Breakfast
A Chinese breakfast is hearty but often light. In fact, it's a somewhat strange area of gastronomic experimentation. It would be fair to say that most hotels in China will offer a stomach-churning array of harsh spices and hot foods in their breakfast spread down at the buffet! This will be accompanied with rice or a hot bowl of noodles (plusher hostelries may have full English breakfast on offer alongside this).
That can be too much of a different type of breakfast for many visitors but a short venture out of your hotel and you’ll find easier to eat, bread-like doughnuts, cakes or dumplings on sale for hardly any cost at all. It’s also quite common to find soups (well, porridge, which is superb in freezing winter weather) sold in the early hours and you may find a fried/boiled egg option in your neck of the woods.
If you stay a while or begin a new chapter of your life in China, you’ll find Western cereal brands on sale at your local (big) supermarket. The non-native food store that has made an impact was China French-owned Carrefour, but now the Chinese malls and supermarkets mostly stock similar Western brekkies. They stock many Western goodies and are a favourite for foreign residents although most Western goods are bought online.
(See also Food for ordering Chinese meals).
