J170 – 6/5/2006

It’s a gray day and the wind is favorable.

What coolness! With a high of 20° Celsius — we’re almost cold.

Serge always wears the same clothing: he just changed hats because the old one, which we wore when he crossed Africa, has completely lost its shape and no longer protects his nose from the sun.  Serge is a “saver,” as this hat shows.  He never wants to change his things, as if he were emotionally tied to his clothes.  Joking, he says he has the habits of an old man and old men shouldn’t be pushed.

Food in China:

(A subject brought up by Jean-Marie: What are you eating?  What food can you buy?)

Breakfast: Even if we are at a hotel, we prefer our standard breakfast of coffee, jams, honey, bread and muffins which were bought at the supermarket)

Lunch: It can be either a picnic of a bowl of Chinese noodles (you only have to add water), or if we find small restaurants we order take away.  We can eat very well for 1 to 2 Euros.  The food available varies as we go along: pork, lamb, beef is rare, noodles or rice, different soups of vegetables, meat or noodles.  Since Hami we find a vast selection of vegetables (aubergines (egg plants), carrots, leaks, potatoes, different kinds of cabbages, onions, tomatoes and cucumbers).  Fruit: bananas, apples, water melon, yellow melons, apricots and small peaches.

The evening: Either we eat leftovers from lunch or we prepare tomato and cucumber salad, rice or noodles, mashed potatoes with canned meat which we bought in Kirghistan and in China.

The main worry we have with Chinese food is hot spices.  Almost all foods are very spicy.  Luckily, as everything is prepared on the spot one has only to ask that none be used.  But sometimes in spite of that the dish is spicy.  More than once we have had a problem.  For Serge it’s a real worry because although he normally likes spicy food, he can’t eat it now because of his stomach, which is already in delicate shape because of the race.

China has a great variety of food and the further east we get the more we can see it.  Being good French, what we miss are baguettes, butter, cheese and good wine…