Lunch with Students

This week, every day after class, we are eating lunch with a small group of students, so they can all have an English speaking lunch. We're eating at the student cafeteria, which is a high ceilinginged space with two levels of seating. You can sit eight people at a table, so with Sarah, James and me, there is room for 5 students, which means it is taking all week to eat with the whole class. The students find James's use of chopsticks very entertaining.

As all of my students are from areas outside Nanjing, and the regional cuisine varies quite widely across the country, the cafeteria makes an effort to provide selections familiar to all of its students. This diversity makes for a very wide variety of choices for a university cafeteria. The first day I was there, there were probably fifty selections

The students know some words to describe foods in English, but frankly, I did not expect the diversity and excellence of food here. It's like France. It's amazing. Today I had rice, greens, and tofu that had been flattened, rolled, sliced into pinwheels and then sauteed in spices. The food is fresh and flavorful. Outside of the Italian galley we used to eat at when I was stationed at a NATO base in Italy, it's the best institutional food I've ever had.