As some of you may know, one of the main reasons I moved to China is to eat Chinese food. Of my thousands of loyal readers many of you have been writing to me asking me to report on food and "booze" (Jewitt). Now, this is something I definitely want to do, but it's been overwhelming so far. The news is good though for those of you thinking about traveling here. Pretty much everything you want to eat (hot spicy Chinese food), need to eat (vegetarian) or love to hate to eat (Hooters, TGI Fraday's, Pizza Hut, KFC..) exists in some way if you're willing to pay for it. You can expect to pay a little less than NYC prices for western food mainly because there is no tipping. Chinese food, however, can also be quite expensive or incredibly cheap depending on where you go and what you eat. So far, nearly all of the Chinese food is new and unique to me. First of all, a lot of of the vegetables that you really can't get, or have never seen in the US fill entire walls in grocery stores here as well as multiple pages of menus. Also, the Chinese eat parts of animals that would make most westerners cringe. But, you don't have to eat those things if you don't want to. Secondly, Chinese food in America is mainly influenced by Cantonese Chinese folk (Southern China), the main group of Chinese immigrants. Now, in urban Chinatowns across the US I'm sure the Cantonese style food is pretty authentic, but outside of there we're talking about American Chinese food which is basically the equivalent of cheap fast food with very little resemblance to a real Chinese dish. Even in NYC we could never find Northern Chinese restaurants. So, if you managed to get through my little rant, this is why I was excited about moving here to eat. Last night we rode our bikes to a little spot that Luhan used to frequent during her college days. The place is known for crawfish, crayfish, or crawdads....whatever your preferred dialect may be. They come in heaping portions because you can really only eat the tail after you break it open and the rest just gets piled up. They we're damn spicy and I think they were cooked with garlic cloves, chiles, and some sort of seasoning salt. Also, we had another more traditional northern Chinese soup called Suan Cai Bai Rou which tasted a lot like a Korean soup with sour cabbage, white pork, and clear noodles. Something else I enjoyed is called Ya Gan which is duck liver. Fried rice and another Beijing style tomato based soup was also included.