Fuddland
Category: China
In February 2006 I moved to China. These are some of the things that happened while I was there.
This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:
- Chinese [1]
- Cultural Experiences [34]
- Sightseeing [4]
- Sinomoblog [36]
- Sinonews [41]
- Suzhou Gardens [3]
- Teaching in China [10]
- Travelling in China [5]
For my Chinese homework last week, I had to write out one of my favourite recipes from my home nation. Seeing as though the lack of an oven out here prevents me from enjoying a good old home-made Shepherd’s Pie, let alone a Sunday Roast, I thought I’d introduce my teacher to the delights of my delicious chilli, which of course is a traditional British dish first cooked by Sir Jeffrey Chilli of Chilli-on-the-Wold in 1423.
大卫的墨西哥辣味牛肉
原料：
绞细牛肉500克
一半洋葱 （剥皮的）
三~五瓣大蒜 （剥皮的）
一罐四季豆（420克）
红辣椒（按口味）
枯茗子
三~四西红柿
一罐浓缩番茄酱（150克左右）
盐
准备：
先把蔬菜洗干净，把四季豆洗净。把洋葱、大蒜、红辣椒切成小块儿。
方法：
把火点着，把锅放在火上，马上把牛肉放进锅里。 是对的，没有油！所以， 很重要你立刻用铲子炒一炒。在炒一炒以前牛肉变成褐色的。把洋葱、大蒜、红辣椒放进锅里， 炒一炒。
把切好的西红柿放进锅里，把枯茗子、盐倒进锅里， 用铲子搅拌均匀，把锅盖放到锅上。 等5分钟左右。
把四季豆、浓缩番茄酱放成锅里，搅拌均匀。把锅盖放到锅上，煨30分钟左右。偶尔搅拌。
跟米饭吃。
The Chinese is by no means perfect, and I’m relying heavily on the dictionary giving me the correct translations for cumin and kidney beans, so I’m accepting no responsibility for any culinary disasters that may result from any Chinese-speakers following the above recipe. For non-Chinese speakers, you should have no problems at all following the Google automated translation of this page.
2008 / 06 / 02 – 10:18 | Comment [4] | Top
Waiting for the bus after teaching the other day, I suddenly noticed a small family of goats munching on the hedges of the central reservation. I really couldn’t have better planned the sudden appearance of the goatherd.
Whenever I need a bit of cheering up, I play this movie I made at the kindergarten at which I used to teach.
In: China
2008 / 04 / 16 – 21:31 | Comment [1] | Top
One of the must-dos in the province of (广西) is a leisurely cruise down the River (漓江) from (桂林) to (阳朔), taking in 83 kilometres worth of the renowned karst scenery. The weather was not totally on our side, presenting us with a rather overcast day, but it was still a lovely way to spend five-or-so hours.
A coach picked us up from our hostel and stopped off at a couple of other nearby hotels to collect the other members of this particular scheduled cruise. Once we were all aboard and on our way to the pier, we were given a brief history of the region by the tour guide, but the most entertaining thing he said was when, since lunch on the boat was part of package, he enquired if there were any vegetarians on board. Several people raised there hands, only to be told:
Okay, can you tell me who you are again when it’s time for lunch? All foreigners look the same to me.
[Aside: this appears to be genuinely true and not an intentionally ironic twist on the racist stereotypes displayed in many a terrible British sitcom from the 1970s; several other Chinese people have told me they have a hard time distinguishing many Western people from each other. Mary explained to me that this is because although people of East Asian descent generally all have straight, black hair and brown eyes, they have a much wider variation in their facial features — the width and positioning of their eyes, the length of their noses, and so on — than Caucasians. So whilst people of European descent are conditioned to use the visual clues of hair and eye colours when recognising others, if those aspects are subconsciously disregarded, there’s a lot less to distinguish one Caucasian from another.]
The journey took us past some imaginatively- and not-so-imaginatively-named rock formations such as Yearning for Husband Rock, the Painted Hill of Nine Horses, and Writing Brush Peak, and there was a sublime moment of comic timing when, just as we were tucking into our lunch below deck, our guide informed us that we were about to glide past the most famous of all the River vistas — the one that appears on the back of the ¥20 note.
The cruise ends at the town of , which these days is entirely given over to tourism: literally every place of business is either a travel agent, restaurant, cafe, bar, hotel, souvenir shop or some such establishment. There were more eating places specialising in Western food than Chinese cuisine, and at night the main streets are garishly lit with ill-thought-out neon, waging war on your eyes while your ears are similarly assaulted by the clash of dance music pumping out of every bar. That’s not to say these places are all dreadful — the Karst Cafe and Drifters Cafe both had good food and wine, and we sampled the Rosewood Cafe’s ice cream menu a couple too many times. My two-years-in-China anniversary on February the 17th was celebrated with Shepherd’s Pie, apple crumble, and a nice bottle of French red — not a particularly Chinese meal but delicious nonetheless. But the real reason to spend any time at all in is to visit the surrounding countryside.
I think most people hire bicycles, but we opted for what we thought would be the easier option of an electric scooter. [For the benefit of any parents who might be reading, let’s all pretend that, yes, of course helmets were provided.] We asked what the best direction to head was, jumped on, and away we went.
Now excuse me while I gush: whizzing along the roads through the undulating countryside — karst after karst towering over small plots of farmland; passing through small villages and townships — with Mary riding pillion, her hands tucked into my coat pockets for warmth, her face pressed against my back as she too admired the scenery, is simply one of my happiest memories of the past thirty-one years. Even though the battery ran out of juice earlier than we estimated because we kept going further and further out and, despite stopping for a late lunch at a roadside noodle place and borrowing their electricity to charge it up for an hour, we ended up having to push the scooter for about 10 kilometres back to , in the dark and the rain, and I was a cranky old so-and-so for most of this time, thinking about that day gives me a goofy little smile that I have no intention of hiding.
In: China / Travelling in China / Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan Island
2008 / 03 / 30 – 09:25 | Comment [1] | Top
In: Moblog & China / Sinomoblog
2008 / 03 / 24 – 21:56 | Top
Tearing ourselves away from the beauty and tranquility of (多依树) and the surrounding countryside of (元阳) was hard, but we also wanted to go and see the famous scenery of the River (漓江) in (广西), which meant we had to first get back to (昆明) in order to catch a train to (桂林).
The bus that we had originally caught heading south from to (新街镇) in left in the mid-morning and took about eight hours. So, when boarding the return bus at half past four in the afternoon, we were figuring on being back in somewhere between midnight and one o’clock in the morning — not ideal, but not too bad.
But when the bus turned out to be of the sleeper variety — comprising no seats but two rows of bunk-beds along either side of the aisle — we started to suspect that we were in for a longer ride than we were banking on. Neither of us had been on a sleeper bus before, and the experience was a lot less comfortable than the comparatively-luxurious sleeper train carriages. The duvet covers provided were a hotch-potch of children’s designs [we had Pokemon], all of dubious levels of cleanliness. Smoking was allowed throughout, and the driver’s reckless confidence at handling the mountain bends had Mary cutting off the blood-flow to my hand for most of the evening.
In order to warrant the use of a sleeper bus, it seems that the driver had been instructed to stretch out the journey as much as possible, so we found ourselves making many more stops than on the way down, and of course given that any and all activities in China must stop dead at mealtimes, there was an extended break beside an outdoor restaurant a few hours after we first set off. [Having spent so much time getting comfortable in our twin top bunk, we opted to stay aboard and chow down on the snacks we had brought with us.]
It was now well past sunset and there were so many more stops for toilet breaks and the like that eventually we just stopped trying to ascertain where we were and, after some reassuring of Mary that I would do my level best to prevent the driver from careening off the mountainside, we drifted off to a restless sleep.
At some point I half-woke up, enough to notice that we had yet again stopped for some reason, and caught a glimpse of another bus parked immediately in front of us. I almost wondered what was going on, but it was still pitch dark and I instead immediately fell back to sleep.
Some time later, Mary and I both woke up to find it was daylight, but we still weren’t moving and, moreover, I saw that the same bus was still parked in front of us. We then noticed that there were yet more buses parked all around us. We were, we had to deduce, in a bus station. Station, to be precise, and had been there since before whenever it was that I had woken up.
It was gone nine o’clock on the morning. Sitting at the front of the bus, chatting around a charcoal fire in a metal bucket, were the driver and the bus attendant. The rest of the bus was completely empty, and all the beds had been made up. We had arrived in in the middle of the night, but rather than wake up the dozing foreigners, they just let the rest of the passengers disembark around us and then allowed us sleep for about five more hours, which meant that we had missed the possibility of catching a morning train on to . I still can’t decide if their hearts were in the right place or they simply didn’t care whether we were still fast asleep when the bus started making its way all the way back to .
In: China / Travelling in China / Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan Island
2008 / 03 / 14 – 18:01 | Top
One of the villages in county of (元阳) was either selected or has the savvy [and I suspect it was the former] to charge tourists to wander its streets. Beside a particularly beautiful expanse of terraced rice paddies about halfway between (新街镇) and (多依树) lies a small market where you can haggle over silver trinkets and hand-finished throws, and a large entrance gate to the village of (箐口).
In a masterful sales move, this entrance gate leads to a path that winds fairly steeply for fifteen minutes or so down into the valley below, and it is at the end of this path that you pay for your entrance ticket to the village: anyone who didn’t know about the tariff would surely take one look at the way they’ve just come and decide they might as well pay to explore the village before they huffed-and-puffed their way back up to the main road.
On their part, the citizens of have installed a small museum of local culture, and restored and maintained their homes and buildings in their traditional designs with thatched roofs, although there are one too many brazenly-displayed gift-shops, and they couldn’t quite conceal their use of modern technologies such as satellite dishes by using them to dry their traditional clothing. But it was nice to spend a couple of hours exploring the designated attractions such as the old mill house, as well as going off the beaten path. At one point Mary acquired a new potential suitor in the form of a little boy who followed us for a while crying, “Miss! Miss! You’re beautiful, I love you,” until he got to his house, at which point he stuck out his tongue and ran inside.
Back up at the main road, waiting for the minibus to ferry us back to , we watched a steady stream of elderly women walk past us carrying large baskets of damp sand on their backs, depositing them further up the road for a group of men to use in the building of a new wall, occasionally stopping for a rest and a chat on the way back.
While we waited for the minibus [which actually took almost two hours to turn up], Mary was subjected a couple of instances of drive-by photography from Chinese tourists deciding that she was part of the scenery, and we were both entertained by a tiny young girl — she couldn’t have been more than four- or five-years-old — who was in charge of collecting the fee for using the public toilets. While I was busy looking the other way for an alternative means to get us back to our guesthouse, Mary saw this little girl, dressed in beautifully woven clothes and a wearing a hat decorated with silver, allow a tourist to pose with his arms around her, before she marched up to the photographer and demanded a payment of one yuan for her troubles. : village on the take.
In: China / Travelling in China / Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan Island
2008 / 03 / 07 – 11:52 | Top
Having got delayed for longer than we wanted to be in (昆明) due to the whole of China shutting down to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Mary and I were itching to get away from all aspects of city life and enjoy a bit of peace and quiet. Nine hours by bus later, we arrived in the mountainous county of (元阳), famed for its sprawling hillsides of terraced rice paddies.
The first township we settled in was (新街镇), our bus winding its way up some precarious mountain hairpins and getting there in the late afternoon to find it all a bit foggy. The hotel we checked into was supposed to overlook a spectacular expanse of countryside, but all we could see from the balcony was the blanket of cold, grey cloud that pervaded the interiors of the buildings as well as the town streets.
After a cold and damp night’s sleep, we woke the next morning to find the weather exactly the same as yesterday’s, so rather than hang about in the hope that the cloud would soon burn off or blow away, we elected to try and move on to one of the smaller villages further up the mountain. I’d read about one called (多依树) that had a well-recommended place to stay called the Sunlight Guesthouse, run by an elderly local couple. This turned out to be one of the best decisions we made on the entire trip, and possibly of all time.
We had escaped from the miserable weather below and from the rooftop of the guesthouse could look down the valley at the paddies stepping down the hillsides. For three idyllic days we slept late — “We’ll definitely get up for the sunrise tomorrow!” We sat in the courtyard in rocking chairs, read, drank tea and looked at the view. We walked to and through some of the other surrounding villages, past busloads of Chinese tourists armed with foot-long camera lenses and, for some reason, dressed from head to foot in all-weather gear like they were going on an Arctic expedition instead of being ferried up and down the mountain on a heated coach; down through tea plantations to teeter along the edges of the paddies and back up to the road; past oxen coming down from the fields and enormously fat boars suckling their boarlets; children playing in the stream running though their village; women in traditional dress buying live chickens from the market; men in their standard modern-day clothing of loose-fitting slacks and a dark-coloured suit jacket chewing on and spitting out chunks of sugar cane. We caught the minibus back to when we got tired of walking, and wondered why so many of the women were getting physically travel sick. In the evenings we ate good, home-cooked meals together with the other guests around the kitchen table. Our decision to leave was based entirely on time-constraints and having other places we wanted to visit. If we had had more time or nothing else we wanted to do, I think we could have happily spent the entire trip staying at the Sunlight Guesthouse.
In: Indexed & Photos / Sinophotos & China / Travelling in China / Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan Island
2008 / 03 / 05 – 16:40 | Top
For the record, here are the places I visited during my recent trip to the west of China:
- (云南)
- The city of (昆明)
- The county of (元阳)
- The town of (新街镇)
- The village of (多依树)
- The village of (箐口)
- ( 石林) — the Stone Forest National Park
- (西山) — the Western Hills
- (广西)
- The city of (桂林)
- The River (漓江)
- The town of (阳朔)
- (海南)
- Island (海南岛)
- The city of (海口)
- The (大东海) area of the city of (三亚)
- Island (海南岛)
I also dipped my toe into the province of (广东) in order to catch a bus to the ferry port on my way to Island. And, okay, yes, I misled you in the title of this entry because one of the above isn’t really a province — is technically one of the five so-called autonomous regions of China, like Tibet and Inner Mongolia, which means it has more legislative rights than a province, I think mostly due to having a higher population of a particular minority ethnic group.
I’ll be sharing photos and stories with you all over the next few weeks, but right now I’m hitting the books in swot-like preparation for the beginning of my Mandarin Chinese course which starts at 8.30 tomorrow morning at the local university. I’m actually looking forward to being back in the classroom after an extended break from learning!
In: China / Travelling in China / Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan Island
2008 / 03 / 02 – 11:41 | Top
We had more snowfall yesterday and the pavements and roads are still covered in icky dangerous ice and slush, and the novelty has long since worn off, so I’m upping sticks and getting out of here.
Tomorrow morning — snow permitting of course — I’m flying out to the warmer climes of the province of (云南) in south-west China [just next door to Vietman], for what I hope will be a nice break from city life. I did have an unofficial self-imposed rule that I never wanted to fly domestically in China — I’d much prefer to take the cross-country train like I did to (四川) around this time last year — but having been actually laughed at by the man in the train ticket office when I enquired as to the chances of a booking this late in the day, I was pleased to find a pretty good deal online.
I’ll be landing in (昆明), the capital of the province, but I’m not planning on spending more than one or possibly two nights there — just enough to get my bearings.
My first destination proper is a place called (元阳). You know that clichéd image you have in your brain of rural China: rice paddies tiered down hillsides in a valley that stretches off into the misty distance; farmers with ox-driven ploughs working the land — that sort of thing? That’s . It should be a lovely few weeks. Fingers crossed the snow doesn’t ruin everything!
As reported earlier this week [by myself and much of the world media], we’ve had a couple of flakes of snow. It couldn’t have come at a worse time of year: every year the Chinese Spring Festival holiday sees the largest human migration on the planet, as people return to their hometowns from all over the country and abroad, to celebrate the coming of the New Year.
The chaos that ensues cannot be overstated — in 2006 the number of journeys undertaken by people exceeded the 1.3 billion-strong population of the country, and last year’s weather was mild by comparison. People save up all year long to be able to afford the train or bus tickets, and the majority cannot afford the luxury of the sleeper carriages on the very long journeys. So when the snow fell, this turmoil and discomfort was plunged into absolute chaos. Hundreds of thousands of people have been stuck, desperately waiting at freezing-cold train stations in the hope that the trains start running again. The government urged people to cancel their plans, but with time off so few and far between for most people here, along with the long and deep traditional importance of family ties, this is their one and only chance to make the trip home to see loved ones.
Here in (苏州) the local authorities appeared to have no idea how to deal with the snow: people armed with bamboo-shoot brooms were apparently told that clearing the snow off the top of roadside shrubs was more important that getting it off the cycle paths, forcing cyclists onto the already-dangerous roads. But such a decision pales into comparison to whichever ludicrous city official gave the go-ahead to clearing the snow of the roads using water cannons.
It’s not just the transportation that has been hit; the price of fruit and vegetables has doubled overnight. I talked to my regular local vegetable market trader this morning and he said he has very few crops at the moment, and those that he has are of bad quality. He showed me his hands that appeared to be swollen to about twice their normal size, and a deep purple in colour, presumably due to harvesting his supplies in freezing temperatures.
With all this gloom and worry, it is hard to imagine anyone actually enjoying the snow here in , but there have been plenty of people out having fun. Everywhere you look, snowmen have appeared on street corners, outside shops and in parks, and spontaneous snowball fights have been having all around. I dragged a friend out to Tiger Hill on Sunday to take photos of the gorgeous scenery, the fruits of which you can find both my Flickr photoset and that of my friend Sara.
2008 / 01 / 21 – 18:34 | Comment [4] | Top
2008 / 01 / 21 – 10:39 | Comment [1] | Top
2008 / 01 / 12 – 13:18 | Comment [2] | Top
2008 / 01 / 01 – 01:01 | Comment [3] | Top
2007 / 12 / 31 – 10:24 | Top
Read the rest of “Our washing machine may possibly be a little bit possessed”…
2007 / 12 / 09 – 13:46 | Comment [3] | Top
2007 / 12 / 08 – 17:10 | Comment [1] | Top
2007 / 11 / 25 – 09:37 | Comment [1] | Top
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2007 / 07 / 22 – 13:54 | Top
2007 / 07 / 18 – 16:09 | Comment [1] | Top
2007 / 07 / 14 – 10:35 | Comment [2] | Top
Read the rest of “The Complete Guide to Flat-Hunting in Suzhou”…
2007 / 07 / 12 – 16:43 | Comment [3] | Top
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2007 / 02 / 12 – 21:47 | Comment [1] | Top
Read the rest of “Days One and Two: so far so the same as ever”…
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2007 / 01 / 26 – 13:56 | Comment [2] |