Safe Snacks for Foreigners

Clockwise from the top: Lay's Potato chips, "Crispy roasted pork flavor"; Ritz crackers with a lemon filling (thumbs up from students); Orion Pie (the Little Debbies of China), also thumbs up; dried kiwi fruit (good but too sugary); Middle - some kind of fruit cocktail suspended in jello, as yet untried.


It's lots of fun to try new snacks when you travel, and China is no exception. The convenience store in our dorm is open 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. - a real 7-11. They do have some 7-11's in China, by the way, in addition to a zillion small convenience stores. Not to mention KFC, McDonalds, and Pizza Hut, all quite popular. Our convenience store caters to the foreign students like us, so it includes snacks that appeal to American, European, Japanese, and Korean students, but often with a twist. There are small packs of Oreos (who knew?) and a Skippy peanut butter that is striped with chocolate, various kinds of Ritz crackers, Barilla and Delmonte spaghetti sauce, cans of Mr. Brown cappucino, plastic bottles of Sunkist grapefruit soda, and all kinds of crackers, chips and chiplike items. One item tastes like Pringles flavored with octopus. We are all finding our favorites. Unfortunately for my weight loss ideas there are really great mocha chocolate Dove candy bars with almonds and another kind with hazelnuts. One kind of mini-ice cream snack many of the students like is a Japanese-style bonbon that only costs one kuai/yuan: 12 cents. There's a larger small grocery/convenience store in the next building that has lots more, including cheaper water and paper products, and snacks for both Chinese and foreign students. Another item we see a lot but have not warmed up to is flavored sausage/hot dogs that people seem to eat cold, sometimes flavored with pineapple. There are lots of yogurt drinks and even very fancy cookies there. It's not hard to find things you'll think are yummy. I've started buying snacks for my own class so I'm always on the lookout for new cookies or crackers. Since we can easily get hot boiled water from a tap in the dorm (we all have thermoses) that water can be used to make ramen noodles, known by a different name here. Most of the brands seem to be Korean. I like the shrimp flavor.

Notice that all of these are quite tame. I'll do another post later on the snacks that seem more exotic to us in flavor and/or ingredients. There's a great blog called "sinosplice" that you can Google created by a linguistics graduate student who has been in China quite a while. He and a friend did a very funny thumbs up-thumbs down rating of snacks in Taiwan, including ones that seemed scary to foreigners.