Tomatoes Tomatoes Tomatoes
Here in China they do not have salad, I mean they have the necessary ingredients but unless you go out to a more expensive restaurant that actually has western food you have to make it yourself.  This was made easier by the discovery of salad dressing in certain supermarkets western sections, in particular a sesame dressing which is very good, not as good as the miso dressing at home but still good, especially considering the only other salad dressings they have are thousand island for the most part.
Anyways, I digress, back to tomatoes.  So cucumbers I can always get and it is actually fairly easy to find romaine hearts as well.  But tomatoes are easy to find, or at least chinese tomatoes.  Now I don't mean that these are a new variety of tomatoes from here in China or anything, in fact a fairly common dish is chopped tomateos and eggs which is pretty good.  But by Chinese tomatoes I mean that they aren't very good, no real flavor, all very faded red, not entirely ripe but what can you do right?
Wrong, you see there are also lots of fruit stands, or to be more precise fruit vans that set up everywhere and until then I hadn't really frequented them unless I was walking by the and was hugry at that moment.  BUT then I saw cherry tomatoes at the stand near one of my friends house.  So I bought a kilo of them and ate them in like two days, they were amazing, juicy flavorful and ripe, really red, all the more so because of the alternative.  So now I can finally have good tomatoes with my salads.  But I have to be honest, I have not actually had them on a salad yet, both times I bought them i finished them before I could have them on a salad.