and dead seahorses on a stick (but not eating them), waxberries, snail meat, cow liver, bamboo shoots, aloe, red rooster, and fish head soup. Someone here ate dog, but I was not with them. A lot of the meat comes out with body, eyes, tails attached (mostly the fish).

I asked my roommate about taxis in Beijing. Gas here is about 3 yuan/pint, so if I did the math correctly, it comes out to about $3.20/gallon. Pretty expensive, especially in China. However, my cab fares for a 15 minute ride or so are always about 15-20 kuai. Split between four people, 4 kuai to get to another part of the city is pretty cheap. I asked her how the cabs can be so cheap when gas is so expensive. She said that her dad is actually a cab driver in Beijing! How interesting. Apparently, only Beijing residents can be employed as a cab driver in Beijing. The government regulates how many cabs can operate in the city at one time (much like the US I think), but, unlike the US, the government pays the cab companies money to basically subsidize the cab fares and keep them low for the citizens. I don't really know much about the taxi industry, but I found this interesting. The government at work!

Vocab words of the day:
Taxi - 出租汽车 chu1 zu1 qi4 che1
Watermelon - 西瓜 xi1 gua1

Bartering tip 101 (from tourist books and my roommate):

Point out every flaw possible in the product.

It's ok to say "too expensive!" "this is sort of ugly!" "the writing is hard to see and poorly written!" "I found a bigger one for cheaper elsewhere!" Don't feel bad. You don't don't do this everyday...they do. You aren't offending the vendors and they're probably already making a huge profit on their "special price just for you." So try going lower. They will ALWAYS say "this is one of a kind," "special price just for you," "I'll give you a good price for 2," etc. Vendors will make you feel like you are cheating them out of a good price for a good product. I say, don't "buy" that! Haha. In fact, don't buy it, walk away, hear the vendor call you back, and see the magic of bartering in action...