(Guiyang, Guizhou 1986-90) The most effective way to make friends in Guiyang was, without a shadow of a doubt, by eating out. The choice was modest—either the students’ cafeteria or the snackbar alley! My routine was to spend dinners with students in the cafeteria.Everyone toted a metal bowl and utensils. The mess hall was an enormous airline-hanger-like structure, inside of which every kind of food imaginable was displayed in rectangular tin pans that were spread out on twenty to thirty tables. The cost per portion averaged from twenty to thirty cents.
Students squatted on the wall outside the hall and tossed out unwanted surprises (i.e., worms, stones, chips of coal, rancid meat, and UFO’s—‘unidentified fried objects’). These were all flung to the goldfish in the pond or to the local yokels who hung out at meal times: piggies, chickens, cats, dogs, and a friendly flock of fifty or so geese.Photos Copyright Men's Fashion by Francesco.
