The Canteen Scene

On Peking University's campus, there are a seemingly infinite number of places to get food. They are divided into canteens and restaurants. The canteens are where most students eat. At canteens, you get your food either by ordering from a counter or by picking plates of food from a line, e.g. cafeteria-style. A meal at a canteen is about 5-8 yuan (approx. $1) and must be paid for with a university meal card (you get issued a card and can add money to it as needed). Restaurants have somewhat better food and there are servers who take your order and bring food to the table. The cost of a meal at a restaurant varies, but generally runs about 30-40 yuan (approx. $5) per person.

The variety of canteens is amazing. One of my favorites is the noodle canteen. At this canteen, you can get a huge variety of noodles... noodles in soup, fried noodles, rice noodles, soybean noodles, flour noodles, fat noodles, thin noodles, noodles with beef, noodles with pork, etc. See photos of the noodle canteen and the menu. The funny thing about the noodle canteen is that the menu has Chinese characters and English, but it doesn't have pinyin (which provides the pronunciation of the Chinese characters for us English speakers). So, I can figure out what kind of noodles I'd like, but I can't order them directly. To make matters more interesting, you can't order any noodle dish from any line. You have to know which lines are serving which noodle dishes, but this is only in Chinese characters. To survive the noodle canteen I've devised a strategy where I stand in any line and listen to what the 2-3 people ahead of me order. I then look at what noodle dish they walk away with and, if it looks good, I order it by saying what they said. So far, I've had some pretty good noodles!

The dumpling canteen next door also looks pretty good. I haven't tried it yet though. Around the corner is a canteen that service regional food from all over China. That's still on my "to do" list too.

Today, I tried the mega-canteen. This is a huge canteen that takes up the bottom floor of one of the buildings on campus (see photo). Food is served cafeteria-style (see photo). I particularly like the baskets with buns, filled and not filled, of various shapes and sizes (see photo). The food? Well, let's just say I won't rush back to this one. I think I had spam for lunch. The sauce was tasty, but even a good sauce can't make spam palatable.