Taste Buds

At the cafeteria here, we have an “All-you-can-eat” plan (Viva America). You check-in when you enter the building and you are free to eat as much as you want (don’t even get me started on how much control we must have to avoid becoming elephants). And there is almost everything. A huge salad bar, burgers, “plat du jour”, healthy sandwiches, fried chicken nuggets, pizza slices, soups, omelets, cereal, cookies, coffee, smooties and so many other things. It is IMPOSSIBLE not to find at least one thing you like.

And yet, the chinese of our class say they are not big fans of the cafeteria.At first, we thought: “Hooow?”, and then it made me think- When we were in china, we would complain about the cafeteria all the time, there were around 8 chinese “kitchens” from which we could order food, and we still had a lot of trouble finding a dish that was familiar, to our taste and that we liked- they almost all seemed similar to us, and hence, not very good.

So now, when we see a huge line of our chinese classmates when there is rice in the day menu, we get it. When my chinese flatmate tells me “I miss vegetables- I wish I could eat the ones in the salad bar but they are raw”, I completely understand her. Weird? yeah well, just a bit. for us. 🙂

So as challenging as China was, it really made us truly understand how different even our minuscule taste buds are.

I love that drawing- which takes the above subject to a much higher level- but the concept is the same.

🙂

M