Seaside Dining

The other night I went with some colleagues from the Foreign Langauge department to a seaside restaurant a couple of miles down the highway from the campus.

It was dusk when we arrived, I grabbed some quick shots just to show our proximity to the ocean. That's Professor Liu -- the friend of Ling and C***o's who's here from the main campus in Jilin for the semester -- on the right, with Professor Sun pouring him tea.

There were two other foreign instructors at the table besides me: The woman is from Japan, and the man from Korea (I was never formally introduced or told either of their names; at the end of the meal I exchanged business cards with the man and learned he was Hyoung Su Park of Korea University). Both of them speak fluent Mandarin, which made me feel even stupider than I usually do here.

The meal, as you'd expect, was virtually all seafood, although the platters in the foreground are a wonderful tofu dish with a sweetish sauce, and drunken chicken. That's a whole steamed fish on the left, squid with peppers in the center, and the ubitquitous scoop-'em-up shrimp on the right. We also had an oyster dish, some sort of undersea snails in a spicy sauce, crab, and a few veggies.

Ling always says I take too many photos of food in China; but as I told Hilary in an e-mail this morning, that's like saying I take too many pics of beaches and palm trees when we go to Hawaii.