Airplane food

United Airlines to China

The "salad" for this one was lettuce, just lettuce:







United Airlines from China

The food on the trip from China seemed better than the food on the trip to China, I'm assuming because on the trip from China they sourced the food locally (where it is more affordable than in America). Desserts and sandwiches in the meals were rather odd.







China Eastern Airlines

This is the box their breakfast came in. It looks pretty appetizing, right?



Inside were some rolls, a bit of angle food cake, and a package of pickled vegetables (not like American pickles, trust me):



Their dinner meal was very good:



Chicken and vegetables with rice. No chop sticks (they'd be messy on a plane). You can see a plastic box in the picture. It contained a grape tomato, half of a hard boiled egg, with the shell still attached, and some sort of pickled vegetables, one of which I think was peanuts(?).

Extremely weird to me was this:



It's labeled "Drinking Purified Water" which is Engrish for "Purified Drinking Water". You don't want to drink water from the tap in China, everyone either uses bottled water or has a personal drinking water purification system. (They'll usually drink something other than water: juice, tea, or alcohol.)

I saw the person sitting next to me dip their utensils in this water before using them, which is apparently not unusual. The hotel I stayed at left bottled water in the room every day and you used it to brush your teeth.

I went to Western-style restaurants with Chinese people, where water was left at the table in glasses, and neither they nor we picked it up. No one wants anything to do with water if they don't know where it came from.

I did see a few public water dispensers in airports, but they had a little LED screen on them showing the temperature at which the water was being sterilized.

Something fun with airline food was to see where the soda came from.

I found Coca Cola from Vietnam, Austria, and Canada; along with Sprite from China:



There was a statement on the Vietnamese Coca Cola which was very adamant about how it was not supposed to be exported from Vietnam under any circumstances, so I have no idea how I got a hold of it; I just enjoyed my black-market Vietnamese Coca Cola.