Going on the fourth day in China, I have to admit that people are right: Chinese food in China is nothing like Chinese food in America - even the supposedly authentic places like the ones up in the San Gabriel Valley.  This may have more to do with the regional differences in immigrants' origins than with a generalization about a giant country gleaned from experience with the old imperial capital only, but I'm going to go with the generalization here for the sake of making a point.

Sometimes the difference is a good thing - the noodles are a billion times better and fresher here.  My noodles yesterday were hand-tossed from a pile of dough three feet from my table before being tossed in the wok and fried up with some pork, mushrooms, and red sauce.  The omnipresent mutton skewers and their curious cumin rub are all but absent in the US so far as I know, apart from a mere shadow at Feng Mao Mutton Kebab in LA.  The yogurt here is outrageously tangy and delicious, sold out of stalls in the heat, but somehow not spoiled, straws puncturing the foil tops of their bottles.  

Sometimes it's not so good.  The baoze here have been disappointing - bitter bread and a droopy filling of sad boiled vegetables.  Tales of exotic fruits have proven to be inaccurate, as mushy apricots and rock hard kiwis have been the norm.  There is a mystery vegetable that the cooks in the Muslim Quarter of Xi'an put in just about everything - pancakes, buns, soups - that numbs the sides of your tongue, up and down, and is very disconcerting.

In both Korea and China, I've had much more luck with street food than with restaurants, possibly because my preferred method of dining is grazing.  I'd much rather wander through a market popping fried quail eggs off the stick in my right hand while gnawing on the carrot-sesame pastry in the other than sit down in a restaurant and try to finish an entire bowl of mutton and wheat noodles in broth with absolutely no help from my stubbornly vegetarian companion.  Food trucks in the US do nothing to compare to that grazing experience.  The Taste of Chicago comes closer if you ignore the overpricedness of it all.

I am now in Xi'an, China, after a series of both extremely unlucky and lucky events at various Chinese airports, opposing but equally dramatic.  Suffice it to say that telling passengers to retrieve their baggage from a baggage check, go through customs and immigration, re-check in for a new flight, and go through security again during an hour layover is not really feasible.  To successfully complete this task required some cajoling in Mandarin and an all-out sprint through the terminal, in addition to the wholesale ignoring of the long security line.  Basically, had anything - an untied shoelace, a line at the toilet, the security guy choosing to scold me for the full bottle of water in my carry-on rather than just shaking an admonishing finger - gone wrong, we would still be in Dalian right now.  I mean, lots of things DID go wrong.  I just mean, anything in addition to the things that already went wrong.  Like the fact that the 'Transfers' sign at the airport pointed down a dark deserted dead-end hallway with a piece of paper taped over it saying 'CLOSED'.  Or the fact that the 'Departures' sign at the airport pointed out onto the highway.

But my reward for all the airport sprinting and sign-ignoring was worth it.  Julian's choice of shady airport cab actually got us home.  (There was a line of identical official-looking green cabs and he went straight for the seedy black car, of course.)  And in Xi'an there were the most delicious mutton skewers I've ever had the pleasure of closing my teeth upon, and some deep-fried winter melon with some delicious and hotly garlicky spices piled on top.  Also, mangosteen on the street!

It's really hot here (it was really hot in Korea too, but the bad air in China makes it more palpable) and I am loving every sweaty droplet of it.  Cold fruit juice and smoking street food on a steaming hot day is what my body begs me for (for no evolutionarily sensical reason at all).  People shuffle languidly by with parasols, fanning themselves, being less physically pushy than usual just to avoid brushing body heat.  They cluster under the sparse trees and the more widespread bank awnings.  Even the hawkers don't get off their shaded benches to yell at you that their buns cost less than their competitors' buns.  The A/C here gives a lukewarm breeze and not much more.

It's a completely different headspace moving from traveling in a country where neither me nor my companion knows the language and bumble through gestures and confusion together, to traveling in a country where I don't know the language, and would certainly be bumbling if not for my utter reliance on him.   I actually know much less Chinese than I do Korean - Chinese sounds like complete nonsense peppered with the occasional xiexie (thank you) and that's it.  Whenever something puzzles me (which is always), I just summon his aid and the befuddlement evaporates.  I even summon him preemptively now.  It's certainly more comfortable, but much less of an exciting challenge.  I feel like I'm one step removed from everybody we see.