Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

Economic crisis? Only with my egg pancake

I eat this on most mornings; probably my favorite thing to eat in all of Xi'an. It's called a Jianbing Guozi, ????, and its a flour pancake mixed with an egg, and then wrapped in these crisp layers of what is fried bread. Kind of looks like its some kind of Chinese burrito.

Anyways, this is usually my breakfast, and I'll eat two in a day if I can. I go buy them from a local street vendor near my apartment. The woman there makes them on the spot, standing behind a cart that's wheeled by a bicycle. On the cart is a black stove, a cylinder of black metal, covered with a flat top, where she grills the pancake.

Business for my local street vendor hasn't been that well. Most of her customers are students from my university. And so during the last few weeks I saw her, she'd always complain to me that business was bad.

But now with school having started again, I asked, “How was business?" expecting her answer to be positive.

"Bad" she said. "Really?" I said. Then she told me why.

"I think its because of the economic crisis," she said. "Not very many people have been buying even with school back in. I just have to soldier on."

I got my two egg pancakes and then left, paying a little more than 25 cents American for each of them. Even by Chinese standards, where food costs far less (I can get a a bowl of beef noodle soup for 75 cents) one egg pancake is pretty cheap. Could the economic crisis be really threatening my local street vendor?

If it weren't for the Internet I probably wouldn't even know an economic crisis was going on. Sure I overhear chit-chat from strangers and the Chinese news has been following it, but my city of Xi'an doesn't seem like its been affected by global recession at all.

Yesterday I went to a newly opened mall here, and on a Friday night, and most of the high-end restaurants there were packed. At the Diary Queen inside, people had to wait in line for a table and to order their frosted blizzards.

I'm perhaps even more sheltered from the economic downturn since I'm in the education industry. Even with jobs shrinking in China by the millions, people still need to learn and get degrees.

People sometimes tell me that I left America at the perfect time. I can't even imagine what's happening back in my home state of Oregon, where unemployment is already in double digits. If I stayed in America, I'm sure I'd have an incredibly difficult time trying to find a job in the already ailing journalism industry.

Oh well. In the meantime, I'm thinking of buying three egg pancakes the next time I visit my local street vendor.