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Yunnan Province; China

Mar
2004-09-14 15:37:29

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Daily dishes

Yesterday afternoon we bought 3 litres of water and our breakfast for this morning. It is 06:30 and still dark outside, with the ‘noise’ of loud roosters we open the first plastic package. An oily white piece of fabric bread and we add our own honey we bought in Kunming The second package contains another cheap piece of bread, after our first bite our mouths are full with very sweat whip cream. The last bit of our breakfast is a package of cookies. They make a lot of noise while eating and don’t fill our stomachs at all, but at least the white drops on the top leave a sweet taste. We flush our breakfast with water. Today we are lucky, sometimes we have only plain biscuits to start the day with. ‘A snack every two hours’ is what we have learned in the last couple of months. If you do not keep on feeding your stomach you will get the empty-feeling (‘bamboo legs’) just after 2 to 3 hours cycling. Snacks are alike breakfast. We have a great choice of plain biscuits: biscuits with cream, made of rice or grain, (grandmothers)cake, popped rice with honey in a plastic package, cake with a thick layer of sugar paste inside, or peanuts in sugar provide a lot of energy. Can you imagine we long for lunch at this time. A noodle soup is not so heavy and thus perfect for us. We have seen a wide variety in noodle soups but the one we have today is, let’s say, quite poor. I can count three pieces of spring onion, if I really search hard I can find two mushrooms (or two halves?), and for the other part of the noodle soup it is just water and noodles with a dark read colour of the chopped chilli.

In China almost every corner has a small restaurant for dinner. Raymond throws the phrasebook at me and I search for the ‘food’ pages. ‘Beef?’, I ask as I point to the Chinese translation. The lady gives me a very long answer in Chinese, she could be saying something like ‘beef is available ...