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| ganzhou |
First we had coffee (I can't go more than two days without catering to my addiction) in a super-fancy cafe by the river. I wonder who can afford this! I seemed to be the only foreigner in town - all weekend people were staring at me wherever I went. But there were actually a few Chinese in the cafe. Well, also my two guides seem to make a decent living - one works for a software firm in Shenzhen, the other one is in real estate in Guangzhou. Then they drove me around town on their mopeds - we also stopped by both their parents houses. That was certainly an interesting lesson. Liu Zhuang's grandfather was in the army, so he got to own a house! Everyone else I met so far lives in an apartment. Their house is a nice 2-story building right in the middle of the city, they have their own cozy courtyard with a garden, and it's surrounded by tall apartment buildings. Kind of surreal. I only caught a little glimpse of their sitting room, it seems to be furnished with redwood, antique (looking?) furniture. The other Liu is the son of a police officer - his parents live in an apartment that, I guess, is part of his employment. It's a brand new apartment tower right behind the police station. It's very common in China, also for professors for example, to get an apartment as part of their benefit package. That's often more useful than a higher salary. The police man's apartment was huge! And totally brandnew. But it looked like the parents were a bit lost in their, as if someone had taken them from a country side place (they were dressed in very simple clothes, no, not Mao suits, and wore their synthetic down coats inside the apartment - as they all do - and the mother's face looked lined from years of hard work. There is something about Chinese of that generation that makes them look very alike (at least to me, the ignorant foreigner), no matter what their background or profession is - I guess it's because they grew up during the cultural revolution) and dumped them in this huge apartment furnished with a mega-size leather couch and two fridges in the the living-dining room. When we arrived, they were actually in a small bedroom, huddled around a heating lamp. They made me sit down, served me tea and peanuts and oranges and the mother asked all kinds of questions. She seemed very excited by my presence. When she asked my age, her son quickly covered her mouth with his hand and gently explained to her that one cannot ask a western woman such a question :) She apologized profoundly and I tried to explain that it's no problem that I get asked this question all the time and I'm used to it. I was very amused. Actually, it annoys me much more that people usually throw "are you married? what about kids?" at me. Somehow I find that more personal than my age, but maybe that's just me. So, compare these living conditions with my friends' parents, who are both doctors, but live in a simple apartment from the 50s or 60s - very similar to the first two apartments I looked at when I was looking for a place in Nanjing. It's all clean and functional, but very simple. Their couch and furniture is old, but they have a new fridge, TV, microwave. Still, the doors were rough wood and there were numbers above the doors. I don't quite know how to describe it, but it had a bit the feel of communal living quarters to it.
In the evening we met the other friends of bride and groom and had dinner together - that was much more enjoyable than the lunch. They are all really nice people and made me feel so welcome. After dinner we went for Karaoke :) It was not my first time in a Chinese Karaoke bar, but the first time with Chinese. In contrast to foreigners, it's not just a petty excuse to get drunk and stoned. No, they take the singing seriously! By God. Even the guys were singing their heart out to kitschy Chinese love songs. They might have been a bit disturbed by my performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody," but I have to say I didn't remember the lyrics were quite that bad :) We only had four beers among 7 people (I made them try the Tsingtao stout, which none of them had had before, and it was received with a lot of enthusiasm) but the atmosphere was really hilarious nevertheless. I wish my students in Nanjing were a bit more lively. It's hard enough to get them to come out for dinner with me (I have to invent reasons why I owe them for something, so they can let me pay for their dinner without having to feel like they need to repay me - so I was told by my friend when I complained that they students never want to let me take them out - one example of the Chinese concept of "face," I would make them lose face if I always pay for them, I have to let them return the favour to balance the scale. Well, in my view they have helped me so much dealing with Chinese bureaucracy and shopping thta I could not repay them even if I tried), I don't see them do karaoke. But maybe they're still a bit afraid of me :)
So, and now it's time to say goodbye to our vegetarian (and other faint hearted) readers - hush, hush, off you go - and turn to some food stories. I hope those who are interested held out all the way till here. The dinner with friends was really fun. We went to a place with Ganzhou specialties, and one of them was - dog! If I ate it? Of course I ate it. You have to try everything once, right? Well, maybe except those things that one can really only try once and stay alive... anyways, how it was? Well, to be completely honest... it was delicious! It came in a spicy stew (because dog is very "yang" (hot) as opposed to "yin" (cold)) and tasted like... eh... chicken! :) just kidding. Maybe a bit like rabbit, but the farmed one, not the wild one. It did not have any gamy taste at all in fact and was rather fat. It came chopped in little pieces (for once without head), so I can't judge its size. But I was told by the Chinese that it's usually small dogs used for food, and that they're farm-raised. I truly hope so. But considering how fat the little bugger(s) was(were), I'd say they can't have lived on the street. The first bite was especially good, because it was still really hot and the skin (think lamb leg rather than chicken skin) sort of crispy. Yum. So, whoever is not freaked out, please raise your arm? Ah, I see. Maybe I'll save the cat story for another time :P To be honest, I haven't seen cat on any menu yet. It's supposedly not so good, because it's meat is a bit acidic. I'd like to try snake, but that is only served in the south, I think. And I don't know enough about turtles to know which are ethical to eat and which are endangered. Maybe I'll make that my next project to find out. If it's any comfort if you slightly creeped out - almost half the Chinese there didn't eat the dog either, some even acknowledged it is because they like the little puppies. Oh well. I guess another culinary tradition that is going to die out with this new generation of Chinese.
Other delicious dishes included duck (unfortunately in a stew - that's all I seem to get these days, typical winter food, I suppose; I could kill for a freshly roasted duck, I'm getting really tired of stewed meats in brown sauce), steamed fish, fish balls (fish grind into a paste, add starch, form balls and fry them, then they are served in a soup with mushrooms where they soak up the mushroom flavour), fish noodles (the noodles are actually made from fish - I got some to take home from my friend's mom, but haven't tried them yet, you just use them like rice noodles in a soup, just that it's gonna taste fishy), steamed pork sausage (homemade!) with peanuts - that was very tasty - and lots of chicken in all sorts of varieties. I also went to a
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| food_fair |
next to my hotel, lucky me, of course there had to be one there that weekend, and had a very yummy banana pancake. You have probably heard the rumor that Italians stole the noodles from China? Well, it appears also the method of making pizza dough was copied from Chinese :)
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| pizza |
You guys are lucky that I didn't mind behaving like a completely idiotic tourist in Ganzhou - I probably won't go back. I'd never display the same unrestrained photo taking here in Nanjing :)
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