Food and Water

Food

When you first come to China, you’ll need to be careful when eating food. Again you’ll need time until you get used to different kinds of bacteria. It is recommended that all fruit and vegetables are washed in purified soapy water to remove the pesticides and bacteria; as time goes by your stomach will slowly become accustomed. This writer in his six years in Tianjin has only had bad food poisoning twice; once after eating in some small restaurant in the fourth month of being here and once in 2005 after eating some bad dumplings in a supposedly very clean restaurant. That was a nasty few days of diarrhea, vomiting and sweating!

Water

Tap water should not be drunk unless having boiled continuously for five minutes first. Even be careful when brushing your teeth for the first couple of weeks until you start building a resistance to a new set of bacteria. Maybe use drinking water to rinse your mouth out with after brushing. After two weeks you can mix half tap water and half drinking water to rinse your mouth out and then move onto rinsing in tap water only after being here a month.