Nighttime in China Street Scene – Boys watching TV

Nighttime in China Street Scene – Boys watching TV, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

I guess it must be girls night out . . . I think in bedding shops it’s usually women selling stuff . . . but I don’t think the gendered division of labour is as segregated as what I’ve seen while living in Korea.

J

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Nighttime in China Street Scene – Bus Stop I

Nighttime in China Street Scene – Bus Stop I, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

I’m posting this picture because you can see the * by the bus number which means that this bus has air conditioning and you have to pay 2 yuan for the fare.

Now newbies to China, myself included, should realize that just because there’s a * doesn’t mean that the interior temperature and humidity levels will be cooler than the outside conditions–in fact, a fair amount of the time it might even be hotter and more humid inside!!!

Tonight, the bus we got on actually had good air conditioning . . . and this really helps Julianne and I not get irritated by the sardine-packed-conditions of the bus we were on. There were so many people that more couldn’t enter anymore by the front entrance of the bus so they’d just climb in the back exit doors . . . this is not unusual, either, for bus culture in China from what I’ve seen.

Anyways, the extreme bus culture of China is definitely not something we will miss after leaving!

J

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Nighttime in China Street Scene – Shirtless, Beer, Snacks, and Girlwatching . . . this is China! II

Nighttime in China Street Scene – Shirtless, Snacks, and Girlwatching . . . this is China! II, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

Well, Julianne and I are slowly nearing the end of our time in China–we leave in a couple days.

It’s been extremely hot and humid outside now for several days. Sometimes there’s a semi-cooling breeze that keeps things tolerable in the shade, and sometimes there’s not and you begin to feel like you’re walking through an outdoor sauna . . . and it’s only going to get hotter as the summer progresses!

Anyways, tonight we went out for dinner with friends. One of them had a brother visiting from America, and they had just returned from Beijing and traveling around doing the tourist thing.

We went out for Korean food and had a good time talking about the brother’s first experiences in China. I also got a great picture of him trying kimchi for the first time–he pretty much did the classic contortion and smile to try and hide the shock at how spicy/sour/salty/unlike-anything-you’ve-ever-eaten-in-your-entire-life-before-face . . . it was FANTASTIC!

Later, as we were walking around to do some shopping I saw a classic THIS IS CHINA nighttime street scene.

Shirtless, cold beers, snacks, and sitting with friends by the street having a good time . . .

Awesome!

J

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Julianne’s Brownies

Julianne’s Brownies, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

At Metro you can buy Betty Crocker brownie mix . . . yum.

While I think I’m a fairly decent cook when it comes to baking and making western style foods–Julianne is a thousand times better.

I’ve made brownies using the Betty Crocker mix, and thought they were good.

Then I tried Julianne’s brownies that she made with another package of the same Betty Crocker mix . . .

Julianne’s brownies are superior–no contest.

This morning Julianne baked up a ‘last batch of brownies in China’ for us . . .

Don’t they look good?!

J

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Julianne’s Curry Chicken II — and — Happy Canada Day!!!

Julianne’s Curry Chicken II, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

Julianne and I get asked a lot by our students and other university teachers here in China if we like Chinese food and how often we eat it, etc.

We really like Chinese food and there are very few dishes we’ve come across that we didn’t like when eating at the restaurants in Changsha.

We also, of course, like to eat western foods from North America, and foods from other cultures like India, for example.

Since we haven’t heard of any Indian restaurants in Changsha we decided to make some curry style chicken when we came across a packet of seasonings in Metro (similar to COSTCO) a few weeks ago.

The only problem was that even with the ‘prepared’ seasonings the recipe on the package called for ingredients and items we don’t have in our apartment. We also knew we couldn’t find them in Metro.

Anyways, Julianne improvised with what we had in our kitchen and produced a really good tasting curry-esque chicken dish (I’m sure substituting ketchup for pureed tomato might have altered the dish a wee bit, lol).

As a side dish we had baked potatoes which are surprisingly cheap to buy here.

It is possible to cook western/foreign food dishes here in Changsha but it pays to bring spices you love from home on the plane. You can get quite a few at Metro and Carrefour, but others are impossible to find.

Next week I’ll be back in Canada and can’t wait to go into a grocery store and experience the extreme reverse-culture-shock of seeing so many choices . . . it really hits home how privileged one is to live in Canada after being overseas for several years.

Happy Canada Day!!!

J

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Chinese Food at Maojia Restaurant, Changsha (14)

Chinese Food at Maojia Restaurant, Changsha (14), originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

Well, today was my birthday and Julianne and I went out for dinner at Maojia’s Restaurant with our student assistant and his girlfriend.

Apparently the owner of this restaurant is a relative of Mao’s and the menu has several of his favorite dishes. We ordered some of them and I took close-up shots of each dish which you can see on my flickr page.

I found it a ‘little’ ironic that the menu was a GIANT RED BOOK, lol. I should have snapped a picture but forgot to. There was a picture on the cover of Mao and some of his relatives and in particular the woman that owns the restaurant; I’m supposed to get an email soon with a link to the picture as it’s ‘famous in China’ so I’ll add that to this post.

Getting a taxi back to the apartment was a bit of a task with Saturday night traffic, and then, of course, we rear-ended another taxi . . . luckily it was just a tiny bump.

The driver got out of his car and looked like he was going to try and throw a fit to get some cash but I gave him my best teacher-look-of-don’t-you-dare-do-that and he hesitated, and I kept staring him down as the driver of our taxi got out to talk to him . . . and luckily the other driver decided he didn’t want to throw a temper tantrum, and gather a crowd of people around to hold a ‘street court judgement session’ which seems to happen in China with these kinds of situations. Before the other driver gave up, though, an old guy on a scooter stopped when we first bumped the taxi and said a comment, and two other guys then wandered over from the sidewalk. . . but luckily for Julianne and I the other driver gave up and drove off.

I guess the last thing to say about my birthday is that the Chinese weather gods must have decided to send me a gift today because the heat and humidity were pretty much absent when I headed out tonight for dinner. There was a blue sky, some nice sunlight, a good breeze, low humidity and the heat of summer was absent–nice!

J

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The Meat Carver Man and THIRTY KINDS OF MEAT!

The Meat Carver Man, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

A few days ago Julianne and I were taken out by a Chinese couple who are awesome friends of ours.

We went to a German-Chinese fusion buffet restaurant.

Our friends ordered and set up our bill with the server, and we went to fill up our plates and then came back.

That was when the Meat Carver Man began coming by periodically with skewers of different kinds of meats. He’d set up and cut off some meat for us and we’d each eat some.

After about the fifth appearance of Meat Carver Man I began to wonder how many DIFFERENT kinds of meat our friends had ordered for us.

Our friend, after hearing my question, leaned forward with a big smile on his face and said, “There are over 30 different kinds of meat in this restaurant.”

I’m pretty sure if there had been a video camera trained on Julianne’s face and mine that we blanched simultaneously at the images of what eating THIRTY different kinds of meat would do to our digestive systems . . .

Our friend must have seen this because he then said, “Each day they choose 20 to put on the menu.”

Oh, ONLY 20? Lol! I then told our friends a story about my first year in Korea and how the Korean teachers took me to a raw seafood restaurant where they ordered more than 20 different kinds of fish and repeatedly kept ordering me to eat and eat and eat . . . I then said “later that night I had to spend a lot of time in the bathroom.”

The word “bathroom” in this context lead to a discussion about how Chinese people say “WC” for toilet/washroom and how “WC” stands for “water closet” (anyone who thinks American English is dominant in China needs to teach and live here before saying that!). After exploring the origins and variations of the words we returned to ‘spending hours in the bathroom’ and what it meant–which was explained in Chinese by the English teacher to her husband because he wasn’t sure what I was alluding to, lol.

I think maybe five or six more different types of meats were delivered by Meat Carver Man before a cessation in the meat-blitzkrieg suddenly halted . . . I realized that sometime during one of my trips to the buffet tables my friend must have altered the order so that Julianne and I wouldn’t have to be forced into eating more than we felt was healthy or safe for us.

This was incredibly awesome of him to do because in most of my experiences in Korea, which is my general basis of contrast and comparison for Chinese culture, whenever this kind of situation would happen my Korean host/colleagues/friends would not be able to catch the ‘hints’ I’d start giving that I didn’t want to stuff myself to the point of illness or spending hours in the bathroom just in order to allow them to fulfill their ideas of what ‘good hospitality’ means (which all too often is about what the host wants versus what the guest NEEDS in Korea).

Kudos to my friend for listening to Julianne and I.

J

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Buffet Restaurant in China

The Restaurant, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

Julianne and I were taken out to a buffet restaurant in China a few days ago by a Chinese couple we are friends with.

Some observations about our experience there . . . with so many people inside the restaurant it was a ‘everyone for themselves’ kind of dynamic when it came to getting food at the buffet tables.

I get why this is necessary because with so many people all wanting to get the same thing at the same time (as in a particular food tray), or do the same thing at the same time (as in use the soda fountains), if you act like a Canadian (which I AM) and let someone go ahead of you if you’re unsure who go there first or who is next in line (next in line–ha, I kill me!), then you end up waiting while 20 Chinese people just go and keep on going as the-idiot-Canadian-stands-there-not-wanting-to-be-rude-and-push-in-cut-someone-off . . . I only did that ONCE, however, as I’ve now been overseas long enough to know not to, for example, hold a door open for someone in a shopping mall in Korea thus becoming/transforming in the Koreans’ minds a doorman–yes, it happened to me.

I don’t mind jockeying for position or having to cut off some little kid or polite and shy woman anymore since that seems to be the cultural norm and expectation–I do mind, however, having to fight to find a pair of tongs so that I can actually put food on my plate while going down the buffet tables. Looking around I saw that several people had just picked up the tongs off their resting plates and were using them as their own PERSONAL TONGS while the other half of us looking to load our plates had to wait for an opportunity to snatch up the tongs once a person had finished with them.

My Canadian cultural ‘DNA’ at first told me in a panicked voice that it would be rude to take a pair of tongs and use them just for myself to get food from different trays–but after standing there for what seemed like several minutes but was only one I told the voice to shut up and grabbed tongs and didn’t put them down till I’d got my plate loaded . . .

If I’d been able to I would have taken a picture at the soda fountains where it looked like a multi-body-octopus’ arms were flying in and out and all around the nozzles with glasses being held by different people trying to fill them up . . .

Anyways, the food was really good, and for Julianne and I the general experience was the closest we’ve had to being in a ‘western style’ food and service environment in China.

J

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Dinner Horde – Waiting for the restaurant to open its doors . . .

Dinner Horde – Waiting for the restaurant to open its doors . . ., originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

A few days ago Julianne and I were taken out by a Chinese couple who we really like and enjoy spending time with.

When we arrived at the German-Chinese fusion food buffet restaurant there were about 75 or so people already waiting. I used the word ‘horde’ in the title but I don’t mean that they were uncivilized or acting poorly. It’s just that the 75 grew to be what I would guess around 200+ people all waiting outside the restaurant to go inside . . .

I asked our friends how big the restaurant was and was told ‘about the size of a football field’ and I think that is probably accurate.

A few minutes after 5pm (no one was allowed to enter before hand), the doors opened and at this point I think the word ‘horde’ again became appropriate as EVERYONE tried to go through the entrance at the same time. Our friends apologized for the behavior but I told them not to worry about it because we’d already experienced door cramming culture in China while getting on and off of buses, lol.

In my entire life I have never seen a restaurant go from completely empty to completely full and buzzing with sound and action in less than 60 seconds–it was astounding to see!

I’ll write more about the buffet experience in my next post.

J

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Xiang River – Giant Mao Head – Changsha, Hunan, China II

Xiang River – Giant Mao Head – Changsha, Hunan, China II, originally uploaded by Serenity in China.

A few days ago Julianne and I went out for dinner with a Chinese couple that we are friends with.

It was an awesome night as the couple treated us to dinner at a German-Chinese fusion buffet restaurant, and then afterwards they let us stop to snap photos along the Xiang river.

Our friend really wanted us to take some shots of the giant Mao head that sits on a little islet in this part of the river so we did. He then wanted to do a couple shot of us with the Mao head in the background.

I didn’t know how to diplomatically explain that taking a ‘romantic couple shot’ with the Mao head in the background is tantamount to taking a ‘romantic couple shot’ with, oh, let’s say the short dude with the small ugly upper-lip mustache and penchant for doing straight-armed salutes into the air who sent millions of people . . . in the background of a ‘romantic/couple’ shot . . . it’s just about the most complex and dangerous cross-cultural topic one can bring up in China and I didn’t know of any way that I could say something . . .

I guess this picture really illuminates, especially for me, how differently foreigners see Mao versus how he is represented within China.

’nuff said about that, I think.

J

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