And yes, I know it's been forever. I've been having real issues with blogger and proxies lately. I actually am writing more, but can't really get anything to save or post. Like, um, can you even see the slideshow in the previous post? Because I can't. but I'm way too frustrated to spend another half hour trying to solve it.

Things I ate in Yangshuo

Dan and I had a long vacation weekend at the beginning of May, so we went to Yangshuo in Guangxi Province. This was my first time traveling to a different province - or even city - in China. Guangxi and Guangdong province share a border ("xi" means west and "dong" means east) and we took a 12 hour overnight bus to get there. Of course, I was very excited about trying some new different food.

Check out the slideshow, plus some extra details below.


Guilin mi fen (Guilin rice noodles)
The local dish is Guilin mifen. Guilin is a larger city in Guangxi province, an hour or two from Yangshuo. Every time we were at the bus station, someone would run up to us yelling "Guilin!" and try to sell us a ticket. The noodles, though, are great. Rice noodles in broth with garlic, green onion, vegetables, spice, and maybe meat or pickled bamboo shoots - they're a little bit different everywhere you go. They make a great breakfast or lunch and give you lots of energy for biking through the countryside. They're also cheap. We ate them daily and never paid more than 5-8 RMB a bowl (about $1 US).
The photo is probably the best bowl I had, at a tiny roadside restaurant in Baisha town. They gave you the noodles in a metal bowl and you added your own flavoring and broth. Carrying a metal bowl full of boiling soup across a restaurant is harder than it looks.

Pijiu yu (Beer fish)
This is another Yangshuo specialty. The fish is cooked in beer, tomatoes, green onions, garlic, and chili peppers. The beer gives it a sour acidic taste, similar to using lemon when you cook fish. We accompanied our beer fish with the local LiQuan beer. You can get boneless beer fish if you pay extra, but Dan and I have been in China long enough to stop caring about fish bones.

I can't spell OR say gong xi fa choi

Rachel arrived in Hong Kong a little over a week ago. We spent the weekend there (post to come, as always, but you can check out Dan's take while you're waiting) and came back to Zhuhai on Monday night. We spent last week basically doing nothing but eating and getting massages. I love being on vacation.

This past Sunday was Rachel new year. Since Chevy's Mexican Restaurant doesn't exist in China, we decided to make our own fajitas. When we left the house to do some shopping we found our neighborhood completely empty, since it was also Chinese New Year's Eve. Zhuhai is a relatively young city that has grown exponentially in the last 20 years, so most people packed up and went home to set off fireworks, eat dumplings, and give each other lucky red envelopes. I wasn't sure if Sunday or Monday would be a bigger fireworks day. Well, it's Wednesday evening and people are still setting off firecrackers, so I guess I didn't have to worry about missing the show.

The supermarket is open but my gym is still closed, and since the electronics and computer stores beneath our building are also closed it's still really quiet in our neighborhood, except for the frequent explosions. It has also been fairly grey and chilly since the year of the ox began. But my biggest disappointment so far is that the bread family is still off visiting their family. Here is a picture of Rachel enjoying their product in happier times.


I don't know if I've ever written about this delicious food before, but it's basically thin garlic bread cooked quickly on the street. You can have them brush spice on it if you like. I spend a lot of time wandering my district of Zhuhai looking for the bread guy. I hope he's having a happy new year and that he comes back soon!

I went to Macao and all I got was this lousy coliseum.

Macao is an awesome and strange city that you have to show your passport to go to. You can walk across the border, and it is separated from Zhuhai by a giant underground market. Macao is strangely European-looking with plazas and street signs you can sort of read if you took any other Romance language. It has lots of casinos, which I haven't been to, and lots of delicious restaurants, which I have been to. Macao is also spelled Macau, but I like Macao better because both Chinese and Portuguese have the crazy -ao sound. I like to imagine the Portuguese came to China and said "hey you guys we have this crazy sound it is a and o TOGETHER!" and the Chinese were like "dudes, we invented it, ni hao already."

Here are some pictures from two different trips to Macao. The last time I went was in December so there are lots of Christmas decorations.

Good for health

That's one of the most common phrases Chinese people say in English. It's right up there with "lucky" and "very famous." To be fair: I can't make it through a single day in China without saying hao chi (delicious) and I say xie xie (thank you) like it's my job. I assume that "good for health" is roughly equivalent to your mom saying "eat that, it's good for you" because I've definitely been told that some very foul-tasting vegetables are very good for health. There's also times when it's really hard to argue, like when they say "fish skin... well, it's good for YOUR skin."

And then there's today. I had a crushing stomachache all morning and taught the majority of my classes while sitting down. I would have gone home sick if it wasn't the last day of the term - which I'm already finishing late from a previous sick day. For lunch I ordered the blandest tofu dish I could think of. The office staff asked me why I wasn't eating something spicy as usual, so I told them of my stomach troubles. They offered me some medicine. I'm pretty much a Western-medicine kindof gal, but beggars can't be choosers.

They handed me a bottle of pills so I could sniff it, because it smelled pretty strong. The pungent mix of fish and mint did not dissuade me, and they shook four into my hand and told me to swallow with water. Then they said "eat again in four hours... oh, look, English directions!" and handed me the bottle.

This is when I noticed the ingredients list was also in English. First ingredient: belladonna. You know, deadly nightshade. I guess at the very least my pupils will look big and beautiful. Second ingredient: creosote. I got this confused with creatine and was briefly really excited about bulking up and hitting more home runs next season. Unfortunately, creosote is either a wood preservative made from coal tar, or a Japanese herbal diarrhea remedy. I'm really hoping I got the latter.

This is why they cautioned all the Olympic athletes about taking Chinese medicine if they got sick. After four hours, instead of taking a second dose, I ran out of my next-to-last class and threw up in a bush. At least I made it one bush down, so instead of vomiting directly in front of my school, I did it in front of the music school next door.

Current food obsessions

Every few weeks in China I try some new dish, or learn how to say a new word, and then it's all I eat and all I talk about until I find the new thing. So I decided to share these (and some photos!) with you.
First off, congee (which is not called congee in Mandarin, but zhou).

This is a boiled rice porridge that is surprisingly delicious. Some reviews I saw on the internet called it boring and flavorless, but you're supposed to put stuff in it to make it taste better. It's like oatmeal, but more awesome because you add savory flavors, not sweet. It is also an excellent hangover cure and very good if you're sick. Dan's favorite variety has pork, mushrooms, and "century eggs" (preserved eggs that turn black from whatever they're preserved in). My favorite has chunks of boneless fish. Either way, you dump some soy sauce and white pepper in, stir thoroughly, then wait 20 minutes so it cools enough to eat. It is often served with a chopped-up fried dough stick (in Cantonese, the name means "fried ghost") which you dip in the soupy goodness. I ate this two hours ago and now that I'm typing about it I want it again.

My new favorite drink is ginger coke (jiang le). This is nothing but coca cola boiled with julienned or sliced ginger, then served in a coffee cup. It looks just like coffee until you stir it and all the ginger rises to the top. As Dan said in his blog, I drank this yesterday, today, and will probably drink it tomorrow and every day until I learn the name of a new beverage.

The last new food is not that new. It's French toast.

Back in late September, when we went to Wan Shan island, we saw someone else ordering this and managed to get our own. We even took this photo so we could order it the next day, but they were all out. The mythical French toast was forgotten until a few days ago Dan and I randomly pointed at the sandwich section of the Hong Kong restaurant's menu, and they brought us French toast (with syrup)! I don't know how to say this in Mandarin but I do know how to read it on a menu. Also, it is delicious to eat while waiting for your boiling congee to cool down.

End of the year book round-up

Every year, about mid-December, I get really excited about writing about the books I read in the past year. Since 2005 I've kept a list of everything I read; since 2007 it's been primarily online. In 2009 I might go back to the word document/excel file method, because one thing I miss about using goodreads is that I no longer have a tally of page numbers. I read fewer books this year than last year, but a lot of the books I read were fairly long. And I've been reading an epic biography of Mao Zedong for the last month (it's over 900 pages, but if you skip the interviews, index, and footnotes it's a mere 770!)

Overall trends of the year: short stories and nonfiction. Short story collections are good for the busy reader, and I'm happy to start reading more nonfiction because I used to be a straight-up novel girl.
Web reading trend of the year: lots of Google reader, especially science articles, and cutting celebrity snark blogs out of my life. (I've still got things like Gawker, Defamer, GFY, and the IMDB news feed, but I think I'm a much happier person for not reading I Don't Like You In That Way or Tyler Durden to find out who looks fat in their bikini.)
Recent bandwagon trend: the New Yorker fiction podcast. I can't really read on noisy crowded buses here, but with this podcast, it's just like I can.
Life change/awesome website of the year: Bookmooch! I had to get rid of a lot of my library when moving across the world, so I sold some books online, gave more to the library, conveniently forgot a few at friends' houses, and shared a lot through Bookmooch. I highly recommend it, especially for those of you still in the U.S. with its awesome cheap media mail. Giving a book to someone who you know wants it is a great feeling.

1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
2. Straight Man by Richard Russo
3. Tomcat in Love by Tim O'Brien
I started off the year with a mini-trend of college satirical novels. Lucky Jim is the best and one of the very first. I read Francine Prose's Blue Angel towards the end of 2007, which kick-started the college novel trend and led me to Lucky Jim, which I'd never heard of before. If you like this type of novel, you need to check out the original.
4. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley by Malcom X
5. Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore
6. My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro edited by Jeffrey Eugenides
I read a lot of books about birds this year.. but surprisingly, not these two.
7. Beautiful Children by Charles Bock
8. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
9. At Home in the World: A Memoir by Joyce Maynard
Felt sorry for her when I finished reading it, but still wanted to go read Salinger instead.
10. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
11. Up in the Air by Walter Kirn
12. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
13. Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park by Marie Winn
I didn't think this book was written particularly well, but hey, hawks! In the city!
14. Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris
15. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger
Loved Raise High the Roof Beam, couldn't make it through Seymour.
16. The Life of the Skies by Jonathan Rosen
Great book about what it means to be a birdwatcher/observe the natural world, and why it's so important, but I'm afraid that if I try to describe it it will sound really cheesy.
17. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
18. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
I am so glad I came back to this book and actually read it!
19. Things I Learned About My Dad: Humorous and Heartfelt Essays, edited by Heather Armstrong
A really uneven book of essays. I'm sorry to end the year with this one. Maybe I can read five hundred pages about Mao before tomorrow night.

This year I got away from my goal of reading National Book Award winners, Pulitzers, and the Modern Library's 100 best 20th century novels - the only one I picked up was Kavalier and Clay.

I can't really pick a favorite book of the year - as I look at this list, my choices seem to be all over the place. Best novel? Best nonfiction? Best essay or short story? Most important? Most thought-provoking? "Kavalier and Clay" is great, but you know that. Everyone should read Malcolm X's Autobiography. The collection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides has an awesome title referencing Catullus, a lot of excellent stories, and a human heart on the cover, so that's worth your time. "Beautiful Children" got a ton of hype and subsequent backlash, but in my opinion it's a very good novel about a child's disappearance that follows multiple characters through Las Vegas and manages to keep them all from becoming caricatures (usually).

All that said, I keep coming back to "Life of the Skies." Part history of birdwatchers and birdwatching, part quest for the ivory-billed woodpecker, part memoir; full of literary references and early Audubon illustrations; this book explores what it means to be a birdwatcher in the early 21st century - and I mean birdwatcher as in "hey, look, there's a robin in my yard" not snobby analyses of breeding plumage of tiny birds in treetops that all look the same from the ground. It's a big read, but a good one. Enjoy it while reading something else - may I suggest a collection of short stories or humorous essays?