food for thought.

Twelve days and I'll be waving goodbye to Hohhot from the seat of a plane.

Struggling now to name all the things I will - and won't - miss about this bizarre city and the six months I've spent here.

School. Lesson plans. The blistering heat. The stinging dust. My six-legged housemates. The tendency for my water to be inexplicably switched off at nine o'clock at night when I'm hot and sweaty and tired and needing a shower. Well, no.

But the kids, yes. Their squeals of "Katie-mao!!" My neighbours. The street life. Chinese diet Pepsi. The smell of barbecued meat wafting into my apartment. The men who take their pet birds for walks in their cages every morning. The stares and guffaws and shouts of 'waigouren!?' when I make my daily chug around the park. Yes, yes, yes.

And oh, the food. More than anything, the food.

wo bu chi rou [I don't eat meat] was - and still is - the single most important group of words I've managed to string together in my otherwise limited Chinese vocabulary. True, I've been laughed out of many a restaurant by drumstick-chewing, marrow-sucking Mongolians, and there has been more than one occasion when my tofu been cunningly served with slithers of mutton.

But, when they want to, Hohhotians do vegetarian like nobody else. Especially when it's from a stained two-wheeled stall on the side of the road.

Street food, I've been told, is dirty food. Poor man's food. They don't clean things. They re-use the oil. It's not safe.

Maybe. But it's damn good.

Roadside liang cai [cold vegetables] isn't just a side-dish; it's an adventure in vegetarian gastronomy. Tofu sliced, tofu marinated, tofu shredded; seaweed in black, white and purple; eggplant, seven kinds of fungus, beans, bloated peanuts; frilly mushrooms, chilli potato, cucumber, carrot, noodles; shapeless crunchy stuff that I'm yet to identify.

The man who runs my favourite stall greets me like an old friend. He parks his battered motorbike-drawn business about twenty minutes' walk from my apartment; it's worth every step. Thirty-odd stainless dishes of every kind of vegetable and seaweed and soybean derivative I've seen. Many I haven't. Oil-soaked and laced with cumin. Divine.

While other customers take their pickings away in a bag, this guy gives the waigouren a bowl and a pair of chopsticks and lets her sit on his motorbike to eat.

A boon to his business, surely. All for five kuai [about a dollar].

And the adventure isn't just gastronomic.

Of course, I'd like to think that the owner of the foot-long black hair entwined in my seaweed had bathed recently. That they used a good shampoo. That, at least, their hands were clean.

I'd also like to believe that the fingernail-sized body I once found floating in the oil at the bottom of my styrofoam dish didn't have a face. That it was a seed, a strange kernel, a slither of tofu, perhaps.

Has it put me off?

No. I've been back. And I'll go back again.

Perhaps it's the same principle I've applied to many of my experiences over here. Be it teaching five-year-olds how to say "There are FIVE apples!", explaining adverbs to adults, showering in the dark or chowing down on unidentifiable fly-infested roadside cuisine.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

When I cross over the Chinese border in a month's time, it'll be with a steely determination that I can - and will - do whatever I want.

And guts of steel.