Eating healthy in Chinese

Wow!  What a full three days!  Internet is a bit unusual here in Tibet so I will just do a quick post but keep your eyes out for a full day-by-day play-by-play coming soon.

I had one of those mini travel breakdowns this afternoon.  Unfortunately, for me these mini breakdowns are just another reality of living out of a backpack and out of my element for an extended period of time.  It was nothing and everything that triggered it.  I was hungry and frustrated at the difficultly of finding healthy food.  I was tired because despite having a comfortable bed last night and feeling really wiped out, I wasn’t able to sleep all night.  I was frustrated because we kept getting mixed stories about the availablity of internet.  And I snapped.  Tate suggested I go for a run to relieve some stress and I shot back “I can’t run, I didn’t sleep last night and I am hungry and we are at 12,000 feet above sea level!”.

If you know what’s good for you, do it.  I bought some bananas, ate banana with muesli and peanuts, napped, and went for a run.  And now I feel much better.  The run was a really tough, mostly the altitude but also only running once in 5 weeks made it challenging.  I took it easy, running 2 minutes and walking 1 for 30 minutes.  The stares were intense in this high altitude, poor, Tibetan city but I just smiled and kept on plugging along.

My Chinese is improving everyday, I now recognise the characters for woman (as in which toilet to go into) and tofu and know the words for hello, water, and thank you.  It’s so hard!  There are a few ladies from Singapore in our group and they are going to write down the very useful phrases “I don’t eat chicken, pork, or beef” and “less oil, less salt” for me so I can show it to the waiters.  So far we have been eating at restuarants with menus in English but I think they will be harder to find once we leave the comfort of a tour and are on our own in mainland China.

I plan on sleeping better tonight and getting up for a run before a 9:30am departure to the next town.  Our tour is “B&B”, leaving us on our own for lunch and dinner.  Breakfast this morning was very, umm, interesting.  Two pound cake things, a hard boiled egg in the shell, a big white roll, two mini slices of tomato, two mini slices cucumber, and a small pile of peanuts.  I’ll get a photo tomorrow morning.  They didn’t have coffee and I have been very into the coffee lately, even though it’s almost always of the instant vartiety.  Tate went next store and got a little packet that ended up having creamer and sugar already mixed in.  I had a small cup but was bummed to break my sugar plan on the 3rd day of the month!  We found a jar of plain instant for tomorrow.  Oh the joys of travel.