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!