Nepal Travel Notes | "Chinese Stir-Fried Vegetables"

After eating Nepali food for several days in a row, I was clearly feeling the heat 🌶️. Probably due to the accumulation of too many spices in my body, even my exhaled breath seemed to have a distinct aroma. It made me feel like a walking range hood 💨. So, upon returning to Kathmandu from Pokhara, I ordered a few vegetarian dishes at the hotel restaurant, trying to lighten things up with my limited knowledge of dietary therapy 🥬. I’d had "Nepali salad" before—it’s just sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, plus a small dish of salt and pepper 🧂. But "Chinese stir-fried vegetables" was far from what I’d imagined those five characters to mean. Its ingredients were somewhat similar to Chinese braised mixed vegetables or vegetarian medleys, but the chef had used a lot of black pepper, basil, rosemary, and other seasonings that my body was already overloaded with 🌿. Eating it was definitely going to counteract the effects of the Nepali salad. Yet, I took one bite and was quickly won over by the flavor, tucking in hungrily 🍚. Over the past few days, there have been quite a few moments like this where I couldn’t help but eat a little more. The buffet lunch provided at the conference had a wide variety of dishes and was quite delicious (kudos to the AAS-in-Asia conference organizers 👍). In Pokhara, I was lucky enough to crash at a homestay booked by my travel companion, spending two days in a Tibetan community 🏘️. Our host, Tsering, was a middle-aged woman who was good at managing both life and business, and something of a "big sister" in the community 👩💼. The two dinners we had with her family let us experience her clever cooking. She also ran a community breakfast spot, which she’d imaginatively named "Restro" ☕. On the day we left, she prepared egg pancakes, braised potatoes, fried chickpeas, and butter tea—and we polished off this magical combination completely 🍳. Back in Kathmandu, this "Chinese stir-fried vegetables" made me curious about Chinese food that had been "locally interpreted" 🤔. On my last night before leaving, after wandering around, I found myself "semi-automatically" walking into a Lanzhou beef noodle shop on a street corner 🍜. The "semi-automatic" part was probably because I really love Lanzhou beef noodles. Especially over the past year, Shanghai has somehow become a battleground for this dish (there’s Deyuan with many branches, Jinqiang which always has long lines despite limited options, and my regular spot, Zhang Youde)—it’s only made me more addicted 😋. What’s more, the atmosphere in this shop was really lively 🎉. As I walked past, a Korean uncle with a red neck (probably from drinking before arriving) was standing in the shop, looking up at a Black diner over two meters tall, exclaiming, "You so tall!" When the noodles arrived, the taste was familiar. The lamb skewers were a bit dry, but they were sprinkled with five-spice powder, almost identical to what I usually have at Zhang Youde. However, thinking about the pleasant surprise from the stir-fried vegetables the day before, I felt a strange sense of disappointment at this familiarity: Was it… too authentic? 😮 Lost in thought, a middle-aged man wearing a hat sat down across from me 🧢. #Nepal #TravelFragments #TravelJournal #NepalTravel #PowerOfFood #AuthenticEatsOnTheRoad #Kathmandu