When the most controversial question is..."Do you prefer Noodles or Rice?"

Instant Nescafe in bed at about 5:30AM in Taiyuan, China. We had free breakfast coupons this morning so we navigated our way to the dining room. We had to weave our way through some sort of storage room to get there so I wasn’t sure what would greet us on the other side, but breakfast was heavenly. It was a combination of breakfast like food and leftovers from the night before. I’ve always known I am Asian by the fact that I would much rather have soup and leftovers for breakfast than American breakfast food. This was my jam! The waiter took a video of us and we obliged by posing.

Next up, walk to campus. There is something that is beautiful and exhilarating about walking down a side-street-bike-lane-something-or-other while cars, mopeds, motorcycles and people weave around you. Traffic in China is a sort of a choreographed ballet that never results in accidents or bloodshed, it seems. Apparently it is quite a feat to get a driver’s license there. It is quite evident.

The university was beautiful in it’s own way, but made me realize how nice it is to have doors on our bathrooms instead of curtains. The smell is quite memorable.

Sitting down with these sweet, inquisitive students and telling them about life in America was delightful, but exhausting. Speaking slowly and listening hard is a taxing job but so worth it.

A group of students took us out to lunch that day. I didn’t realize how tantalizing lunch would be. We walked around with a “waitress” as she wrote down what we wanted. There were about 100 dishes on display that we could choose from. Wow!

We sat down to this delicious meal and watched as someone performed a noodle making workshop. The province we were in is famous for it’s noodles and vinegar. The most controversial question to ask at the university was, “Do you prefer noodles or rice?”

That night we went to a bustling food street where we ate tons of stuff on skewers: meat, vegetables, etc. I crashed hard on my brick-like bed after a day full of difficult communication, new friends, top notch Chinese food, and deliberating the question, “Do you prefer Noodles or Rice?”