If you haven't been to China yourself and haven't eaten in various Chinese restaurants yet, you might be thinking now - well, yeah, knowing a bathroom within reach is not a bad thing, but I am able to hold that for a little longer. Oh, haha, lucky you I say, but wait til you come here and eat something that will make your stomach go crazy. No, you will not be able to hold that even only a second longer. You will need that bathroom, in that VERY SAME second! And if you are lucky it has toilet paper :-D
I have to say so far I never had a problem with street food. That stuff goes easy on my stomach. I can also always be sure that I get a freshly prepared meal, I mean, I can actually see them preparing the dish infront of my eyes. The restaurant food is where you should be carefully picking what goes into your mouth. As their dishes are more complex, they are often premade and then just reheated when needed. This gives those nice little animals aka bacteria plenty of time to get comfy on the food that I am later on shuffling into my mouth. Especially meat should be approached with a skeptical attitude. But you can be as careful as you want, sooner or later it will find you, that grumbling down there, followed by the urge to hit that toilet within the next 5 seconds. Not any later, trust me! Now you might think - okay, I can manage that for once, I mean, once it's all out, that issue is done. Oooooooh noooooo! Misunderstanding! Those are serious salmonella, folks! This takes me DAYS to recover. Literally 3 days of not being able to hold food in longer than 3 hours. And constant stomach pain. Some people also get hit by this diarrhea by eating dished that got spoiled with a generous amount of 辣椒 lajiao - hot Chinese peppers. Already went through that too. That's actually even worse, as for days your stomach feels like there is still a fire burning inside (2 days after eating Sichuan Hotpot I still felt the fire!) - and everytime you dissapear to get releave from the pain you feel the chili seeds making their way out of your body. Which expands the burning feeling from your stomach into your butt. I wouldn't even wish for my biggest enemy to experience that. It's really that nasty.
This should get better though after like 2 days, and really helpful is a lot of rice and bread. Yes, let those carbohydrates soak up either all the hotness or the salmonella so there will be peace again in your stomach. If that still doesn't stop the flow, get to the closest pharmacy and point to your stomach with a painful face. Or take a friend with you that can actually speak medical in Chinese. They will hook you up with tons of pills, I was literally taking 8 pills a day! But, after 2 extra days, my stomach returned to it's normal peacefulness. So eitherway, give it some time and you will be fine. While I had my last visit from this unwelcomed friend, I searched online for other suffers and actually found reports from people that were one day away from literally dying from lacking salt and water, so the only way they could be helped was by a hospital visit getting tons of saline solution pumped into their venes. Glad it didn't get that far with me yet haha. But what I say is, if you aren't careful, it can hit you anytime, anywhere. And so many Chinese told me, once you went through it, your stomach sort of gets immune to it. LIE!!! I'm in my 4th month here now, and my stomach still constantly gets put upside down.
But please don't let my story now stop you from going out there and trying the truly delicious food that China has to offer. Enjoy your stay in China! And I do count the diarrhea to my experiences here as a Cultural Ambassador. It truly let's you feel the culture and the food to your deep inside. Which makes it even more memorable. And there we even found a little positive part about this s***. And it gives you a true body cleansing. Which from time to time is also needed :->