What do you do when you’re at a restaurant and your meal comes and every single piece of it is raw? Simple, you take several pieces and put them into the small pot of boiling water beside your plate and leave it there for at least 3 minutes. When you’re through with this, you eat it! Thus you have just experienced that “Hot Pot Meal!� This is one the meals we experienced while in Xi’an. Before China, I never would have even thought that such a meal would be served at a restaurant. In the US, it would probably be considered unsanitary, while as here, it’s truly a unique experience. When I heard about the hot pot meal in practice and the experience several UMM students had last year, it made me a little nervous, especially when it would come to determining when my meat was fully cooked, thus coming into the meal I was bound and determined to only have veggies in my hot pot lunch. Now, having experienced this type of meal, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked creating my own dipping sauce mixture, trying new combinations of food and the fact that it was hard to eat too much as I was forced to wait at least 3 minutes between the very small servings that I was able to fit into my hot pot. It think that the whole idea is rather unique and I am definitely glad that I was able to have another new culture experience that was good!

Posted by Laura Smith at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alicia looks like a pro at her first meal!!! There are no forks allowed until we return!

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Savannah and Lauren had the opportunity to learn the art of making authentic Chinese pork dumplings. We had many chances to hang out with children and learned a lot about Chinese culture from them. Oh, and the dumplings are amazing!

(You can click on the photo to view/download a full-sized version.)

Posted by Daniel Moore at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)