Something interesting I learned about the people on the WWOOF farm near Toledo: to them, if something is sweet it is pretty much always a desert. This is very different from China in which many popular main dishes are sweet. In fact, many of my favorite dishes are quite sweet. 糖醋里脊 (sweet and sour pork) remains one of my favorite dishes (of which I have many fond memories and which I hope to see again at some point in the future). But other gastronomic delights abound in Chinese cuisine as well: there is also a sweet corn dish, sweet pumpkin slices, and 鱼香肉丝 (yú xiāng ròu sī), all of which I think are fairly sweet and regularly serve as main dished rather than as dessert.
In fact, I don't really recall much of a concept of dessert in China. Is that something that I missed or have my other friends had similar impressions? However, when asking me about dessert in other cultures the WWOOFers here didn't care about dessert in China, but only in the United States. This was troubling to be, first on a level of their disinterest in a major world culture, but also because I am not sure about the status of sweet dishes in the United States. As I realized while spending some time with Nadia in Germany, I know more about China than I do about the United States, so I find it quite challenging when people ask me about certain things concerning the U.S.. I hope this doesn't turn out to be too much of a challenge in the future when I expect to be increasingly called upon to relate information about the United States, in a school environment and potentially in other environments as well. I am, after all, working in a Spanish school as kind of a 'cultural expert' on the United States.
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