After a kind of busy weekend, here comes Monday. After a morning working at the lab on my project, which is going well for now, I took my lunch break outside eating in a "normal restaurant".
By “normal restaurant", let me explain the kind of restaurant you can in China.
- Self service little restaurant : In this kind of restaurant, there is a person in front of it giving you a plastic box for you to fill with the food you'll find in the shop (or on the side-walk). There is plenty of kind of vegetables or spring roll or tofu, but no meat. Once you filled your box, you go to the cashier and the weight of your box will determine the price you pay, it's usually around 19 Yuans for one kilo, after you paid, you have also the same plastic box full of rice in addition to the dishes you choose before. In this restaurant, the food is exposed at the direct air of street and everyone pic his food in a joyful messy crowd. Maybe your stomach won't appreciate...
- Little restaurant : In this little restaurant, you have a big choice of dishes, usually between noodles or rice based dishes, and served in a single plate or bowl if you take noddles with soup. It's a single plate, with the rice/noodle, vegetables and very tiny pieces of meet. You can eat there for minimum 5 yuans, or most of the time 7 or 8 yuans. It's cheap because the quantity of meat you have is really, tiny tiny tiny. Same than for the previous description, your stomach may not like this kind of food. I think than health rules are more than basic in this kind of restaurant, but the dishes are tasty.
- Normal restaurant : A set of crockery wrapped in a plastic bag to tell you your dishes has been clean : a glass, a bowl, a plate and chopsticks. You have a menu and the waiter come at your table to take your order or you can write your order by yourself and simply give him the note. You can separately order dishes, like a plate of vegetables, a plate of fish, meat or a big bowl of soup. When you order the dishes, it takes a really short time to be ready (not like in France) and the waiter also brings you a big bowl of rice, to eat with the dishes you ordered. The "usual" typical order is like one dish for one person, and everyone takes what he/she wants on the table. The rice in China is not really considered as a dish, but only something to be eaten with the dishes. The price for a dish with meat is around 14 or 18 Yuan, but that's really meat and in a very satisfying quantity. For two people, count around 40 yuan for a meal.
- Fancy restaurant : It's the same than a normal one, except the decoration, you can also have a separate room if you are more than 6 to eat, with your own air conditioner, toilets and tea table. There is also almost all the time a waiter in the room serving the dishes or preparing tea. The quality is superior and so are the prices. Count around 400/500 yuan for 6 people.
So my preference goes to the normal restaurant, first because it's very tasty in most of this kind of restaurant, you have enough to eat (whereas a single plate of rice and vegetables will often let you starve some hours after), you can eat meat, and it's "stomach compliant".
Once returned to my lab after a one hour break, I begin to keep working on my bash script, using vim to insert none printable ASCI characters for doing a spinner which will be displayed while the background task will be done, anyway, doing my job peacefully, when a student in my row go back to seat on his desk. My computer is shut down, power off. Yes, the outlet for electricity is placed on the ground, on a little metallic hatch, and the outlet is kind of not very stable, so my nice lab-mate walked on it or touched it and powered off my computer and the router for the left side of the lab, congratulations !
Yes, the lab is a mess, hubs on the ground, RJ45 wires running everywhere, 2 multi-plug outlets pluged in a row, kind of never seen, but working, but very sensible to any bad move made by a chair or an awkward foot.
After leaving my lab and passing by the local supermarket to buy some fruits and ice creams, I went to run on the stadium I have just at the feet of my building. It belongs to a college, not Wuhan University of Technology, but another one.
Let's talk a little about sport now : In China, in the college campus, what strikes the most is to see the number of basket ball fields and to see all those students playing all day long. It's also funny to see a lot of students, or middle age or old people walking or walking quickly around the stadium, chatting together. Before coming to Wuhan, I feared that because of the pollution I won't be able to do intensive exercise but in fact I can run as well as in France, and I don't have any particular breathing problem due to the not clear air.
Today I met a Chinese student from the university who was also running and we chatted quickly while running. And during a little break I took before two running sessions, and since my tender half wasn't running with me, I was boarded by a student whose English was not clear and mixed up with Chinese, she seemed kind of confuse so I returned to run, I'm not an easy man !