Lunch Hour

We, Me, Ken Dave, Steve, and sometimes Teddy and Amy, been having lunch at the North Cafeteria every Tuesday for a while now. In one sense it's a testament to just how much free time we all have that we can sit around for two plus hours just eating lunch and talking. I have essentially nothing better to do during this time then sit and have a long lunch, and this is on one of the days when I actually have classes. I still can't get over just how well I'm being treated in China for having essentially no skills and doing almost no work. This is by far the oddest part of living in China that I just get huge benefits for no real reason. I've dissected before why exactly this happens, I think it has mostly to do with foreigners still being so rare, but that's not really what I wanted to talk about. Last semester I didn't go to the cafeteria much but recently I've been liking it more and more. They have a pretty wide variety of dishes, I been eating a lot of this pork and onion dish, and it's very convenient. Even when I can't tell if the name of the dish they are calling is for me they tend to point to me since I'm one of the only foreigners. The students eat at a fairly amazing rate. They come in put their bags down at a table, which since they're not yet sitting their eating can cause something of a space problem. They then order, wait for their food, and eat all in about 20 minutes. We often get started at about 12:10 and by 12:30 most of the place is empty. Dinner at the cafeteria is a little more spread out but it's still petty confined. The cafeteria actually has two parts one lower floor is more like what you would think of as a traditional cafeteria where you pretty much just point to food and put it on a tray. The upper floor, where we eat, has a bunch of little restaurants in it which each have slightly different food. The quality on the second floor is pretty good all things considered. In a rare move towards conservation I think most of the food waste is taken to be animal feed. The students have a habit of picking out what they don't like in their food and setting it on the table next to them, so you can see that one student didn't like onions since there will be a little pile of onions left on the table, why they couldn't order the dish without onions is a question for another day.