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!

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.

My routine

I've been in China for two and a half months and I'm settling into a routine. Saturday and Sunday are the marathon teaching days, but even these are getting better. Planning takes a lot less time than it used to; discipline and managing a kindergarten classroom are going much better; and last Sunday my teacher's assistant said she really likes the games and activities I've been coming up with. Most of my students seem to like me. A lot of them seem to spend a lot of time at the school - they're around hours before or after our class. These kids will come up to me during lunch or break and try to talk to me in English or Chinese. The little ones just scream "Hello!"; the older kindergardeners say "I am Candy, I am a girl" or occasionally "I am a pencil case" (that girl needs to study more); and one of my Children's class students has a mother who speaks good English and coaches him to come up and ask me "Can you read Chinese?" He then runs off to get a follow up question from his mother. During the two-hour break, I usually order lunch with the other teachers and staff, and we have it delivered to the school. But now that the weather's getting cooler I'm trying to go outside and take a walk, just get out of the building.

Besides the weekend slog, I teach adult classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings from 7:30 - 9:30. My first term of adult classes ended last week and I started the new term last night. I switched branches of the school but I'm teaching the exact same course again, which is nice. My old adult class was at the same place as my weekend classes, about a ten minute bus ride away. Convenient, but a bit boring to go to the same place 5 days a week. My new branch is also about ten minutes away, but quicker to get to because more busses run in that direction. It's a more commercial part of the city, with a lot of restaurants and barbeques open late, which is really cool. I think it will be a fun place to teach for the next two months.

So how do I fill my days? We get up in the morning and usually eat breakfast sometime between 10 and noon. This might be standard Western fare like eggs at our house, or steamed buns from a stand on the street. There's also a bakery we go to sometimes, but it's nothing like a Western bakery. Think of a danish with hot dogs or dried squid on top, and not a blueberry muffin in sight.

We usually go out for lunch because there are so many cheap options. There's a place close to our apartment that we call the pick and point, because you get a plate of rice and just point at three dishes you'd like to eat. It's usually pretty tasty, but every few trips you accidentally end up with a scoop of bitter melon or duck fat, so you have to exercise caution. Next to the pick and point is the muslim noodles place: mostly bowls of soup with fresh-made pasta, a little beef or lamb, and some vegetables.

Timing dinner on teaching nights is a little tricky, since we leave for class around 6:50 and I hate being full when I teach. We cook dinner frequently (we have a lot of spices now and can fake most Western food that doesn't require an oven) or go out with friends. There's a northeastern Chinese restaurant nearby that's open really late, so about once a week we'll end up eating dumplings there after English class.

Twice a week we have Chinese class in the morning and lately we've been spending a lot of time studying so we can get better. We're currently at a level where we can understand when people say "I don't think they speak very much Chinese, haha" so it's time to push it to the next level. We try to go out and do something at least once a week, whether it's shopping in a different part of the city, hiking on the nearby island, or even going to Macao. This past Monday we went to a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of the city. We go shopping frequently, usually for groceries or stuff for our apartment. Every shopping trip is an adventure, whether we're speaking Chinese to a saleswoman or trying to determine which bag of white powder might be flour. The easiest place to go is Jusco, the Japanese supermarket, but it's also expensive and full of women who follow you around trying to help you. We buy a lot of vegetables and some fruit from the stalls set up near our apartment; we've basically chosen two vendors we always go to and now they're charging us a little less. And we watch a lot of DVDs, because you can get almost anything here if you look hard enough. We finished season 1 of "Mad Men" last week and are currently watching "30 Rock" and "Generation Kill."

I hope this gives you a better idea of my life in China. Leave any questions in the comments!

Long days and weird food

One of my friends here said that the last time he talked to his mom, she admonished him not to waste his time here by drinking all the time. If my mom has similar concerns, my adventures yesterday should put them to rest.

We have some minor problems with our apartment, so in the morning Dan stayed to wait for the repair guys while I went out grocery shopping. I also wanted to buy some hair conditioner. Now, the supermarket we go to is massively overstaffed. There's a department store above the supermarket section, and if you so much as glance at a towel, a woman will race over to unfold it for you, then follow you around for the next five minutes suggesting additional towels and telling you in Mandarin how great they are. Downstairs, they're usually more relaxed. But since I can't read the Chinese characters for "conditioner" it took me too long to find what I wanted, and a clerk swooped in. I pointed at one of the few (expensive) bottles that actually said conditioner in English and used my favorite Chinese word, "this." Then I just stood back and watched her show me multiple bottles, all over 30 RMB, and let her point at various characters on the back that I couldn't even begin to read.

Eventually I grabbed the cheapest bottle with English writing on it and left the aisle. But she chased me down with a bottle of shampoo! I started breaking out all the Chinese I know, which is nothing but: "I have this." (pointing at shampoo)
"I don't have this." (pointing at conditioner)
and wishing I remembered the word for need. Then I started to mime washing my hair, at which point she got really confused and dragged me to the sushi counter to find someone who spoke better English. Luckily, a random customer who spoke English intervened and helped me pick an appropriate conditioner at 1/3 the price. It's even made by an American company, so I'm sure to like it.

In the afternoon, Dan and I had a cooking lesson with a friend who owns a baking school. Her chef friend taught us how to make kung pao chicken, deep fried peppers, and a pickled cucumber salad. In the US I think kung pao chicken is disgusting but this was amazing. It was the platonic ideal form of kung pao chicken. We're swapping Chinese cooking lessons for American cooking lessons, so we taught them how to make hamburgers. That's what they wanted to learn, and they took a lot of photographs.

To celebrate, we went to a dive bar! This is exciting because most bars in China are either outdoors (upside: watching the hookers run from the cops) or nightclubs (upside: drinking a bottle of whiskey mixed with green tea while playing rock-paper-scissors). We found a bar with a Coors Light sign in the window and played liar's dice with our friend Luke. We made friends with/were told various stuff we didn't understand by the Chinese guys sitting behind us, and when we tried to ask them what the name of the bar food they ordered was, we ended up eating a plate of snails. They're spicy but a real pain to eat, because they're tiny (about the size of periwinkles).

The night ended at Luke's friend Dongdong's house, where she served us the very famous bird's nest soup. I felt a little guilty about eating bird's nests, but I figured I might never get the chance again. It was actually delicious - very sweet, and the nest itself was like really thin noodles. Plus, it was awesome when someone leaned over to me with a pocket translator to tell me what I was eating, and the translation came up "edible bird's nest." Definitely the strangest thing I've eaten so far.

Bon appetit

I was reading this article from the Times yesterday, about how some chefs in New York are ordering whole cows and pigs and butchering them themselves. And my first thought was "so what?" Being in China, even for just a month, has really changed how I think about food. Yes, you can go the supermarket and get a container of ground beef, frozen pre-cooked shrimp, or even a bag of frozen chicken nuggets. But then you turn around in that very supermarket and you see a wall of fish tanks (including live turtles) and a half a cow hanging from a rack. Not behind a counter near a friendly, red-aproned butcher, but right on the floor, so close that you might have to step behind it to avoid a tiny child in a shopping cart car.

And this is the fancy expensive Japanese supermarket, which is great for the selection and for nervous foreigners who like their meat refrigerated. Most people don't get their groceries there. On the street behind our apartment is a series of stalls and markets. We have no problem shopping for vegetables or fruit down there, and there's a stand with amazing vegetable and pork steamed buns that I'm getting hungry just thinking about. But we also have the option of big cuts of raw meat sitting out in the 90 degree heat, or all the drying fish and shrimp you could possibly want. So far we have resisted those temptations.

Also on the same street, there are two restaurants we often go to for cheap lunches and dinners. There's the "pick and point" where you get rice, soup, and three random vegetables or meat that you point at (for about 1 American dollar) and its neighbor, Muslim noodles - delicious noodle dishes cooked and served by women in headscarves. In between them on the sidewalk is a crate of live chickens. Not only does this guarantee your meat is fresh, it provides dining entertainment when people come up to purchase one. China is not a land of Purdue chicken tenders. When you want to buy a chicken, you pick one that looks delicious and wait for a nice-looking young woman to kill and pluck it for you. If watching this while you eat makes you uncomfortable, just make sure you get to the table first so your chair faces the opposite direction.

Not speaking Chinese sucks

So I've been planning to start my China blog (and shamelessly steal pictures from Dan's) but lately, I haven't been in that good of a mood. I thought maybe I would wait until I had something more to say than "Not speaking Chinese sucks" and "It's really hot here."

But wait! Not speaking Chinese really does suck! I only go to restaurants with pictures or English on the menu, or places where the food is all in hot trays in front of me and I point at what I want to eat. Sometimes when people get tired of trying to tell me something, they write it down. This doesn't help at all because the only characters I know are "people", "mountain", "middle", "kingdom", and the name of our city. Surprisingly these don't come up very often when people write things down for me, so I just stare at it for a while and think "hmm, that one looks kindof like a house. And it's next to a squiggly!"

Thursday Dan and I went to Qi Ao island, and after hiking around we found a restaurant on the beach. We were sitting in the shade and had a nice view of the Pearl River, old men fishing, and young brides getting wedding photos taken on the beach. Everything was going well, until the waiter brought our menu - which was all in Chinese. I stared at it, looking for "people" or "mountain" or maybe even "middle" until the waiter started recommending dishes to us. He started with the most expensive so we didn't say yes until he hit something in the 30 RMB area. This is what we got:



a duck and celery dish



and fried tofu and skinny mushrooms.

The duck and celery was good, but the fried tofu dish was amazing. When we paid for our meal I tried to ask the waiter what it was called, so maybe I could order it again. Unfortunately he only said "jige"* which even I know means "this one."

For my job, I'm teaching kindergarten and first year children's classes. Every child I teach is between the ages of 4 and 8. Their English is actually a lot better than my Chinese, but they frequently say Chinese words that I know, and that's exciting!
1 - they always call me "laoshi" (teacher)
2 - when I ask for volunteers they get really excited, raise their hands, and say "wo" (me)
3 - today I was teaching numbers to my youngest class and they kept using the Chinese numbers, which is about all the Chinese I know!

Anyway, soon I will be taking Mandarin classes from my school, and I have a number for a private tutor. One of the reasons I came to China is to learn Mandarin, so I'm going to be really serious about it. And I know it's my problem: I'm not one of those obnoxious westerners who says "why don't they speak English?" I'm in their country, I'm the one who needs to speak their language. I just find the combination of tones and characters ridiculously hard to pick up.


* - Note: I totally can't spell in pinyin but it's better than my Chinese characters!