Pita and the PSB

Let's continue to talk about food. It's been quite busy here, so I haven't had a lot of time or motivation to undertake any major touristy or sight-seeing type of activity. What I have had time and inclination to do is check out a variety of recommended restaurants. Truly, one of the best parts of city living is the wide variety of food available. In my neighborhood alone, for foreign cuisine there is a delicious Turkish restaurant, an Indonesian place, and a new Indian restaurant, and those are just the ones I've tried. For Chinese food, there's a good Xinjiang place, a yummy baozi stand, and a little counter that makes a baked, filled pastry called a bing. It's kind of like a little meat pie. Or peanut pie, or spicy vegetables, or bean, or a half dozen more varieties whose names I do not recognize. My favorite is the beef and onion for savory, and the peanut for sweet. There's a place directly next to it that makes a killer mango smoothie, too. A mango smoothie and two beef and onion bing runs me 14 kuai. At the baozi stand, I can get red-bean stuffed steamed buns, or the unstuffed variety flavored with scallions. I can also get a flat bread that has a scrambled egg fried to it, or a half kg of scallion pancake. All of these range from 1 - 4 kuai. The Xinjiang place [that would be Chinese Muslim cuisine, fyi] has the advantage of delivering to work at lunch time. They make the flat shaved noodles that I first ever tried in Xi'an, and also delightfully garlicky dumplings. The dumplings are 25 for 8 kuai. The noodles are 12.

Foreign restaurants tend to be a heck of a lot pricier, but sometimes, you just really want some variety. I would say, sometimes you just want something familiar, but I haven't quite found a Maine diner on the corner of Dong Feng street yet. I have found these, though, and I can happily report they taste exactly the same as they do in the USA:

Ikea Swedish Meatballs: 15 kuai. Eating Swedish Meatballs in Guangzhou: Priceless

Today was my day off, so my flatmate and I went to a Mexican restaurant about which coworkers had raved. I have to say, the raving was deserved. I had a chicken quesadilla with sour cream and homemade salsa. The chicken was smoky with chipotle and the gooey cheese was something like Monteray Jack. Oh, so good. My flatmate had a vegan bean burrito with roasted veggies and was wicked happy with it. It made me cringe to pay 60 kuai for lunch, but really, that's only about 9 USD, so I truly can't complain too much. As we left, I overhead a party just sitting down conversing in Spanish. Mexican so good, even the Spanish-speakers of GZ eat there.

Now, you may be wondering about the title of this post, so let me finish off with a story. Now, Saturday and Sunday are the busiest days of our work week, when we are at work from 8:30-6:30, and teach three 2-hour classes each day. Sunday night, we got off work and decided we really didn't have it in us to make dinner. I had told my flatmate about the middle eastern Shawarma place I'd been to the week before, and we decided to go out for some falafel [because falafel makes everything feel better]. It was about 7pm and dark when we arrived in the neighborhood. The restaurant is two subway stops away, in Taojin. Now, Taojin has a higher concentration of foreigners than anywhere else I've been in Guangzhou, though I don't have the foggiest idea why. Anyway, it's also where we ran into the PSB version of a speed trap. Two things you might like to know: the PSB is the Public Safety Bureau, and in China, not carrying your passport gets you a 50 kuai fine.
So, here we are, on a quest for delicious falafel, and we get stopped by a gaggle of cops about a block away from our goal. They ask us for our passports [in Mandarin Chinese, which, by the way, my flatmate speaks not at all]. I produce mine, but my flatmate only has a photocopy. This earns us a trip around the corner to the local PSB station. As we arrive, I see a group of foreigners leaving. In the station, there are about 6 or 7 foreigners waiting around. We follow our officer in, and he asks us [and by us, I mean me, because this is all still in Chinese] if there is anyone who can bring us my flatmate's passport. Well, no, there isn't, since we're both here and we hadn't gotten around to giving anyone a spare key to our apartment [in our defense, we just had the lock replaced on Saturday]. Our officer seems surprised, but settles for asking if she knows her passport number. She does, since she has a photocopy to reference, and they go to look her up in the computer system [thank goodness we are law-abiding foreigners and are registered with the police in our district]. They confirm her identity, write her out a pass, and collect the 50 kuai fine. It all takes about 10 minutes, and we're free to go. As we leave, there are more foreigners being escorted in. Honestly, I think they accost every foreigner they see. Maybe they've got a quota to fulfill?

We continued on our way, got our delicious falafel in homemade pita bread [yummy yummy yummy], and returned to our apartment without further incident. My flatmate seemed very surprised by the whole incident, and while I can understand why, part of me is really not surprised at all. China, despite all it's cosmopolitanism, all it's private ownership and rampant, gleeful consumerism, is still a communist country. Why shouldn't the authorities stop us and demand to see our papers?

But, that is too dark a note on which to end, so I shall leave you with this picture from my walk today. This is a little garden along the canal that runs behind the hospital outside my window. The garden immediately lifted my spirits, as the swiftly flowing current carried the scent of warm, wet mud. Ah, but the thing I miss most about rural living is the smell of nature. But I suppose, for a year, I can settle for the smell of fresh baked pita and steaming hot dumplings.