我吃的习惯/My eating habits

So for a break from my past several interesting and informative (I hope) posts, I will now detail the most peculiar things I've eaten over the past couple weeks.

In the organ category, I've sampled both cow stomach and duck gizzards recently. The cow stomach was delicious, a nice slightly chewy texture that was served hot, both in temperature and spice. The gizzards were alright, more of a snack type food, served cool. They were also chewy and didn't have a particular strong flavor. Not as good as hearts, necks, or tongues, but they were still pretty good.

For other meats, I had myself some pork knuckles recently.

This was awfully fatty, a little excessively so in my opinion. They were fairly small for pork knuckles, without that much meat on them. Good sauce though. Couldn't eat all that much of them, because they were fairly greasy tasting, but they were worth trying. I've had better in Budapest though. 

I also ate chicken wings over the weekend. While that's not-at-all strange, in China they're served on skewers, called 串儿/chuàner (you slur the n and the r together so it's pronounced something like chuarrrr, with a nice strong Beijing accent). This is the typical ways to serve wings and other bits of roasted meat in China, and 串儿 are a very typical food to eat after you've been drinking for a while and are out late at night. The wings I had were BT辣 (là), where 辣 means spicy and BT stands for 变态/biàntài, or "perverted." Unfortunately, they weren't super spicy, though it was a decent amount of spice, and they were accompanied by roasted tendon, which was quite tasty. 

Additionally the other day, Martin, Ben, and I discovered a 驴肉店/lǘròudiàn near the language school. 驴肉 is quite a tasty meat, whose high regard is explained by the phrase 天上龙肉地下驴肉/tiānshàng lóngròu, dìxià lǘròu. This poetic turn of phrase, emblazoned on the side of the restaurant we found, proclaims that the heavens above have dragon meat, and the earth below has 驴肉. It ended being quite a delicious meal too, with bowls of soup made with 驴肉 accompanied by stir-fried 驴肉 captured between two fried buns. Fantastically greasy and delicious. What is the magical animal that 驴肉 comes from, you ask? Why, it's donkey of course. Delicious, delicious donkey.

The most interesting drink I've had to date would definitely be 绿豆沙/lǜdòushā, or green bean sand. I was really thirsty when eating dinner the other night and saw this on a menu. As I had never heard of it, I decided to give it a try. They presented me with a little plastic spoon and a little plastic tub filled with a transparent greenish liquid. At the bottom of the liquid was a bunch of sediment, the eponymous green bean sand. To drink, you mix to combine the liquid and sediment and consume with a spoon. It was served cold and turned out to be really tasty and incredibly refreshing, which is always a plus in a place where cold water is uncommon. (Okay, I should admit that you can buy cold bottled water everywhere you go. But you can't drink the tap water, and the Chinese habit is to drink hot water, not cold, so you never get cold water for free. Not that a bottle of water ever costs more than 50 cents. But it's the principle of the thing, dammit!)








Today, I had one of my favorite meals to date, so you're going to have to excuse me while I gush a little. Martin and I picked a random restaurant on the street, one of the the best methods for finding good food in China, and ordered four tasty looking dishes. Two of them were fairly standard, tasty but nothing special. The other two were the following:

On the left is one of my favorites: 干过茶树菇, dry pot tea tree mushrooms, which I've mentioned before. Nice and spicy, not oily at all, they really are a treat. On the right there is something new, some kind of 麻辣青蛙/málàqīngwā. 麻辣 is the wonderful combination of flavors, common in 四川/Sīchuán food, that results from combining chili peppers and a special type of spice known as the Sichuan peppercorn. This wonderful little berry (not actually related to peppers or peppercorns at all), which I may have mentioned before, has a pleasant floral aroma and a taste that is best described as numbing. It's a mild anesthetic, and consuming food cooked with them, or the peppers themselves, produces a strange buzzing/numbing feeling on the lips,on the tongue, and in the mouth, that is quite unlike anything else. It's one of my favorite flavors ever, especially when combined with the fiery heat of chilis. So the sauce of this was fantastic. As was the meat: 青蛙 is frog. I'm not quite sure whether this was bullfrog or some other type of frog, but it was delicious. There was so much meat packed into this dish, a relative rarity in Chinese dishes, and the flavor was fantastic, with frog tasting somewhat like the cross between chicken and fish: it has the taste of the former with the texture of the latter, though it's nowhere near as flaky as your average white fish. They're also super satisfying to eat, in that very visceral carnivorous sense, because you're eating the meat right off the bones of the animal. It was wonderful, and is a definite recommendation for everyone.

Of course, it's not all been strange foreign foods. A while back, I was looking over the menu at a lunch place and saw an item called 番茄肉酱面/fānqiéròujiàngmiàn whose picture looked promising. Literally, the name means tomato-meat-sauce noodles, so I was like, "That sounds delicious!" and ordered one. What I received was the following, and not at all what I expected.

I'm not sure if you can tell from this picture, but those noodles don't look, nor did they taste, particularly Chinese. After eating a little bit, I realized that I had managed to, in a Chinese fast-food restaurant, order a bowl of spaghetti bolognese. I asked for the hard-boiled egg to be added, but even without the egg it would've been a strange experience. It was still pretty tasty, mind you, and I finished every last bite, but it was bizarre. It did not taste Italian nor did it taste particular Chinese. It was quite strange.

Finally, I end with a picture of an item I found in a grocery store. Not food, exactly, but involved in the preparation:

This name does literally mean "corn embryo," but I'm assuming they mean corn kernel here instead. Not even sure what else a corn embryo could refer to...

好好学习(hǎohǎoxuěxí) / Study well

I spend most of my time in Beijing attending class and studying Chinese. Instead of doing this at a university, like I did last summer, I study at a place known as Taipei Language Institute Wangfujing, a language school in downtown Beijing unaffiliated with any university. TLI specifically teachers Mandarin to foreigners, mostly Japanese, Europeans, and Americans, and they're the school that the Luce Scholars program has been using for the China Scholars for the past several years. The Taipei in their name comes from the fact that they were initially founded in Taiwan, I believe, but no one in the Beijing office is from Taiwan; they're all from the mainland. This is more than slightly confusing, and I've yet to meet anyone, including some of my Chinese teachers from Oberlin, who has heard of TLI before, as they're very small. However, they are great.

There are about 10 teachers working at TLI, I believe, and our classes consist of one-on-one sessions with a teacher, for fifty minutes at a time. We rotate through the teachers, changing teachers every hour or two and we're currently attending five hours of class a day, three in the morning, followed by a lunch break, and then two more in the afternoon. This is absolutely exhausting, but fantastically helpful, as it allows us to cover a lot of ground and get a lot of practice in each day. Since the classes are all individual, Ben, Martin, and I all move at our own pace and can specify which material we want to study. Ben and Martin are currently working through the basics, while I'm working on intermediate level Chinese, both of the more written, formal variety, as well as the spoken vernacular. And we're all studying with an eye towards learning some of the specific vocabulary for our areas of professional interest: Martin is looking to start business Chinese soon, while I've been (very slowly) reading a review article on the understanding of language in the brain, published in Chinese by my boss for the coming year. 

This is as good a time as any to give a quick overview of Mandarin Chinese, as I have been continually posting small snippets in Chinese throughout my blog posts and plan to continue to do so. Mandarin is the dominant language in China, officially supported by the government and taught in all schools throughout the country. It is not the only language in China, not by a long shot, but it's the one that you would learn as a foreigner and is generally what people refer to as "Chinese." From an English speaker's perspective, the difficulty in learning Chinese lies in three major areas, two of which are not nearly as bad as they appear at first. 

First, Mandarin is a tonal language, which means that one syllable can have many different meanings based on the pitch of your voice when you pronounce it. Mandarin has four tones: a high flat tone, a rising tone, a down-and-up tone, and a falling tone. If you've never studied a tonal language, this sounds absurdly difficult and ridiculous, but it is something that you get accustomed to as time goes on. There's no real way to hasten the learning process other than constantly listening to Chinese and attempting to speak it, inevitably leading to hilarious mispronunciations that either carry no meaning, or a separate, often hilarious meaning.

Second, Mandarin is written with characters, not a phonetic alphabet. Therefore, every character represents a whole syllable, a complete sound, instead of only one component of it. On the plus side, this makes Mandarin a very compact language. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, which weighs in at 309 pages in the American English version, is a slim 191 pages in Mandarin. The downside of this is that when you see a character you've never seen before, you do not know how to pronounce it. It's not entirely true that you have no idea how to pronounce it because, since the simplification of the Chinese writing system undertaken by Mao in the mid-20th century, there are some phonetic components to characters that you get a feel for as you study more, but you are never entirely sure. So then how do you learn how to pronounce a character without consulting someone more learned than you? There are several romanization schemes for Mandarin, but the only one really still in use in the mainland today is pinyin. Each character has pinyin associated with it, which tells you how to pronounce it, with an accompanying mark above one of the vowels that tells you the tone.

The classic example used to demonstrate the importance of tone is the syllable ma. 妈/mā (first tone) means mother, 麻/má (second tone) means flax or hemp, 马/mǎ (third tone) means horse, and 骂/mà (fourth tone) means scold or curse. You can notice the slight phoneticization of the characters by looking at these, with 马 showing up in three of the four. If you can't discriminate between the four tones while speaking or listening, you will be pretty much unable to communicate. Speaking from experience, it's quite easy to be lazy with tones in class in the US, where you're speaking with teachers who have lots of experience with students and can still often understand your meaning. However, when you come to China and talk to random people on the street or in restaurants, you have to pay attention to your tones or no one will have a clue what you're saying. A classic beginner mistake that I've been told constantly amuses teachers is in asking the question "excuse me," as in when you want to ask someone a question. This should be 请问/qǐngwèn, but if you mispronounce it as qǐngwěn, then your meaning becomes 请吻, or "please kiss." So, pay close attention to your tones.

While characters seem ridiculously archaic and unhelpful, you get used to them gradually. And you reach a point where you realize you couldn't get rid of them. Reading a wall of text in pinyin is pretty much impossible, because Mandarin has an absurd number of near to total homophones. For some reason, I find differentiating between them in speech significantly easier, and if they're written (where context is a little harder to determine, potentially?), characters are absolutely necessary.

The third reason that Mandarin is difficult for English speakers is relatively banal in comparison, but it is, in my opinion, the major sticking point. Mandarin is very different from English and there are next to no cognates. The only words that sound similar in the two languages are those that have been borrowed from one by the other. Because most of the early Chinese immigrants to the US were from Southern China, many of those in English are from Cantonese, not Mandarin, which doesn't help in the slightest. And Mandarin, unlike Japanese but similar to French, prefers to take foreign words and localize them, so that email becomes 电子邮件/diànziyóujiàn or electronic mail, and the like. So pretty much the only cognates between the two language are place names. Beijing is 北京/Běijīng (though you do have to pay attention to the tones) and 克利夫兰/Kèlìfūlán is Cleveland (try saying it out loud), and so forth. While at first this seems like a relatively simple point to bring up, it definitely does make learning Chinese a slower process, because, unlike French or Spanish, you can't rely on a word sounding similar to the English when you don't know what it is.

But it's not all bad learning Mandarin. The grammar is relatively simple, especially when compared to the Romance languages and Japanese. There are no tenses in Chinese, with the time course of the verb being shown by the use of time words (such as yesterday, today, tomorrow afternoon, and the like) as well as special markers that show aspect, which I don't really understand at all. This means that you can speak a bunch of words together and, as long as your vocabulary and pronunciation are good, people can most often understand your gist.This leads to the saying among teachers and students of Chinese as a second language that Mandarin gets easier the more you study it, as compared to languages like Korean or Japanese which, due to their complicated grammar and importance of formality, get harder the more you study them.

Mandarin is also, as I mentioned above, super compact and has an absurdly rich literary history that manifests itself in the form of 成语/chéngyú, set phrases of four characters that often summarize a story and carry a fairly complete meaning. They're seen as fairly literary or formal and so aren't used all that much in day-to-day speaking, but they are used occasionally. For example: 入乡随俗/rùxiāngsuísú or "enter border follow custom," is the Chinese way of saying "When in Rome..." Unfortunately I don't have an example of a nice, complicated Chengyu, but if I learn one I will make sure to keep you posted.

And that's my way too much of a surface-level summary of Mandarin Chinese. It's a really incredibly cool language, and everyone should learn some of it. Cursing in Mandarin is also relatively strange. In English, most curses have to do with bodily functions, genitals/sex, or religious subjects. In Mandarin, it seems that they almost all have to do with genitals or sex. And tend to be what I would consider pretty strong. So that's interesting...

And now for something completely different

So yesterday I was talking with a couple of my language teachers and the brought up the classic Abbott and Costello "Who's on First" joke. One of my teachers then proceeded to tell me a Chinese joke with a similar punchline, which I now present to you below:

你姓什么？ Nǐ xìng shěnme?
我姓魏. Wǒ xìng Wèi.
魏什么？Wèi shěnme?
不知道，因为我爸爸姓魏。 Bùzhīdào, yīnwèi wǒbāba xìng Wèi.

This joke is hilarious. It's a dialogue between two people who have just met. The first person asks the second what their last name is, and the second person responds 魏/Wèi. The first then follows up with "Wèi what?", inquiring as to what the rest of their name is. However, this sounds exactly the same as "为什么？", or "Why?" So the second person then responds "I don't know, because Wèi was my dad's last name." Comedy gold.

Living the high life

Last week we had one of those rare beautiful blue-sky days in Beijing, and took the opportunity to check out 国贸(guómào), the Beijing Central Business District. Despite the name, the CBD is not in the center of Beijing, but a decent distance to the east, between the 3rd and 4th ring roads. As I live and attend class within the 2nd ring road, I do not often travel that far out. The CBD is however, the most modern part of Beijing I've seen so far, featuring vistas such as this:

Our destination in the CBD, however, was the China World Trade Center Tower III, a skyscraper of 81 floors int he center of the district that sits atop a mall and features a bar on the top floor. After wandering through the mall for a while, and wondering at the presence of a large number of American and European luxury stores (Prada or Gucci, anyone?), we made it to the building. After taking an ear-poppingly fast elevator that reached a top speed of 10 meters per second, we made it to the 81st floor. The view was a wonderful overview of the city, allowing you to see far into the distance on such a clear day.

Because the cafe was so packed, we had a hard time sitting at a window with a good view. So I took a picture over other people's tables instead. The angular building you can see in the background here is the CCTV building, affectionately referred to by many Beijing'ers as the "underpants building," owing to its pants-like shape.

 

Since the 81st floor featured not just a beautiful panorama but also a fancy bar, we decided to get a couple drinks.

Martin is enjoying a fancy whiskey, the name of which I forget, Ben is enjoying an enjoyable summery concoction fo gin and creme de mure, a blackberry liquor, and I am enjoying a Last Word, a cocktail of gin, green chartreuse, lime juice, and maraschino liquor. It was delicious. They were very expensive, but quite enjoyable, and nice to sip while doing Chinese homework atop one of the tallest skyscrapers in Beijing.

Additionally, this bar also featured the nicest bathrooms I've seen since I got to China, which is admittedly not a particularly difficult feat. The views from the urinals were particularly impressive, and an enjoyable distraction as you emptied your bladder of the drinks you just consumed.

The only negative aspect to the whole adventure was the (what-I-am-almost-certain-was) an attempted scam, both on the way in and the way out.

Beijing is a pretty safe place for foreigners. Of course, there are pickpockets like in any major city with many tourists. And I've heard stories of foreigners getting into fights in bars or clubs, but they seem fairly rare. The most common issue, however, is one of two scams. You're walking around one of the busier areas of Beijing, and are approached by one or two Chinese people. They walk up to you and ask you, in very good English, if you're a student, where you're from, why are you in Beijing, and discussing the surrounding area. It's a very pleasant conversation, and they may even talk about their work, as either a teacher or a student or perhaps something else, and offer you their card. After a while, they'll invite you to come check out a nearby art exhibition or tea shop. And you figure, why not? It's fun to talk to a local and you've always enjoyed Chinese art/tea. Maybe they even offer to write your name using calligraphy as well. And then you have a cup, or take the calligraphy, or walk around the exhibit for a while. And as you're finishing up, they present you with a bill. For several hundred American dollars.

That scam is supposedly the most common way of being targeted as a foreigner in China. Other than this trip to the CBD and one trip to Tiananmen Square on my first trip to China, I've never run into it, so it's still not super common. But it does happen. As we were walking into the World Trade Center Tower III, we stopped to look at a model of the CBD, and talked for a while with an art professor and his student about the area and our studies for a while before being invited to check out his nearby art exhibition. We made excuses, claiming we really wanted to get to the tower, and departed. If we hadn't been warned of the scam earlier though, we almost certainly would've taken them up on it. Similarly, on the way out, we were approached by someone else asking "Are you students?", the same opening line the professor on the way in used.

So the CBD is a great place to get a glimpse of modern Beijing, both good and bad. And one of the most exciting views I've ever enjoyed while peeing.

乒乓和公园/Ping pong and public parks

The other week I decided I should finally try and get some activity beyond walking around, and headed to 地坛体育馆(Dìtán tǐyùguǎn)/ Earth Temple Gymnasium (so named because it is right next to the earth temple found in the earth temple public park) to see if I could find some tennis courts and ping pong tables. The Earth Temple Gymnasium is not a singular gymnasium. Or I suppose it is, but it's in the center of a large number of other exercise areas (basketball courts, running track, swimming pool, etc.) in about the same area. This made it a little difficult to find the part of the complex that I wanted to find, but, after wandering around for 20 minutes, asking for directions, wandering around for another 15 minutes, looping around to the same lady and asking for directions again, I finally found the building I was looking for. It was filled with badminton courts and ping pong tables, but, alas, no tennis courts. My search continues. The ping pong tables were very nice and filled with boys half my age or men twice my age playing ping pong very well. I asked the front desk and found that tables are rented for 20 RMB, or about $3, an hour, though one generally brought their own opponent. This was not a location for pick-up games.
While this information is good for future reference, at that point I was walking around by myself looking for someone to play. As I left the gym, I decided to walk through 地坛公园(Dìtán gōngyuán), the previously mentioned Earth Temple Park. From the textbook we used in my second-year study of Chinese at Oberlin, I was aware that Beijing's public parks are a wonderful gathering ground for the locals, especially older men and women, who use it as a place to socialize and perform such exercises as strolling on the paths, playing badminton or ping pong, doing T'ai-chi/太极拳 (tàijíquán), dancing, and walking one's bird. That last one is not a euphemism. Caged birds were and are fairly popular pets in China, and it's not uncommon to see old men walking or running with an occupied bird cage.

I was directed by the gate operator to the north of the park, where she assured me there were some public ping pong tables. I'd like to take a brief moment to point out that the characters for ping pong are awesome: 乒乓(pīngpāng). They look like hitting a ball back and forth, and the pronunciation in Mandarin, owing to the difference in vowels and the high tone, sounds fairly onomatopoeiac. So it's pretty awesome.

Returning to the story, I walked north through the park in pursuit of ping pong. I passed some beautiful gardens and old-looking buildings (very few buildings in Beijing are actually that old, though many are built to look like they are). Though I've yet to return to it, Earth Temple public park is definitely a park that I aim to see again. After walking to what I thought was the northern extremity of the park, I still had not found the ping pong tables There were many of the outdoors exercise machines that are common in Beijing (I will need to take a picture of these at a later date, they're literally everywhere, and commonly used), all in use, but no ping pong tables. I walked through what I thought was the northern exit of the park, and finally came across an enclosure of five ping pong tables, all occupied by Chinese men and women in their 40s to 60s playing solid ping pong. The level of play was not quite as high as the kids in the gymnasium, but they were still all solid players.

After watching for a little bit, one of the men who was not playing at the moment waved me over and asked if I could play. When I responded that I could, he told me to come in and hit around some. I walked into the enclosure, talked with the man who waved me in for a while about why I was in China, where I'm living, how long I've studied Chinese and the like, and then stepped up to the table to hit around some. I played with two separate people for a total of 20 minutes, just hitting back and forth, no match. They seemed to be about evenly matched with me, maybe a little better, though we weren't keeping score, so it's possible that they were just testing me, feeling me out. After a while, I left, still needing to get some dinner. The guys I were playing with told me that there were people on the tables just about every day, so I should by and play some more. I haven't had a chance yet, but it's something I definitely will be doing again. It was much more laid-back than the atmosphere in the gym, and it was a pretty good time. The people were all 老北京人(lǎoběijīngrén) / Old Beijing'ers, and so had a pretty thick accent that I had trouble deciphering. However, they were quite fun to hit around with.

For a more interesting and better-written look at ping pong in China, I suggest this article, written by the former Luce Scholar whose apartment I'm currently staying in, Chris Beam. It's a pretty great article.

After leaving the ping pong enclosure, I walked back through the park towards the exit. On the way I passed several strange sights:
 
An old man practicing t'ai-chi by himself, surrounded by 4 or 5 motionless white cats, while, in the distance, a solitary tuba played "Do Re Mi" from the Sound of Music:

A square full of people standing in ranks and clapping in time together.

Another square of people dancing around to what appeared to be modernish Chinese pop, immediately followed by a square of people walking around in circles waving their arms to different music, which could have been some older pop music:

And finally, a square filled with a bunch of people doing t'ai-chi by following along with an instructor. This wasn't particularly strange, except that there was a couple standing awkwardly off to the side, out of the square and in the main pathway, following along badly.

All in all, they were several weird scenes to walk by on the way out. But it was a fairly cool park. A final note, exercise clothes seem to be less popular in China. At least among the older crowd that frequents the public parks (those in the gym were dressed appropriately). The dancers, the walkers, the people playing ping pong, the people using the exercise equipment...all of them looked like they could have just left work. Almost everyone was working slacks and a polo or button-down shirt. The only exception were the runners, which are relatively rare. Bizarre.

各省有各省的菜 (gèshèngyǒugèshěngdecài) /Every province has its own cuisine

My opinion is that food in China is pretty great, as you may have gathered from my previous posts and my near-constant comments on this fact. While good Chinese food can be found in the US, it's much more difficult, and the food you find is generally either Cantonese, Sichuanese, or perhaps Beijingese (these adjectives really do not work very well in English...). The best part about eating in a large Chinese city like Beijing, then, is that you have access to restaurants from every province in the country. And there's a fair amount of variety between the provinces. And, of course, every province believes that they have the best food in China.

Here are some quick facts to help you differentiate among the different cuisines of China:

1. Northern China eats wheat-based products as their staple food (big doughy dumplings (包子/bāozi) and noodles), whereas Southern China eats mainly rice. Of course, rice is common in Northern China too, but not to the extent it is in Southern China.

2. Beijing, of course, is famous for 北京烤鸭 (běijīngkǎoyā) / Beijing roast duck, also known as Peking duck. It's also similar to most northern food, featuring more beef, lamb, and wheat products than one would find in the south. Additionally, vinegar is a major condiment up here, present on all tables, whereas soy sauce is rarely present (I believe I've seen it in one restaurant).

2. Sichuan and Hunan (as well as Chongqing, an enormous city near Sichuan) are renowned for their spicy cuisine, and it's generally the land-locked muggy places where you'll find spicy food. Sichuan cuisine also features the Sichuan peppercorn or prickly ash, which is not related to either peppers or peppercorns but is absolutely wonderful. It has a delicious floral aroma and a numbing effect on your mouth. When paired with chile pepper, as it often is, it's a lovely combination that can literally leave your mouth and lips buzzing.

3. People from Guangdong, the province that Guangzhou is the capital of, are known for eating everything. There's a saying that goes: everything that flies except for airplanes, everything with four legs except for tables, and everything with two legs except for humans, people from Guangdong will eat. Needless to say, I'm very excited to go there and see for myself how true this is. Additionally, their cuisine features a lot of seafood and Guangdong was the birth place of dimsum, known in Mandarin as 点心/diǎnxīn.

4. Shanghai food also features seafood, but tends towards sweet.

5. Shanxi and Shaanxi, both in north central China, are famous for their noodle dishes and have fairly similar cuisines, though there are important differences. Or so I'm told, I have yet to eat enough Shaanxi food to assess that statement's veracity. Though I regularly eat a type of Shanxi noodle known as 刀削面 (dāoxiāomiàn) or "knife-shaved noodled", which are these large doughy noodles, a little irregular in shape, and absolutely delicious. Both provinces, like most of north and especially north-western China, feature lamb heavily.

6. Xinjiang, in the far north-west of the country, is the home of the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority, and so their restaurants are always 清真 (qīngzhēn)/ halal, and feature lamb, cumin, and breads fairly heavily. Not as much of the chile spicy that you see in central China, but still pretty strongly spiced.

7. Yunnan, in the south center of China, right next to Tibet and bordering Burma/Myanmar, is one of the most ethnically diverse of China's provinces, featuring a large number of many different minority groups. Its food is definitely different than the rest of China, and been greatly influenced by South-east Asia, so you often see papayas, pineapples, and other fruits showing up. Additionally, they are incredibly famous for their mushrooms. Of every variety. And they're lovely. Porcinis, criminis, enokis, and many mushrooms that I have not seen in the States and am not even sure if we have a good English name for, are featured heavily. It's great. Last night I went to a Yunnan restaurant and tonight I did the same. It's delicious. Here's a picture of last night's dinner.

From left to right, you have: a bottle of bamboo alcohol, much stronger than anticipated at 54% and so poured into shots; a dish of thinly sliced beef prepared with lemon; stir fried 茶树菇 (cháshùgú), literally tea-tree mushrooms, apparently known in English as willow mushrooms, served with peppers; a dish of papaya and chicken; and cheese! That's 乳饼 (rǔbǐng), a type of cheese served in Yunnan that is absolutely great, lightly spiced. It tastes fairly similar to halloumi to me, a mild cheese that you sautee lightly. The meal, all in all, was delicious, and quite different from most of the meals we've been having so far. I didn't take ay pictures of my dinner tonight (for shame!), but it was a similar feast of mushrooms and good veggies, though this meal featured mint in several dishes, including a fantastic mint salad that was just mint topped with a slightly spicy vinegar-based dressing and was delicious.

So that's an overly simple overview of some of the big differences among various Chinese regional cuisines, at least the ones that I've been eating. As I eat more of the various foods from across the provinces, more details will certainly be forthcoming.

中国万岁！ / Long Live China!

So yesterday I had my most exciting and delicious meal in China to date. Before last night, there was serious competition among several meals, including a Korean barbecue that featured unlimited food and alcohol, where we selected and then cooked the raw meat ourselves on hot plates set in the table, all for $10. However 烤羊腿/kao3yang2tui3 definitely takes the cake.

We had heard about this kind of restaurant from several people and had been intrigued from the get-go. It seemed like a slightly strange and quite wonderful concept for a restaurant, though apparently it's fairly common in this part of Beijing. We had a recommendation for a specific restaurant several blocks north of us, but decided to try the one directly across the street first, for convenience's sake. I'm glad we did. It was a fantastic restaurant, though it was, at about $14 a person, a little on the pricey side for Beijing.

So what is 烤羊腿？It's roast leg of lamb. Literally, a large leg of lamb, roasted in an outside grill/oven place, then placed on a spit and set in the table in front of you over a bed of coals. It's just as great as it sounds.

Here's a picture of Martin (the blond one) and Ben (the red-haired one) right before we started eating.

We walked into this place, told them we wanted to eat the leg of lamb, and were then presented with several raw legs of lamb of different weights and told to choose. We ultimately went with a leg that weighted 3.6斤/jin1, which, at one 斤 to 500g, is equivalent to about 4 pounds of leg. We ordered a couple cold vegetable dishes and a basket of a flat naan-like bread whose name I didn't catch as accompaniments.

We cut the lamb using those ridiculously long fork/knife combinations you see Ben and Martin holding, slicing off the hunks of meet we wanted and then eating them plain or dipping them in any combination we wanted of whole cumin seeds, crushed peppers, and some sweet crushed nuts of an unknown variety. Everything was delicious. The lamb was crispy, fatty, and juicy, and we did a good job eating our leg, getting as much meat off as we possibly could.

The only downside is that because of the coals and the large slab of roasted meat in front of you, the table gets quite hot. To keep us cool, we were drinking some draft beer, a dark beer (black lager perhaps?) known as 富森啤酒/fu4sen1pi2jiu3 (Forest Beer), which comes from I don't know where and is quite delicious. More flavorful than your Tsingtao/青岛啤酒 (properly romanized as Qingdao) or Yanjing/燕京啤酒, the other two common beers in Beijing, though still not very strong and definitely easy to drink. However, apparently our drinks were not impressive enough, because about halfway through our leg, the table next to us of four Chinese men, probably in their 30s, and one little girl offered us some 白酒/bai2jiu3. This stuff is Chinese firewater, distilled from sorghum to a strength upwards of 40% ABV (though it varies based on the type you buy). So I poured all of us a shot, but said that we'd only take it if they drank with us. So two of the men poured themselves a shot and we all drank to a toast of 中国万岁/zhong1guo2wan4sui4！from the most boisterous of their group.

Later, we were talking to them and discovered they were all Beijingers, which we found rather surprising, owing to their lack of 儿化/er2hua4, the strong Beijing accent I discussed earlier. They responded that they could speak with that kind of accent, but then we wouldn't be able to understand anything they said. Which is entirely true. A very strong 儿化 accent is very difficult to follow, as the speaker's syllables all run together and can, in a particularly strong case, begin to sound more than a little seal-like. As they left, they also recommended we pick up some 二锅头五十六号/er4guo1tou2wu3shi2liu4hao4, a local Beijing specialty. It's a type of baijiu, most likely the one they were drinking, that is distilled to 56% ABV. Really potent stuff, definitely puts the hair on your chest. And now we have a recommendation on what baijiu to drink, which we'll make sure to heed. Not that it's particularly pleasant stuff. But it's very 北京/bei3jing1. With a final 北京万岁/bei3jing1wan4sui4, our new friends departed.

At the end of the meal, we were all stuffed and more than a little proud of ourselves for eating all that lamb. Martin here is attempting the infamous Beijing Belly look, one that I attempted as well as we walked away. It effectively increases airflow to the abdomen and cools one's body temperature, but apparently not all t-shirts are created equal with regards to this task. I had a fair amount of difficult rolling up my shirt to effectively expose my stomach (#beijingproblems), though perhaps this just takes practice...

Forbidden City and Summer Palace / 故宫跟颐和园

So it's been several days since I've posted. In the days since then I have started language classes, which I'll discuss after I've had a little more time there, and doing a little more exploring of the area. Unfortunately, with the start of classes I have also got homework again, which definitely cuts down on my free time...

So to make up for my lack of adventures recently, I will discuss the trip that Ben, Martin, and I did last Sunday. We were accompanied by a tour guide, a young Chinese woman by the name of Carol who spoke very good English, to the Forbidden City (故宫/gu4gong1) and the Summer Palace (颐和园/yi2he2yuan2). This was my second time to both of these places, but they're still fun places to go and be a proper tourist, gawking at impressive buildings and taking lots of photos.

The Forbidden City, the ancient seat of the Ming (明/ming2, 1368-1644) and Qing (清/qing1, 1644-1912) emperors, is at the dead center of Beijing, with the rest of the city built in concentric circles around the palace. As Beijing has no major natural features, such as mountains or rivers, the Forbidden City serves as the major reference point: the area around the Forbidden City is downtown and it serves as the center point when referring to an area as being in the north, south, east, or west part of the city. It covers a fairly large area and is a major tourist attraction, filled with tourists (mainly Chinese) just about every day. I believe the buildings within are from the Qing dynasty, and are great examples of that style. An interesting side note: almost every building in Beijing was built primarily out of wood, and so very few of them are actually very old. Wood buildings have a tendency to burn that prevents them from lasting an incredibly long time, and so most old-looking buildings in Beijing are actually fairly recent, built within the past 50 years to look old and increase tourist interest.

I am fairly certain, however, that the buildings in the Forbidden City are actually fairly old and not simple replicas. According to Carol, during the Cultural Revolution and the various other upheavals under Mao, when many ancient buildings and artifacts in China were destroyed, there was never a serious proposal to do the same thing to the Forbidden City, because of its importance to Chinese culture. So, thankfully, it's still around. And now, some photos:

This is one of the central squares in the Forbidden city. It was a rather polluted that day, hence the haze and the inability to see very far into the distance. Note the giant crowds of people everywhere.

The last photo there is a sign on one of the buildings, with its name in both Mandarin Chinese and Manchurian. The Qing dynasty emperors were Manchus, originally from Manchuria, not Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China. The script above is no longer used, according to Carol, though I believe Manchurian is still spoken by some of the Manchu people. However, like just about all minority languages in China, the number of speakers is very small and decreasing.

After walking through the Forbidden City, we headed out to the Summer Palace, which is in the far north-west of Beijing. The Summer Palace was the retreat for the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasty, and the current one, 颐和园 (yi2he2yuan2)，is the second summer palace, because the first, 圆明园 (yuan2ming2yuan2)，was burned down during the Second Opium War by the united European forces.

The Summer Palace is gigantic and sprawling, with many different buildings, all connected by walks through various green pathways. We ran through it very fast because it was late in the afternoon and we were approaching touristed out.

The Summer Palace is really impressive, and it's quite interesting because its most famous resident was not one of the emperors, but the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was pretty much in charge of the Qing Dynasty for the second half of the 19th century. She also pretty effectively signed imperial China's death warrant by refusing to modernize or reform China and placing her son, the emperor, under house arrest when he attempted to do so.

Carol, our tour guide, was pretty great. We spent a fair amount of time exchanging information on idiomatic expressions and talking about cultural differences. The big cultural differences that she regularly runs into, as a tour guide, is the ease with which Americans and Europeans both approach physical contact. The kiss on either cheek from Europeans, the hugs from Americans, both of these are fairly strange in China. It's a strange phenomenon, because your bubble of personal space is much smaller in China, with people right up against you on public transportation and walking much closer down the street. But when it comes to hugs or the like, they're not really done in China, though this is changing more with the younger generation. But still, Carol thought they were fairly weird.

When Carol mentioned that she wanted to learn some more idiomatic expressions, we kind of overwhelmed her, dumping a huge number on her at once: "keep your eyes peeled," "makes sense," "it's all Greek to me," etc. The problem with trying to come up with useful idioms on the spot is that it's rather difficult. You tend to use them without thinking, so when you're put on the spot to come up with the ones you use the most frequently...it's hard. So we tended to just throw them out as we came up with them. It was pretty funny.

The most amusing Chinese tip that Carol gave me as we walked around is that she considers the southern Chinese accent in guys fairly effeminate. Carol is from Harbin, in Heilongjiang in the north-east, where the local accent is much closer to standard Mandarin, though with some differences. A strong southern accent does not differentiate between the sounds sh and s, ch and c, or zh and z. This makes it fairly confusing for someone who is studying Chinese as a second language, as it creates even more homonyms in a language that is full of them, but it is something you can get used to. It seems to me to be the most common non-standard accent in China (probably followed by Beijing's Erhua/儿化, where a gratuitous amount of er sounds are added to words so that people start to sound very similar to pirates), and is definitely present in various amounts in Shanghai, Hubei, Taiwan, and Guangdong, so spread throughout all of the southern half of the country. According to Carol, it's often accompanied by a large amount of Chinese "particles." These are meaningless syllables of ya, a, ba, na, ma that are scattered throughout people's speech, most often at the end of sentences or clauses and apparently, according to Carol, makes one sound fairly effeminate. To me, it seems similar to the tendency among Americans of ending statements with a rising tone, making them sound close to questions. Both have a tendency to make you sound less sure of yourself and are more common among young women. This bad habit in Chinese includes the exclamation “天啊！”， tian1a, which translates and is roughly equivalent to "Oh heavens!" According to Carol, this is another phrase that is not very manly to say. I then asked her what men should say when they're surprised by something and she responded: men aren't surprised, they're always sure. “是的，是这样” shi4de, shi4zhe4yang4, or "yes, this is how it is" are how men should speak.

One final note on Chinese language before I finish this long, rambling post. There isn't an all-encompassing way of saying "yes" in Mandarin, which is kind of strange. The most formal way of affirming someone's statement is to repeat the verb back at them. So if someone asks you, "do you have any water," you'd respond with "have," or "don't have" for the negative. 是的, as noted above, also often works. If you're simply following along with what someone is saying, the equivalent of "okay, alright, uh huh," in Chinese is "好好好，” or “好的” hao3hao3hao3 or hao3de, where 好 literally translates to "good." However, the way that I've taken to using most of the time to respond to a question positively or to say the equivalent of "okay" is to simply grunt. It's not something I've made up, as I've noticed various shopkeeps and waiters using and understanding it, and the habit has started to infect my English, where I will more often grunt instead of saying "yes." This may be a habit that will be hard to kick, so if I start grunting while talking to you in the future, now you know why...

Quick Thoughts

I start language class in the morning and so need to go to sleep right now, but I'd like to share some quick thoughts on Beijing.

Chinglish (poor Chinese to English translations) is hilarious.

Though the second one, admittedly, just appears like they ran out of space.

Beijing is so much nicer with blue skies and no smog choking everything up.

And why is the book 1984 available in China?

Judging from the heft of the book, nothing has really been cut out. Not that there's a way to edit it in order to make it more amenable to a one-party system anyway...

"Everything is better with goat penis"

Today was a gorgeous day, blues skies and in the 80s. This was only made possible by the torrential downpour that was visited upon us last night. We were eating dinner when it started and tried to wait out the storm in the restaurant, but to no avail. So we trudged home in the rain, after one of more memorable meals.

So far, when Ben, Martin, and I have gone to Chinese restaurants, we have been fairly lucky with ordering. Most menus in Beijing, it seems, have photos of their various dishes, so we simply flip through, looking at the various photos, and picking the ones that look tasty. Occasionally, however, there are no pictures. In that case, we rely on my Mandarin and various phone dictionaries, along with asking the server what they recommend or the like. This has served us pretty well.

Last night, we went down the 胡同/hu2tong4 (alley) opposite the apartment we just moved into, looking for a Yunnan restaurant that had been recommended to us. Once inside, we ordered ourselves some food from the photo menu and turned our attention to a second menu which consisted of various 烧烤/shao1kao3 (barbecue) items. There were no photos to accompany these, so we looked through the menu, noticed some items featured 羊/yang2 (goat/sheep), and decided to give them a try. We pointed to one of them, only to have our waitress ask us if we were sure we wanted it. Used to being asked this question, as everyone seems to doubt our ability to eat spicy food, we persisted, and asked her what kind of meat it was. At this point, our waitress started to speak, stopped, and began giggling hysterically. She then walked away from the table, started talking to the various other servers and staff of the restaurant, laughing all the while. After a bit of this, with the three of us looking at each other in confusion, she brought a young man by the name of Tim over. He had gone to the University of Delaware for university, was about to head back to finish his last semester, and was apparently the English speaker for the restaurant.

Tim explained to us that the dish we were attempting to order was, in fact, goat penis, a dish that he had never tried before. Ben was a little put off by the possibility of eating goat penis, but Martin and I persevered, on the condition that Tim also have a bit if we ordered it. He agreed, and so I present to you: goat penis.

Sorry for the poor quality of the photos. The penis is on the far right, not particularly impressive, accompanied by chicken hearts, kidneys, and skin. It is not clear to me whether the morsels you see are one penis cut into slivers, multiple penises (though they'd be awfully tiny....), or something else. They were not particularly exciting, fairly chewy and with a flavor largely determined by the spices it was cooked in. Granted, they were delicious spices, with lots of cumin, but I can't say I'm likely to order penis again.

Strangest thing I've eaten so far, definitely. Though I am heading to Guangzhou soon, and the saying about people from Guangdong province goes: "They eat everything that flies except for airplanes, everything with four legs except for tables, and everything with two legs except for people." So perhaps goat penis's title will not last the year...

Oddly enough, tonight for dinner I went out to a swanky steak restaurant with Martin and two of the Luce Scholars from last year who are still in Beijing. Very fancy cocktails, large rare steaks and the like make a very odd counterpoint to the goat penis of yesterday.

The First Day Free

So I've only been here for four or so days and there's already so much stuff to write about. I'm going to start with a brief post on the first half of last Saturday, wherein Ben, Martin, and I had the day free to wander around. The second half of the day consisted of a trip to 马连道茶叶街/ Maliandao Tea Street, which was a great time and worthy of a post by itself, so I'll post something on it later.

In real time, I have just moved into the apartment that I'll be staying in for the summer. It's owned by former Luce Scholar and current journalist Chris Beam, who's back in the States for the summer and has graciously allowed Ben and I to crash here for the next couple months. It's in a similar area to where we were staying before, but much nicer, with more interesting restaurants and bars in the neighborhood. But more on that later...

That morning, however, we decided to wander south from our hostel towards 天安门/Tiananmen Square to visit the Chinese National Museum. The National Museum is massive, an incredibly intimidating building right off of Tiananmen that's clearly designed to impress any and all visitors. Which it did quite well.

It is a little difficult to tell the scale from this photo, but trust me. It's huge. This is the view from inside of the courtyard of the museum, looking out at the square, which gives some sense of its scale.

There was a very long line to get into the museum, and it was fairly busy with tourists, though the vast majority of them were Chinese from all over China. We had a conversation in line with some men from 黑龙江/Heilongjiang, the Northeastern-most of China's provinces, on the border with Russia, while we waited in line. They talked very fast with a not-quite-standard Mandarin accent that made them difficult to understand, but after we mentioned that museum was huge, they commented that it was a very new building, and that many of the older smaller ones in the area had been destroyed by artillery and rifles and the like. These were accompanied by some very spirited reenactments of what artillery cannons and old-fashioned rifles sounded like and looked like when in use, so I'm very clear that artillery and rifles were mentioned. I'm less clear as to what buildings were destroyed, by whom, at what point, and why.

Walking around the museum, we were struck by, again, how huge everything was. However, it seemed to mainly for show, as they did not seem to making good use of the museum space: there were a lot of corridors and sitting areas and relatively few galleries. We only saw a tiny portion of the museum before getting overwhelmed and deciding that was enough art for the day. It was also rather tiring due to the fact that all of the text was in Chinese, which meant a lot of reaching for the phone for translations. Among the more interesting things in the museum was the following collection of statues right behind the entrance.

As best I can tell, this is a collection of important holy figures. I believe that they are, from left to right, Moses, 孔子/Confucius, 老子/Lao Tzu，Mohammed (because you can't make representations of Mohammed?), Jesus, 佛爷/Buddha, and Marx. It's kind of a funny collection of figures to have standing all together inside a museum that seems to be about showing how impressive the Chinese Communist Party is...

After wandering around the museum for awhile, we left and decided to head out and buy some tea at Maliandao Street. On the way, we walked across Tiananmen Square. This is the second time I've been through Tiananmen and again I was struck by how strange a place it was. We had to go through a security checkpoint to get into the square, but they didn't really seem to care about it all that much, as we kind of just walked on through. The square itself is huge, filled with flags, pillars, a video screen running various nationalistic short videos (filled with soaring vistas of China, soldiers saluting the flag, and the like) on loop, and people. Lots and lots of people.

The square, however, is so large, that there's still plenty of room to mill around. It was also my first time being asked by people, a young couple and a gaggle of high school girls, to take their pictures with me, though I'm sure it won't be the last. The tall blond guy looking the other way in this photo is Martin, the Luce Scholar who will be remaining in Beijing. At some point I'll post photos that actually feature all of us, but today is not that day.

The square is not particularly interesting, though you do get a lovely view of the edge of the Forbidden City, complete with a huge picture of Mao and some nice Communist slogans.

That's "Long live the People's Republic of China" on the left and "Long live the united people of the world" on the right, though I'm less sure of that second translation.

That's all I have to say about that morning, though I will leave you with a picture of a wonderful and ever-present Beijing summer phenomenon: the Beijing belly.

Men everywhere in Beijing walk around with their shirt rolled up to leave their stomach exposed, along a cooling airflow to bring a respite to the terrible summer heat. However, to pull this off successfully, you must be a man, middle-aged or older, and have a sizable beer gut. Otherwise, no dice.

再见，
Billy