Dinner for a Dollar

The Chinese spring semester ends this week.  All across the Qingdao University campus lots of people are moving out, going home, and trying to sell off their "gently" used goods.  In the international dorms, at least, some just aren't quite patient enough to sell their stuff and instead toss it in the trash. I don’t blame them- back home, if you want to dispose of a broken mini-fridge, shelving unit, or dirty stinky futon, you leave it near a dumpster or on the street and a well-organized team of garbage collectors will show up and magically make it go away.  In China, it seems like “organized” trash pick-up isn’t happening anytime soon. The past two days, this has been the view from the dorm’s front porch: 

 

 

Yes, a massive pile of trash. What’s even crazier about it, though, is the number of random Chinese people who have come out of the woodwork to rummage through it, looking for things they might be able to sell second-hand.  It was getting really intense. I saw a pair of old Chinese men literally screaming at each other over a broken set of suspenders, one guy grabbing each end. Another woman was holding a torn pair of pants up to herself, as if to see if the damage was reparable.

It makes me wonder just how many kuai (the Chinese dollar) someone might be able to fetch for a broken item of clothing or a damaged Ethernet cable.  Apparently, just enough to make rummaging through foreign students’ month-old instant noodles, used hygiene products and moldy bedding somehow worth it.  I guess if you live in a place like the one below (right next to our dorm) and need the money that badly, dealing with bad smells today might mean that your kids will have the luxury eggs for breakfast tomorrow.

So where do that ridiculously hard-earned pennies go?  In America, $1 US can maybe buy a gumball, some dollar store toothpaste, or if you're really lucky, a candy bar or two.

In China, however, one's American money goes a whole lot further. One dollar (6.5 RMB, or yuan) will buy you a whole meal: a banana (1.5 yuan), spicy won ton soup (3 yuan), and a bag of greasy egg pancakes (2 yuan). Soup’s on!

**Note: If you do end up in China, PLEASE don’t actually eat this kind of street food. My stomach did not appreciate the “grease cakes” or “spicy won ton” at ALL

On another random note, this week our professor Dr. Wang became quite distressed about the news that the food in China is upsetting some of her students’ stomachs.   To remedy the situation, she promised to bring us a “natural” remedy for the la duzi (or diarrhea) epidemic plaguing the Chinese flagship this year. Clearly the idea that we're setting ourselves up for illness, by eating meals akin to the one pictured above, didn't cross her mind.What, you might ask, was this amazing remedy? Nothing less than straight-up bulbs of garlic.

We were all a bit surprised, but Wang didn’t seem a bit fazed by our dumbfounded faces.  She proceeded to pass out entire bulbs of garlic to each one of us and show us the “proper” way to peel off the papery skin. Then, she grabbed a whole clove of garlic, by now lending its wondrous odor to the rest of the room, and popped it into her mouth uncooked. “It’s stronger if uncooked,” she explained. “Garlic is pretty spicy though, so girls should only eat one or two cloves at a time. The young men can probably handle more.”  For whatever reason, whether curiosity, hatred of vampires, or merely sheer desperation to remedy our digestive tracts, almost all of us followed Wang’s lead and munched on some surprisingly spicy raw garlic. I don’t know if it was the garlic (or, much more likely, the Pepto I consumed along with it), but so far my digestive system seems to be doing pretty darn well. I’m sure you appreciate the update on the state of my intestines.  However, one more thing that I can guarantee is that one classroom on the second floor of the Min Xing building is probably smelling quite nice by now. No vampires on campus now, for sure.