Baguette comes from France
Last week I had the opportunity to enjoy a good diet. Plane bread. Crackers. A lot of water, just warm, not hot nor cold. Plain rice with rice and sprinkled with some more rice. As I was suffering with gastroenteritis. Lovely little intestine issue that arisen probably from poorly grilled shaokao one evening.
I think I know exactly how it happened. George called me out for a beer, he had a new camera to show me…well any occasion is good to have a beer, right? So I agreed and we went to local bar called 26LOFT bar. Had a couple of beers. (30RMB for Heineken is actually pretty good price.) And eventually ended up on the streets of Nanping chasing…food.First things first, right. We passed the 24/7 KFC service and headed on the opposite side of the street to a BBQ stalls. I never saw those stalls there in winter and was seriously surprised by that. Besides, once in china, lets have a local cuisine!
Turned out to be a bad decision and one undercooked “meet on the stick” ruined my next few days. BADLY.
Nevertheless, after I was done with absolute fasting for 2 days I had to go out and buy something simple bland and plain to eat and get my stomach to work again. I went to wall-mart ready to buy crackers as advised. After having the crackers in my basket i drifted to the pastry part. And if I write pastry I mean pastry. Chinese don’t know plain and salty baked goods and there is no demand for it so the baked goods part even in wallmart in here contains mainly pastry and all forms of more or less sweet baked products.
But today I was lucky and found a “Holy grail” among all the “taste the same” pastry goods. A one meter long baguette. Standing there still in a basket, along with two of her sisters. I made her mine immediately. Even took two of them..but…eventually divorced the other one since not even in china polygamy is allowed 😛
While the baguette was too big to fit in my bag I took it as it was. Wrapped in semi-transparent paper. Grabbing it in my arm like a long pastry baton.
I am telling you. If you want to come to China to compensate for any lack of attention or you have simply NPD you will do better to to dress like a baguette 😀 It is more appealing to people than a pale, big nose foreigner.
As the weather was great and really nice, many people were out and it was the first time I walked on street and actually felt not challenged by people’s stares. Anytime they looked at me, it was not at me, it was at my baguette 🙂 I thought to myself: “I will have to buy one just to carry it around with me and avoid all the uncomfortable gazes.” The best Asian stare deflector ever.