Eating Chinese

Everyone eats. East, west, young and old, most every person on the planet eats. And while this common denominator is very comforting to the international wanderer, it is also a source of never ending learning and puzzlement.
So here's a short version of what I've learned about the art of eating in China.
They do eat, often, much and sociably. Rice is, of course always an option, but if you don't like it, noodles of all types are also served everywhere. Generally, you begin deciding what to eat by picking one of these basic starches. If you choose noodles, you get the fun if picking what type: fresh, flat ones the size and shape of a ruler, flat postage stamp sized ones, clear sweet potato starch noodles, fried long, skinny noodles, ramen type noodles, ... you get the idea. There are more noodles here than the Italians have ever dreamed of! Besides the basic starches, there are also a bevy of stuffed dumplings, soups with little, medium, or small dumplings, baskets of steamed dumplings, etc.
Then it's on to the Vegetables. There are quite a few, the familiar onions, peppers, tomatoes, a turnip-like white radish thing, eggplant (good here!), lots of unnamed cabbages and greens, lotus root, bamboo, yard-long beans, celery, even carrots, squash, and beets, and lots and lots of mushrooms and fungus, even at the cheap places. There is also the protiens to think through. Generally, it's in little bits, but there are lots of little bits. Beef, pork, and chicken are common, as are fish, tofu, and eggs, and somtimes lamb, and of course, any organ meat your stomach desires :) Then you get to think about how you want all that cooked. At the top of the food chain are a handful of steakhouses and nice resturants, where you can get virtually anything, likely even steak. Next, oddly, are the fast food places, Pizza hut, KFC, McDonalds, and G&F, a local look alike, all just like at home.
Next, and where my budget generally reaches, are sit-down Chinese places, where you order a few dishes and then all eat them. The largerthe group, the better this option is. If you get about a dozen people and 13-14 dishes, it as good as a potluck dinner. The trick is to pace your self, since dishes keep comming throughout the meal, new ones stacked on top of emptied plates, and each seems yummier than the last. They aren't that expensive either. An all you can eat dinner with at large group can run from 12-18 Kwai.

A word here about chinese table manners- King Louie the 16th, or whoever invented table manners, wasn't king of China. consequently, they don't observe many of the niceties of the west. There are no serving dishes, you just use your own chopsitcks to grab a bit of whatever and put it, as your fancy dictates, on your little plate or atop your bowl of rice. The same goes for soups, you just take your little spoon and get some. Helpings are small, maybe a few bites worth, and frequent, hence large tables are round and equipped with generous lazy susans. There are however, a couple of rules- never touch the food, and don't eat anything that hits the table top. Spitting bones and seeds out on the table however, is perfectly acceptable. Drinking and eating are not so firmly linked as in the west. Tea may be served, but not much is drunk and the glasses are tiny- they say you have more room for the food that way. Often, a thin soup broth fills in for the drink, and in the winter, it's wonderful how nicely a big bowl of hot soup will warm you up.

That brings us to the little resturants. These are everywhere, at some you order, generally from a couple of dozen varients of a few themes, and the cafeterias, where you simply point out what you want. I like the sit-down places better, as the cafieteria food is often cold. Generally, you can get a solid meal at one of these for 6-10 kwai (1 kwai=1yuan= ~$0.15 ) Some dishes you can find most places are fried noodles, a hearty beef/ noodle/veggie soup (my cold weather favorite) fried rice (one place has a version with so much ham, eggs, and vegtables that it makes me think of Jambalyia everytime I eat it), various vegetables, meatball or fishball or dumpling soups, and more noodles.

At all the Chinese places, the seasoning follows a few rules: Soy sauce and dark soy vinegar are always on the table, and hot peppers are often cooked whole with foods- don't eat the peppers! If you want more heat, you can always get some of the oily, hot red pepper puree. Garlic, green onions, and Ginger are everywhere, and there is always lots of oil- often too much- and plenty of salt. Sugar is around, but only occasionally do you find really sweet foods. They are more of a treat than a reguar part of the diet. Other spices show up from time to time, but those are the main ones.
Most people like fruit, and little wonder. Bananas, all types of citrus, starfruit, asian pears, apples(often from Washington), grapes, kiwi, even pomegranite, and even dragonfruit are readily avialable, both in the stores and at corner fruit stands.
Breads and dairy are the things a westerner misses most. Bread isn't too bad- there are several very western style bakeries around. You can only buy sandwhich bread a half-loaf at a time, and it's all very white, but there are plenty of baked treats to be found.
Dairy is harder. You can find fresh yougurt and radiated milk, and occasionally even some cream cheese and processed cheese like stuff (real cheese apparently isn't very appealign to the Asian palate) but there's that little issue of melamine. All of the brands I've been able to locate are on the recall list. But I like milk! So I've been very cautiously indulging in a little bit now and then, and making do with almond and soymilk whenever possible.
Speaking of milk, beverages are a whole catagory here. In the winter, many people almost exclusivly drink hot beverages, and I've learned to follow suit- it helps you stay warm. Coffee, other than instant, is quite rare. Even that isn't drunk much. Tea is much more common. I'll have to save the preperation of the drink for another post, but the short description is that the local tea is very green, flovorful and non-bitter. Hot water is an even more common drink. Beer, wine, and rice wine are all common- too common- it's often hard to politely avoid drinking a large amount, especially for a man. I tried a sip of the rice wine. I'm told that the local speciality was comparativly mellow, but it still nearly sent tears to my eyes.
You can also get soy milk, and a really delicious chi-like milk tea. The soy milk, however, is always served in a bowl with a spoon. Why?


This has become a long post! It's suppertime here, and I am hungry! Noodles, here I come.

Dehua Illustrated

Today I chronicle a couple of little milestones: I went to a restaurant and managed to carry out all the necessary conversation in Chinese- I even managed to ask for the name of a dish.
The second was last night- I successfully co-taught my first class. One of my fellow teachers will be traveling next week, so I'll get to teach her class for a while. It's a nice to feel like I'm finally doing something to earn my salt.
I've also gotten new batteries for my camera, so I can get the pictures from Duhua off of it. They came out almost as lovely as I remember.

This is the dormitory of the high school we visited. The "bathroom" is in another building- one trench runs through all the stalls, and there are no door on them. We saw a number of students washing their hair and the lines of sinks outside. No hot water, btw.





The tiny group of people standing in front of the building to the right is most of our team. After class, an astounding number of students packed the Balconies of the classroom building. I don't think many foreigners come by!

The Duhua porcelain museum was facinatiating. I love whiteware, and I discovered that Duhua is famous for it's white ware- blanc de chine, as I've since discovered.

I took lots of pictures so I wouldn't forget a detail. Things like this make great inspirations for all sorts of projects.

There are also some colored wares, and even furnishing display. The musical instrument in the center really caught my eye- it's smaller, but otherwise nearly identical to a appilacian hammer dulcimer. This makes me want to finish mine even more!

Duhua has more than history though- they still make ceramics. After the musuem I toured a factory. The order of the day was little tooth mugs- maybe for dentists' offices? It was strange seeing the exact styles I am used to seeing at Wal-mart in the states being produced.Now I know what is behind that ubiqutous "made in China" sticker

To cap off the whole adventure, we went shopping. Much of what we found was just the same stuff you'd find anywhere in the states, albiet at a fraction oif the prices, but some was really lovely and unique. My favorite find was a tea set, white of course, which looked just like one in the museum, and so thin that you can see every petal of the relief plum flowers right through the cup when you hold it up to the light.

The bus ride home was nearly as gripping for a newcomer as the destination. Here, far from the shiny new cities, the China of stories shows through a bit more.

Duhua

I'm going to have to post some new pictures soon, but 'till then, here's a quick account of my latest adventure.
Last week I went to Duhua with several other staff members to do a special Christmas English outreach at a couple of rural schools. Our first stop was a middle school. About 3/4 of the students live at the school, the remaining 1/4 are close enough to home to travel back and forth each day. It was charming, in a way, but I'll never complain about the condition of a US school again. Facilities aside, it was a lovely experience. The students were eager and curious, the staff wonderful hosts, and teaching for the first time was a blast! We even got to put on a Christmas skit at a English club party in the evening for a thousand plus people. Definitely the largest audience I've ever been in front of!
After a huge meal, at the same place we had another huge meal for lunch, we crashed in our very comfortable hotel rooms.
The next day we got to repeat our classes of a lower level at an elementary school. Then lunch, followed by a museum tour.
Dehua is an ancient porcelain making center, famous for it's pure white bias relief ware- blanc de chine- to be precise. The museum is fairly small, but the 45 minutes we had to spend was far too short a time to take in thousands of years of dynasties, styles, and patterns.
Next, it was off to a factory, where we got to see some of the wares in production and watch the process of pouring slip into molds, letting it dry a bit, pouring out the center, and then finally removing the molds, trimming the seams, and drying it for firing. In another room we got to watch transfers being put on transfer ware.
After that, we went shopping. I'm not an expert, but I think I got some nice pieces, and for great prices. My favorite was a tea set the looked almost exactly like one I saw in the museum.
Finally, we headed home. The Chinese countryside is lovely. There isn't an inch of wasted space to be seen- the hills grow bamboo and trees, the lowlands are dotted with houses, and every inch of exposed dirt is planted with some kind of food crop. In many places, impossibly steep mountainsides are even filled with terraces.
Many of the old courtyard style houses are still there. I found those really intriguing. The back is a four room house that is about like a southern dogtrot, then wings are added to the sides. If the house is really fixed up, a gatehouse is added across the front, and possibly any number sheds and appendages on the outside walls. I couldn't get many good pictures from the bus, but I think I've got a couple.
The older buildings look so nice in the landscape. They are simple, but gracefully proportioned. Some are only made of mud, sheltered by deep eaves, so some combination of stone and brick, but they are so lovely.
++ After rereading this post, I can only home I get some Chinese soon- I'm rapidly losing English! Sorry folks.

Pictures!

It's been quite a week. There's been the bittersweet of my first Christmas away from home with new faces. There's been the triumph of managing to do a little shopping without a chaperone and of learning to navigate the city, the little treats of new words and their rewarding uses. There has been the mystery of my first visit to the state church and complexities of each new thing I learn about my host country, and the challenges of meeting more students and working through my training.

Most exciting for the you though, my friends, is that I've got pictures to share.

Above is Frank the rabbit checking out the view from my room.

This is the view inside the apartment complex. Notice all the little gardens people have put out on the roofs and all the different types of metal?

Everyone hangs laundry out to dry- notice all the clothes on the balconies?

Below is my room, looking back toward the living room. My clothes rack is actually a ladder- the standard type around here. The hinges are simply a single 8d nail. :/

The shot to the left is our tiny tiny kitchen. We got an oven for Christmas (toaster oven sized) so we can bake now too!

This is the intersection I can see from my room, at a fairly quiet moment of the day. It's always busy!
One really nice treat recently was getting to hear a song from one of the staff members from Tibet. I have no idea what the lyrics are, but it was quite impressive! I managed to catch most of it on video:

My Life as a Deaf Mute

This is China. That's what I seem to tell myself at least every hour. It's all I knew it would be, and nothing like I thought it would be.
Traffic has a new meaning. Take an open air mall and mix in a flea market and a farmer's market. Stack eight floors of apartments on top of that, add a street festival, a motorbike and scooter rally to that, and allow the normal auto traffic too, then send all the police home, take down the street signs, and you've got a pretty good idea of the street life here. Cars, people, and bikes mingle freely all over the streets and both sidewalks. Someone once painted lines on the streets, but no one pays them any heed. Intersections are indescribable. Except where a policeman is personally directing traffic, the lights are regarded merely as decorations. The rule is "go and don't get hit"
Food is good, cheap, and diverse. I like Chinese, and even if I didn't there is a KFC, McDonald's, McDonald's knock off, a steak house in walking distance. It's citrus season in the homeland of the genus right now, and the oranges are truly wonderful. The more pressing problem is communicating what it is I want. I learned today that "moaw bao" means "take out"- "doggy bag" really, and that "lao dow" will get the attention of the manager. Other than that and "please" and "thank you" I'm still a deaf mute in this land.
It's strange, and humbling to have to rely on someone for absolutely everything, but it's also quite surprising how far you can get with pointing, pictures, and symbols. I'm beginning to understand how an illiterate person could survive. Overall, everyone I've met has been at least polite, and most are very willing to help. There are not many forigners here, so you do get noticed, but not to the level of being obnoxious.

How to Pack a Suitcase

This is a retrospective now, but I've been through six airports, two trips, and two continents in the last week, so here's what I have to say about the art of luggage.
Clothing: I was told not to worry about being fashionable- that the Chinese were more practical minded about that kind of thing. Yeah right. I've never seen so many cute boutiques, or walking advertisements for them. But the general rules still apply- aim for easy care and maximum options. Jeans that can be dressed up or down. Tops that don't wrinkle and can go lots of places. A minimal number of versatile shoes, a good dressy coat, a couple of sweaters.
Also, take a little as possible. You can rearrange a few well chosen items in a surprising number of ways.
Blanket/ wrap: I don't go anywhere without a paero in the bottom of my bag. It's a scarf, skirt, blanket, towel, sheet, laundry bag, privacy screen, table cloth or wall decoration depending on the need.
Makeup: on a long trip, I find that there is a real psychological benefit to having whatever you need to feel pretty every now and then.
Other basics: Journal- I don't keep one at home, but it's such a great way to remember things.
Something to munch, because airport food is always expensive.
All your paperwork, and a spare copy in every bag, just in case.
Your money, also spread between at least two locations.
flashlight
empty water bottle to fill once you get through security
reading material
some strong cord


Your carry on should have everything you really need to survive- a change of clothes, papers, money, and any valuables, since it's the least likely to be lost or raided. A plastic bag or two is also handy, to quarantine dirty clothes as they are worn, and maybe a big one to cover the bag with if you are going to spend time outdoors.

The art in a nutshell: Pack everything you need. Look for versatility. Pack no more than you need. Travel light, be happy.

Around my computer lies a mess of paperwork, all indicating that I'm leaving Thursday. I've got a visa in hand at last, and a ticket to go with it.
My next job will be to get a return ticket- I do want to come home, ya know, and deal with all the bits of business of being gone.

I've been told that the ideal way to travel is with an open return ticket- a ticket which will allow me to come home any time within a 6 month or 1 year window. Generally, these are only available through travel agents, which I haven't bothered with up to this point. Second best, and less expensive, is a simple one- way ticket for the latest date I'd possibly use from an airline with low or no fees for changing tickets. Also, I could just wait and buy a ticket when I'm ready to come home, but there is a certain comfort level to having a guarantee of passage home.

Number two on the list is the good old IRS. I'll be gone through April. I've learned, though, that you can get an automatic extension for 6 months if you are out of the country by filing this.

Customs is going to be fun too. I want to take a few lettuce seeds- it would be a taste of home to have a wee little garden in my window in faraway China, but for none of the travel websites cover that. :( Maybe a gardening website?