Great time travel

Chapter 621, Entering India

Chapter 21. Entering India

For the Ramlila Square in New Delhi, whether it is a low-caste driver from West Bengal or Bai Quanyi, a health commissioner from the Indian Embassy, ​​they all seem to be familiar. The two discussed for a while, and soon they were nearby. Found a cafeteria that looked good.

Generally speaking, the decoration of this restaurant is not bad, the air conditioner is fully turned on, and the environment is quite clean, but the smell is a little bit bad, and there is always a faint, vague smell, similar to The strange smell of foot odor mixed with yogurt.However, as long as you walk a little further inside, you can smell the aroma of food, and then it will be covered. Later, Wang Qiu learned that most of the places where Indians have lived for a long time will have this smell, but the degree is to a lesser extent. It's just heavy.Because they ate too much curry, and the weather was too hot, they were sweating non-stop, and there was always a sour smell of curry secreted from their bodies. The fatter and darker the body, the heavier the smell. The place where I live is also "polluted"...

(Any international flight with a large number of Indian passengers sprays the cabin with air freshener before receiving passengers from other countries.)

The Chinese culture has always attached great importance to food.For Chinese travelers who go abroad, one of the great pleasures of traveling abroad is that the local food is very appetizing, which can not only experience the novelty of foreign cultures, but also feast on them; Instead, they can only rely on local Chinese restaurants, but they often find out that the taste of food produced by this so-called "Chinese restaurant" is also seriously disappointing to their ancestors. In the end, they can only eat instant noodles... Is it good to eat in one place? Link to Chinese tourists' perception of foreign lands.Those places with special and delicious food will have a better and clearer impression; while the places where the food is difficult to eat, the feeling will be much worse.

Of course, there are great differences in food culture around the world, even the cuisine flavors of different provinces in China are very different. It is indeed too subjective to judge other people's food culture by one's own standards.But there is no way, the impression of travel is a very subjective thing...

At this point, India is a very unlucky country. Thanks to its notoriety in sanitary conditions, the country's food culture is usually directly excluded from the experience options of Chinese tourists. Many short-term travelers, even No thought of trying Indian food.

Then, according to Wang Qiu's personal experience today, the food in India is indeed not very good, but it is not as scary as the rumors say.

——Turning around in this cafeteria, Wang Qiu discovered three characteristics of Indian cuisine:

First, there is very little meat; second, the hot dishes are almost all mushy, mainly curry; third, there are no pure green leafy vegetables.

In the entire cafeteria, if you count desserts, there are no less than a hundred dishes, but most of them are vegetarian. The only meat dishes are chicken and fried eggs, as well as fried fish steaks cut into small pieces. .But there was no beef or pork. There seemed to be roast mutton, but it was a pity that before Wang Qiu and the others came in, they were all eaten up by the diners, leaving only a few bones and an empty stainless steel basin.Then, except for those baked or fried foods, the rest of the dishes are basically all kinds of green paste, yellow paste, brown paste, spicy paste...

——Indians don’t seem to have the concept of stir-frying for vegetarian dishes, but everything from beans to cauliflower, from leaves to roots, is chopped and boiled in the batter. If the chicken is not used for frying or roasting, it is also put in the batter Stewing... This is really a way of cooking for lazy people.

Chinese are usually accustomed to collectively refer to this paste dish as curry.That's right, and it's not right.All pasta dishes are made with spices. Curry is only the most important category of these spices. There are other flavors, such as some pasta with fennel flavor, some with mint flavor, and some with braised sauce. Soup, some taste like canned mushroom soup, some will add cheese in it, and some will add bay leaf in it.

Moreover, the curry eaten by the Chinese is generally the three-handed version that was first introduced from the United Kingdom to Japan, and then from Japan. The three essential things in it are potatoes, carrots and meat.But in the authentic Indian curry, there are more beans and onions, as well as coriander, corn, spinach and tomatoes, but potatoes and carrots are not very common. In addition, there are certain differences in specific tastes.

No matter what, Wang Qiu and the others scooped several kinds of batter in small bowls, and some fried or baked pasta, and then found a table and sat down.There is a bowl of water with lemon slices on each table for the diners to wash their hands. After washing, each of them stretched out their fingers to the food...

——Indians usually eat with their hands directly. If you want tableware, you have to ask the waiter for it yourself, and there may not be any.

Next, Wang Qiu and the others discovered that although the Indian dishes in this cafeteria were not very good in appearance (they were all mushy), they tasted pretty good.Especially those kinds of pasta snacks are all made to a very high standard - deep-fried round and crispy golden bread balls, filled with cheese with brown sugar, as long as you take a bite, the sweet juice will flow down your mouth and fill your chin ; Deep-fried curry dumplings made into triangles, with potatoes and vegetables seasoned with curry spices in the sun. It is really suitable to eat with all kinds of pastes; finally, the yogurt and milk tea as drinks are also quite good, but slightly sweet.

Of course, like those Indians on the table next to them, they put their fingers into the bowl, stirred the rice and the paste vegetables together, and put their fingers into their mouths to suck twice from time to time, Wang Qiu and others still felt a little uncomfortable. It's too adaptable...Although Xinjiang's hand-picked rice is also eaten like this...

"...Although these pastes look very unappetizing, they seem to taste good...especially this coriander curry..."

Wang Qiu dipped the pancake into the green paste and said, "...the taste is very refreshing...much better than the imagined Indian food. Is it because we are in a high-end restaurant, so the feeling is not so bad?" Passable? I read a travel brochure before coming here, which repeatedly warned us not to eat casually from roadside stalls in India, and not to drink bulk drinks from small shops, otherwise we will suffer from diarrhea..."

"...If you are not prejudiced, Indian food is still worth tasting. Otherwise, why would the British bring curry back?"

Health Commissioner Bai Quanyi ate a piece of curry fried noodles and said, "... about the roadside stalls and big restaurants...how should I put it? This cafeteria is indeed a relatively high-end consumer place, and the patrons are all high-caste Indians. people and foreign tourists. However, although those roadside food stalls in India look dirty and messy, the hygiene problem is actually not as serious as imagined. Think about it, how clean are our roadside stalls in China? ?And most of the Indian snacks are fried and grilled. Even if there are any bacteria, they will be wiped out by the high temperature long ago!

After all, Indians are not Japanese, and they like to eat everything raw, resulting in a bunch of parasitic diseases.On the contrary, Indian food is basically only overheated!Let’s just talk about these gooey vegetables!They are all stewed in a large pot or even a pressure cooker for several hours.It may not look good, and it may destroy the nutrition of vegetables, which is not to the taste of some people, but sterilization should be no problem. "

"...So, are the stories about Chinese tourists eating bad stomachs at roadside stalls in India in the travel brochures all exaggerations and fabrications?"

"...It can't be said that if you really go to the roadside stall to eat, it is indeed very dangerous to the stomach. But the main thing is not that there is a problem with the food - the bacteria in the fried snacks themselves have long been killed in the heating process Died, but the tableware is too dirty, and the water for washing the tableware is not clean. The plates and cups of the vendors basically don’t wash, they just rinse them in a bucket of dark water, and they don’t clean them from morning till night. How about...how about that?"

Bai Quanyi replied, "...every time when people from the embassy and I go out to eat, if it is not such a relatively high-end restaurant, we usually bring our own lunch boxes and cups, so that there are usually no problems. In addition Some tourists are too tired from long-distance travel, resulting in poor health and weak stomach, but they still have to eat Indian-style raw onions, spicy curries and indigestible fried foods, so they are naturally put down..."

"...If this is the case, it is indeed the tourist who committed suicide." Levi muttered while nibbling on a small fish steak, "...but this curry still can't be eaten--before, I thought that the Europeans The body odor is already strong enough, but it can still pass after washing. However, even if the Indians here take a shower, the smell of curry still cannot be washed off..."

"...It is true that Indians not only eat curry all the time, but also eat onions every day, and they are raw onions, so the smell on their bodies is naturally not good."

Bai Quanyi shrugged, pointed to the young driver from West Bengal and said - this guy was eating a bowl of chopped raw onions, "...however, this is also a survival philosophy adapted to the environment of the South Asian subcontinent, First of all, eating more onions and curry can stimulate the mouth and prevent heatstroke, which is the same as taking Rendan in summer. Secondly, doing so can also prevent mosquito bites. When I first came to India, I was always bitten by mosquitoes in summer. But the Indians around are always fine. Later I found out that the reason is their curry body odor - because Indians often eat onions and curry, after a long time, the smell of sweat can repel mosquitoes... "

"...Just to repel mosquitoes, you have to eat onions and curry to the extent that you smell weird? Isn't this too exaggerated?"

Wang Qiu was dumbfounded and complained without thinking, "...we are human beings, not living mosquito coils!"

"... But if you want to live in India for a long time, you really need to turn yourself into a mosquito coil! Here is a tropical climate, so the mosquitoes in India are much more vicious than the mosquitoes in China. Chinese mosquitoes are just for human body It’s just a few swellings. Indian mosquitoes can really kill people!”

Bai Quanyi shook his head and sighed, "...I am the health officer of the embassy. Every year, I can hear that some Chinese tourists who come to India contract tropical diseases because of being bitten by mosquitoes and other reasons! If the mosquitoes that spread malaria are also Forget it, you just have to wait a week or two. But if you encounter mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever, you will most likely die. And when you die, you will be bleeding from your seven orifices, and you will be covered in red spots, which is horrible..."

Speaking of this, he suddenly paused, shuddered violently, stared at Wang Qiu, Li Wei and the other three and said, "...Wait, you guys were all vaccinated before you came to India for a business trip. Now! This is a matter of life and death, so don't be careless!"

"...Uh...don't worry, we've all been vaccinated! Absolutely no problem! And we brought a doctor this time!"

Wang Qiu was stunned for a moment, then reached out and patted the shoulder of the female doctor Ju Chuan Shizuka, and replied confidently.But then the three of them quickly took out cooling oil from their bags, and wiped it on their bodies regardless of the pungent smell. Being bitten by Indian mosquitoes and contracting dengue fever was just a small trouble for them; But if you are infected with the T virus by Indian mosquitoes, the situation will be horrifying...