圣诞节快乐！

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you're having at least as much snow as we :) And in case you haven't been following - that's not my living room in Nanjing, it's in Montreal. The scroll has been hanging there for two years already.

I arrived here half a day late because I got stuck in Chicago overnight. At least they put me in a hotel. But I didn't make much use of it, because I really wasn't tired. I had managed to sleep on the plane from Shanghai to Chicago. So there I was in my fancy hotel room (without mini-bar! argh) and a $10 dinner voucher that I couldn't spend anywhere. Not that I would actually want the dinner you can buy for $10 at the Chicago airport. The 80yuan coupon I got in Shanghai, on the other hand, was thoughtfully invested in dumplings. So when I finally got to Montreal (funny aside - my plane neighbors on the last leg of the trip had also come from China. Everyone seems to live and study there these days. If you aren't yet, you're missing out on a trend) I was pretty jetlagged and had no concept of time whatsoever, but I had the most pleasant immigration experience ever. I was apparently the first new permanent resident of the day :) The rest of Thursday was spent as usual - planning a dinner, going shopping and ending the evening at BU (our favourite wine bar). Ok, I admit, without a three hour power nap I wouldn't have pulled through this day. Friday evening we had some friends over for Christmas dinner, which involved - of course - a roasted honey-glazed duck (with orange-chocolate stuffing) and, a first-timer for us, pan-seared fois gras. I think we did pretty well, although we got better and better when practising with the leftovers. I have to say, finishing a whole liver is quite a formidable task. I suppose I could also mention the scallops with quince chutney and orange-endive salad or the ginger-honey parfait with rosemary figs, especially the latter one was quite interesting. The figs were caramellized and the whole thing came with a drizzle of pepper-rosemary-honey syrup. The syrup by itself tasted rather awkward, but turned the parfait from nice into surprising.

Anyways, getting to bed at 3am when having been up since 5am (thank you, jetlag) is quite rough on a rapidly aging woman, so I pretty much collapsed after that and spend all weekend doing nothing. Worst of all - my stomach rebelled and I can't really eat anything anymore. Maybe the first two days with above mentioned dinner and a lunch that involved oysters and braised rabbit was a bit too much. It might also have been the cheese, which I'm really not used to anymore. So, we found the perfect cure and that was our Christmas dinner:

Just kidding.



The duck wings, pork tongue with spicy cucumber and steamed dumplings were our lunch. If you are in Montreal, you should definitely check out the new location of Qing Hua on 1676 Lincoln (close to Guy Concordia). The interior is not really authentic Chinese anymore, it's now spacious and cozy, you don't have to share tables with strangers anymore and the waiters are really courteous, but the food still is.

True gems

Sorry for posting so many new entries at once. You see, the reason I haven't been writing much is not that nothing has happened, but that I can't access blogger.com from home and I haven't been frequenting my favorite cafe as often anymore. Too busy and I also like my home quite a bit these days...

But I had an amazing Sunday afternoon today and have to let you in on my story. Again, it is thanks to Liu Xing that this day was special and right now I am filled to the brim with warm and fuzzy feelings for the Chinese and I feel really privileged to be among such amazing, kind-hearted people. But first things first. I had mentioned to Liu Xing that I wanted to buy some Jade as souvenirs and she offered to take me to a store a friend knows the owner of. All the much better, we would also go for lunch together. So, we get to the store this Sunday and my jaw drops to the floor seeing the price tags. Holy shit, I knew jade was expensive, but this was more than I had expected. This must mean the earrings I bought last time in Beijing are fake :) Anyways, we agreed to meet her friend there, so we start browsing the shelves and I learn to appreciates the different shades of green and get an idea of what makes certain pieces more expensive than others (the intensity of the color, the translucency, the clarity of the stone, but also the craftsmenship in carving). Liu Xing's friend arrives and delivers some poisettas to the store. The price drops by 20%. Finally, her friend calls the boss. We wait for him. I get offered more pieces that they had been keeping in store. Just as we are being served hot water, the boss arrives. He is a Nanjing University graduate, probably in his 50s, looks more like an engineer to me than a jewellery store owner. After a little chatting, he's very pleased to hear I am studying Chinese and working at Nanda, the price drops to 50%. I am extremely happy, but also a bit embarrassed because I bought some of their cheapest stones. They are really pretty though, just not dark green but more white with a green tint. But honestly, you can easily leave 10k there for only one little green pendant.

So, it was time for lunch, and the boss suggested a noodle place nearby. I thought we were just taking Liu Xing's friend, but the boss also joined us. The noodle place turned out to be a Shanxi (a province in north-central China) restaurant. Wen they said "noodle" I imagined everyone of us to get a bowl of noodle soup, but the boss is friends with the owner of that place, so we got the chef's recommendation. And, well, there were noodles, three different kinds actually - long, rather thick egg noodles in a soup with peppers and beans, short irregular shaped egg-noodles fried with carrots and bacon (a bit like "Spaetzle") and some buckwheat noodles, that looked like short cannelloni and came standing upright in a steamer together with a sauce for dipping. Everything was drowned in garlic :) But that wasn't all! No, there were spicy wood-ear mushrooms and fried sausage as starters, garlic greens with chicken stir-fry, cabbage and the best - lamb chops with cumin. Wow, that was good lamb. Not the old mutton one gets most places, but really young and tender, delicate flavour lamb. We also got a corn-chowder as a side (could have used some salt for my taste, but I followed the others in spooning sugar into it). I had never had Shanxi food before, so that was definitely an interesting experience. And I could tell from Liu Xing's grin that she was just as happy as me to be treated to a nice, expertly chosen lunch. Because it turned out - the boss paid! I tried my best to take over the bill, thanking him profoundly for coming over to the store and giving me a discount, but he didn't want to hear about it. So, at the end of the day the lunch bill wasn't quite as high as what I had paid in his store, but he cannot have made much of a profit from me. I am really deeply embarrassed now for having stolen the time of three people to buy a little souvenir, but none of them seemed to mind terribly. That's what I mean when I say I feel really privileged to be among these people. I feel like I'm no longer just a 老外 Laowai (foreigner).

Chinese climate politics

Nowadays the German media is surprisingly China-phil. What's behind this new found love? Do tagesschau and Zeit believe they can actually influence the public opinion about China's climate policies and that in turn the (German) public opinion will push our politicians to reach out to the Chinese in Copenhagen?

http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/solarstadtrizhao100.html

http://www.zeit.de/2009/50/Regierungssysteme?page=2

For the less fortunate among you who are not fluent in German (ts, where is the time of Goedel and Wittgenstein, when every half-way intellectual learned German as a little child, along with Greek and Latin and French and... nevermind), one of the articles praises the town Rizhao in China that runs almost entirely on solar power (I assumed it to be a desert town; picture my surprise when I found it to be on the coast, about halfway between Beijing and Shanghai), the second one (from the Zeit - sorta the German version of le Devoir ;)) discusses China's dictatorship, pardon my language - strong central government is what I meant to say, as a benefit for climate change - only with a strong government, they argue, can you impose inconvenient rules and force your citizens to save energy and care about the environment. America and Europe i are apparently too democratic to save the planet. China certainly isn't the big planet saver yet either, but they might have a point. Incidentally, the article from tagesschau (the biggest German news show on public TV) comes out pretty well in google translate, while the Zeit is apparently too intellectual to be understood by a simple translation algorithm. Aren't we something? :) I can't help but be a bit bothered by the absolutism in both articles - not too long ago all you would hear in the German media was criticism of China's lack of openness and democracy and its terrible environmental track record. So, lack of personal freedom is a good or bad thing depending on the phase of the moon? Sorry, but that's not quite up to the standard we claim to impose on our unbiased media.

Thanks to IKEA I'm enjoying Gloegg (hot mulled wine) and ginger bread cookies and it's not even too cold at the moment, so life is good. Next week I have my Chinese final exam and although I know I don't have to care, having scored so well in the midterm, my ambition has been awakened... it should be possible to also score the best grade in the final, no? Wanna place bets? :P I'm not sure I will get my grades though, as I'm already leaving next Wednesday.

And in totally unrelated news... Washington DC's city council has approved a gay-marriage bill!!!! Yay!!! Who would have thought? It still needs to be signed into effect, so there's still the chance for some mormons to stage a protest. But even if they manage to pump enough money into a counter-movement as they did with prop8 in California... DC is not a state and therefore doesn't have a state constitution one could amend to make gay marriage unconstitutional! So, what would they amend then? :P

Food! Foodies! Duck!

Do I need to say more? :) Seems like my prayers have been answered, finally someone has taken pity on me and made it a project to introduce me to typical Nanjing food. The saint is LiuXing , my language partner. We have become quite good friends actually, laughing about each others mistakes is kind of a bonding experience I suppose :) I guess we started off on the wrong food (now that's a Freudian slip if there ever was one :P) - me cooking pasta for her and making her taste a piece of German style cream cheese ("Schmelzkaese"), because that was the only cheese-like thing I could find and really, I can't blame her she hated that. So, after that she always found excuses to not join me for dinner (I attributed that to this "diet" she keeps talking about). I finally managed to drag her out for lunch, because we were on the way to a pharmacy. Sometimes I do really need an interpreter's help. Pharmacies here are really interesting - apart from selling also "traditional Chinese medicine," which nowadays also comes in forms of pills and syrup (and according to the Chinese I talked to are not really potent anymore because they are not prepared fresh), they sell all sorts of stuff over the counter! Like birth control or, say, anti-depressants... wouldn't you think it's generally a good idea to see a doctor for that? Pharmacies here are more the European variety, not the American drug-store type that sells everything from aspirin to cat litter; some of them have showcases with dried ginseng roots, bird's nests, seahorses and the likes. The "traditional" medicine is characterized by coming in "green" looking packages, somehow reminiscent of homeopathy. No idea if that stuff actually helps. Whenever I was sick, I would get some of that on top of antibiotics, but I was never very convinced of either one helping much. But I can say this - if you ever contemplated eating patchouli - don't!

Anyways, back to the important matters. It was so sweet of Liu Xing, she had even looked up the translation of the specialty she wanted me to try - duck blood silk noodle soup. And she was afraid I might not like it (being a disgusting cheese eater and all). It was so much better than the duck blood soup I had tried in the canteen. I'm still not a big fan of the blood, it doesn't really taste like anything and has a weird consistency (sorta gelatinous, but less elastic), but the liver in the soup was nice. And the added bonus? This place also makes a sort of pastry that comes filled with either meat or bean paste, it's like a puff pastry but instead of butter - you guessed it - they use duck fat! Yum! I think they also sell a few other noodle soups, but the duck blood soup is really their trademark dish. Everyone who came in just said how many bowls they wanted and it was understood to be that soup. A very popular place for lunch, it was packed, but also tiny. There were only 4 tables with 6 seats each. For such a small noodle joint it looked surprisingly new and clean. Most restaurants here look run down when their not totally new. Even the fancier ones... it seems after a while, neglect creeps in and they just leave the beer cases in the entrance way or never bother to remove stains. When it stops attracting customers, it closes down, something else opens and the game begins anew.

In almost related news, I recently watched "Julie/Julia", about this woman who cooks her way through the Julia Child cookbook in one year and I really enjoyed it!Meryl Streep gives a pretty good Julia Child and I certainly gathered a new appreciation of what she did for American food culture. I also want to de-bone a whole duck now...

Still alive

No, the wolves didn't get to me in the end. But with a cosmology workshop going on and the crazy Italian being in town, I didn't have much time to write. The snow has thawed, the dogs finally came back and we're on our way again...

Last weekend brought a trip to Suzhou - the, or I should say one of the, Venice of the east. Well, I'd say it's more like the Mestre of the east (the industrialized suburb of Venice). There are some canals and lots of gardens (that's what it's famous for), but it is not exactly cozy. Some pictures of the "Humble Adminstrator's garden"...

suzhou

not so humble after all. Fortunately, my friend had insisted that we go to a small village and although I think he expected something more remote, where people still stare at the foreign "white devils" and not a cute renovated river town where you have to pay 80 yuan just to get into the old city, it was worth it (well, it was worth the 2 hour train and one-hour bus ride in any case). Tongli is much more like Venice. Especially in the sense that if you stray away from the main tourist road you find yourself in a residential area without any visitors and people look at you as if to say "what do you want here?" Oh, and there are also gondolas. And yes, the gondoliere (whatever that is in Chinese) also sings. Also terribly wrong. Instead of palazzi you can visit courthouse gardens and a "sex culture museum." That was quite interesting, actually. According to the exhibition there, homosexuality was never prosecuted in (ancient) China. I wonder if that's really true. Some of the paintings at least made it clear that it was not an absolute taboo.

Another cultural experience included a trip to the "Nanjing Massacre Memorial" Hall. It was not quite as depressing and gruesome as I had expected after several warnings. The architecture is quite oppressive, dark and looming, but in a modern, stylish way. The inside is m mostly a history museum, not just about the massacre itself, but also about the history of Sino-Japanese relations. The International Safety Zone is described as rather "unsafe" (Japanese would still invade the zone under the pretense of looking for hiding soldiers and weapons). But the fact that the Chinese Republican army basically abandoned the civilian population of Nanjing is only mentioned between the lines. Japanese atrocities are of course described in detail and condemned. It's certainly a political statement, but I think you can't blame the Chinese. Interestingly, the exhibition is in Chinese, English and Japanese; I guess they are making a point that no Japanese should be able to claim to not know about it.

I've also managed to get closer to my students. They seem to have accepted me as one of their own, in fact so much that one of them asked me a question in class... in rattling Chinese! I just stared at him horrified and then burst out laughing. I even had three of them over for dinner - my Italian friend just had to cook pasta for someone :) without cheese, of course. And then imagine what happened - one of them doesn't eat duck! Can you imagine?! I was just speechless. Incidentally that was the same guy who tried to talk to me in Chinese.

Surprises come in weird disguises. Today I met with an elderly physicist from the purple mountain observatory, who wanted to ask me questions about string theory! I wasn't all that thrilled at first, but we ended up having a rather nice discussion for 2 hours and then went for dinner together. Finally someone who wants to go to real restaurants! And it turns out, this guy, who is probably around 65, has studied Kung Fu for several years! I had already given up on ever meeting anyone who knows anything about traditional Kung Fu. Dinner turned into a discussion about proper iron palm technique (if you do it wrong, you ruin your eyes! seriously) and Qi as an effective theory :) Maybe I should mention that this guy grew up in Taiwan, I guess it's more likely to find traditional Kung Fu there. I was so happy that I even ignored the mediocre dinner for 100yuan. The roast pigeon was good though.

I have to say, I feel a bit let down by the food here. Somehow I expected less mediocrity. But then, why should China be different from any other place? There are always people who appreciate good food and those who don't. And I can't blame my students for not having the money to go to good restaurants. And if a place is really cheap, it means the ingredients aren't the freshest and they use inferior fat and spices, also here. It's just that all the Chinese I met in North America seem obsessed with food! In about the same degree I am. So I thought it must be infinitely better here than in any average Chinatown in the west. But I have no luck finding the really good places. Sometimes there is the occasional lucky find like the spicy eel in Suzhou or the Sichuan style smoked tofu in Tongli, but most of the time when I go out for dinner, the food is average (if I go with Chinese) or bad (if I go with the other foreigners). The sad truth is, I have been to a number of restaurants that were worth than the campus cafeteria!

Captain's Log

Lost track of the date. Can't tell how many days it has been since the nightmare began. The snow is still blowing heavy, the dogs have all disappeared, God knows where to. For all I know they might have torn each other into pieces. Sometimes there are strange sounds at night. It seems there is no going on from here, but I have to leave a warning to those who follow...

snow

The cold has crippled my fingers, the dim light of my IKEA lamp is barely enough to illuminate the little fortress of warmth I have set up in my living room. It is dark out there, close to freezing, visibility is down to almost zero and it's SNOWING! Yes, no kidding! I'm holding the fort as long as I can, but I don't know how long supplies will last. The door is barricaded, all heaters and weapons crammed into this room. I will not let them get to me. I WILL NOT LET THEM GET TO ME!!!

The misery of cold is painfully under-estimated. It creeps through the floors, cracks in the doors, seeps through the window... there is no escape. All I can do is pile on more clothes, scarves, hats... the gloves make it hard to type though. Even if my fingers freeze off... people have to be warned!


So you thought I was joking last time. But I did actually give my last lecture in winter jacket, scarf and gloves (fingerless to not get chalk all over them). It was miserable. I have great respect for the students who showed up and suffered with me. I had to end class early because my voice was fading. I still have a cold that knocked me out flat last weekend, and speaking in my "lecture voice" (I was told I have one, ts) at zero degrees air temperature was not a good idea.

I am not sure I have made it sufficiently clear yet - this place is crazy! Not just because a pack of 20 Lipton tea bags costs the same as a brand new 1.2 liter glass teapot, no, also because people here deal with the cold by wearing heavy down coats in their apartments! I have a good view into my neighbors kitchen and witnessed her putting on an apron - on top of her heavy coat! All the while they kept their kitchen window still open - at 0 degrees and snow?! Madness! They told me I'm going to southern China, not the South Pole! How can it be that I am freezing more here than I ever was in Montreal?! Gah! Btw, at the moment it's colder here than there, which is just wrong! WRONG!

I don't think the current weather has anything to do with the weather-experiment-gone-wrong snow storm in Beijing, but people assure me it's highly unusual to have this kind of cold weather already in November. I feel really bad for the students who live in unheated dorms where the windows don't really close. For the first time I can remember the sight of those white flurries didn't fill me with delight but with trembles of horror...

Nous sommes Canadiens!

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!! I can't believe it it! Our permanent residency application was finally approved! YAY! Long live the Queen! Or wait, vive le roi? Oh my, I am already confused. And I haven't even "landed" as an immigrant yet, which I have to do before the end of the year, so I'll be home for Christmas... dumdidumdidum. This somewhat overthrows our plans, but thankfully no plane ticket was bought, no commitments made, so we can start plan B - that is me coming to Montreal for a couple of weeks (depending on my boss' good will) and then hopefully handing over the apartment to a subletter (if you know anyone who needs a furnished apartment in Montreal for half a year or so, please let me know). I am not looking forward to such a long flight again so soon, but could there be a more charming place for Christmas than Montreal? :) I had already resigned myself to not having any Christmas at all (they don't even have the tiniest break here, I would have to teach all the way till the end of January), now I might even get snow! And I have to say, upon getting the news I was so happy that all my doubts whether I really wanted to go back to Montreal after the year here evaporated.

Apart from that, life here is going on as usual. The week just flies by with teaching and Chinese class (I got the class' highest score on the midterm :P I know, I know, I'm a total teacher's pet. But you know what?! I don't f***ing care!) and on weekends I buy household appliances :P Ok, I'm exaggerating, but I did buy heaters and did not regret it for a second. I need to be able to warm up somewhere. My neighbor (the nosy one with the little daughter) could not believe I had already used my heating. She said I wasn't wearing enough clothes! I was actually wearing three layers of shirts/sweaters and two layers of pants at that moment - I had just come from Kung Fu and had just put my street clothes over my Kung Fu clothes when the little girl came storming out of their door, grabbed my leg and basically dragged me into her apartment. I swear she must have been waiting behind the door for the sound of my key in my door lock! As if I didn't get enough of 5year olds at Kung Fu.

Speaking of Kung Fu, I witnessed a rather bewildering scene there last weekend. The other instructor (i.e. one of the guys who shows up in sports clothes and stands around smoking most of the time) - he trains the bigger kinds whereas the old Master Xu trains the little ones and me :) - got very upset at one student, I think this guy might be 18 or so. I have no idea what he did to anger the teacher so much, but he made him come to the front of the class and started to slap this guy's face. Then he said something to him, slapped him again. He seemed to become more and more angry, he got louder and started to slap harder. But the student didn't run, he just stood there, tears streaming down his face and took it. The other parents either went away where they didn't have to see it (aka the women) or walked over and talked to the angry teacher (aka the men). They didn't actually try to stop him from hitting that guy, but they seemed to try to calm him down a little. After about 30 smacks the class resumed. The boy went to wash his face and then continued the training. Wow. That was something different. Meanwhile, master Xu had continued with the little kids and told them to do their exercises and not stare at the other group. Needless to say this was the most disciplined class ever. Whereas yesterday, when it was just me and three 6-7 year olds, there was a lot of screaming, uncontrolled giggling, rolling around on the floor and playing tag with Master Xu. He carries a big stick, but never really uses it :) I will be careful to keep my distance from the other teacher though...

Last Saturday was the beginning of winter - according to the lunar calendar anyways. I managed to take Xu Feng (another one of my boss' students) out for lunch and we ate lamb - incidentally the traditional start-of-the winter dish. It's very "yang" (not just because that's Chinese for lamb) but also considered "hot" food you should feed on in winter. And indeed it was this delicious, very fatty, stewed-for-hours dish, exactly what one needs on a cold day. Xu Feng was amazed when I said "oh, this is good, and so fat!" He asked "You like fat? 90% of Chinese girls are on a diet!" (from my limited statistic I would say that's true) He says it's not because of the Western beauty ideal that girls want to be anorexic thin, but goes back much farther, maybe 200 or 300 years, when the heroine of popular novels where these fragile and sickly girls (I guess that's also what we can blame the footbinding on). Xu Feng is an interesting source of Chinese history. I also asked him about his attitude towards Japan. Apparently, the Nanjing massacre is still the number one topic in history books. It's quite embarrassing how little the Sino-Japanese wars are covered in our treatment of WWII, I think. And kind of weird how China points to Germany as a good example of dealing with their past in a way the Japanese should have - according to China anyways. Now, I wonder how the dealing would have been if the allies had decided to "denazify" Japan instead of Germany.

I have also recently worked on improving my history knowledge. I had never heard of this guy named John Rabe before my Montreal Chinese teacher mentioned him to me. He is called the "good German of Nanking" because he was the head of the International Safety Zone that was established to protect the civilian population of Nanjing (there wasn't really anyone else left since the army had abandoned the city and left its inhabitants defenseless against the Japanese killing and raping about 300,000 people in six weeks in the winter of 1937/38). There is a memorial site in his former residence, which is on the Nanjing University campus. The people who run this place (they had a seminar a couple weeks ago which I went to) take it surprisingly personal that John Rabe never achieved the same fame and popularity as Oskar Schindler, although he saved so many more people. Well, he used the fact that he was a Nazi and Germany allied with Japan to stop the Japanese soldiers. But he wasn't alone. There were also quite a few Brits and Americans involved. And how do you count exactly whom he saved? He was ordered to come home by the Nazi government and obeyed, abandoning the people of Nanjing if you want. Supposedly by then the Japanese troops had moved on or just gotten tired of the killing and raping and he had "accomplished his task" as the people at the memorial site view it. But it so happens that there are movies out there that portray him as not quite so heroic. The only proof of events really seems to be his diary, and although that's certainly an important historical document, I doubt it's completely unbiased. So, everyone has to make up their own mind, I guess. The memorial site was sponsored by Siemens & Bosch (for whom John Rabe worked in Nanjing) and Johannes Rau (former German president in case you don't know - the German president is just not that important compared to the chancellor, he mainly "represents"... and establishes memorial sites, I suppose).

Ok, that's my story of the day. Next week the crazy Italian :P is coming to visit and in about a month I'm already on a plane. Wow, times really goes by fast. Sometimes I wonder if a year is enough to really get a feel of China.