Chapter Fourty-Four: Res Halls and Giant Food Courts (~jinghan)

Since the move-in date for my new apartment isn’t until next week, I’ll be staying on campus in what will be a residential hall when the term starts and the freshmen students move in. I have to admit its pretty comfy and the internet is FAST – you notice when you are uploading photos. To demonstrate, here is a photo of my room, with all my suitcase mess everywhere because I don’t want to unpack properly yet. (Yeah you blinked and missed the uploading, uh huh)

And here is the *drum role* Dining Hall. Or the small slither of it that I caught on camera because I didn’t want to seem too touristy/stalkerish by brandishing my camera all the time. To get a better picture of what it’s like, imagine a LARGE food court, then imagine three of them placed side by side, and every food outlet is actually serving buffet style.

Here is the “visual menu” I think it’s real food. But don’t worry they don’t encourage wasting food here. They have little mini plates/bowls for you to try the food before plunging in for the real thing and then wasting it all when you don’t like it. And they have vegetarian and vegan options marked out or on special order. And there’s this gorgeous vegie patch outside the food hall that is grown by residential students to promote the idea of “sustainability”. I think the napkins are made of recycled paper, at least the tomato s- I mean: ketchup bottles are made of 30% plant material and 100% recyclable.

Here is the 10 different types of cereal. (I swear someone was having cereal for dinner today. Each to their own, I guess.)

Here is the dish return. It’s a big rotating shelf (moving left to right and then around the corner) that disappears into the kitchen where the dishes magically disappear and are cleaned. It’s really neat and hygienic.

Here is the noodle outlet place, where they have a really big hot plate the size of a small table that they dump the noodles and vegetables that the students has chosen onto, they push all of this back and forth with a large stick swipe it into a bowl and voila! stir fried noodles. It’s pretty cool to watch.

And finally *drum role* it’s a waffle maker with the UC Davis logo imprinted in your waffle. Hahaha. Beside it is the waffle mixture dispenser, and there are little cups that measure the right amount of waffle mixture to make the waffle. Be-careful the syrups are really sugary.

     

As nifty as this all is, I’m still looking forward to cooking my own food. for one it’s far to easy to over eat with the dining hall, and the other thing is – I missed both breakfast AND lunch the other day because I slept until 1:30pm and they stop serving lunch at 1pm. (Okay so I’m a little more jet lagged than I thought I was.)