Tonight four of us went out to a nice restaurant for hot pot, Yulin style. This time the pot in the center of the table was heated by a gas burner underneath, unlike the one in Beijing. It was divided in two, and both sides contained water flavored by a mix of spices, some recognizable (slices of ginger) and some not. One side was mild-flavored, the other spicy hot, with lots of little red peppers floating around in it.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that in nicer restaurants, the wait staff (whether one person or several, like tonight) stands by the table while you peruse the menu and decide what to order. Tonight we had three foreigners (besides Jamie and me there was Marien, who is from the Netherlands and teaches English here) and Jingjing, who is from Yulin and is a senior English major at the university.
The head waiter gave us a sheet of paper with dozens of things to choose from that we would eventually cook in the hot pot, and with Jingjing facilitating we chose:
mushrooms
beef (very thin slices)
mutton (ditto)
tofu
lettuce
potato slices
sweet potato slices (but pale, not like ours)
2 kinds of noodles (lucky, for birthday celebrations)
fish balls
quail eggs
chicken eggs
We were each given a small bowl with a peanuty sauce in it, plus there were little plates of condiments to add to the sauce: chopped cilantro, chopped scallions (or something similar), a red sauce, and a green sauce. We also added some broth from both sides of the hot pot to our dipping bowls and stirred everything together.
Tea was brought (which is only automatic in nicer restaurants, oddly enough given the custom in Chinese restaurants at home), and we also had Sprite and beer.
The items we had ordered came several at a time, and we put two or three kinds of things in the hot pot at once. One kind of noodle looked like spaghetti (but didn't taste like it), and one was a translucent, wide, flat, chewy potato-based noodle that I’ve been fed a bunch of times here and like a lot. Noodles were saved for next to last, just before the chicken eggs.
As you can imagine, this meal went on for a long time, until we were all too full for another bite.
Back outside, for the first time since I’ve been here we didn’t get a cab right away. Every cab that went by already had someone in it, and although there’s a shortage of cabs here, so they often pick up a second fare when they’ve already got a first one, with four of us only an empty cab would have stopped. We finally gave up, and Marien and Jamie started to walk back to campus on the assumption that Jingjing and I would get a cab more easily by ourselves. And then, of course, one came along immediately, and we had the driver pick up Jamie and Marien as well.
Back at Jamie’s apartment -- cake and ice cream. :) The bakery had provided a gizmo that opened up into a Chinese lotus flower with a little candle on each petal, and played a tinny “Happy Birthday.” Jingjing added a Chinese verse to the singing, and a good time was had by all.
There are pictures, but they’re not on my camera, so I’ll have to wait to post them.
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Friday, 19 February 2010
Yulin: The Organ Grinder's Monkey
Jamie said that Yulin would be different from Beijing, and guess what, it is. It is a different landscape, for one thing, but right now I want to talk about how people react to us.
Early on in his stay in Yulin, Jamie wrote that on the street he sometimes feels like he’s a on display rather than being seen as a real human being -- I called it being the organ grinder’s monkey. Now I’m seeing it first-hand every time we go out in public.
In Beijing, even in the neighborhood of our hotel where there were hardly any other foreigners around, people didn’t pay much attention to us. Beijing is a city of 15 million people, so I suppose they’re urban/urbane and absorbed in their own bustle. Sometimes people gazed, but they really didn’t seem all that interested in us. Sometimes they were a little surprised that Jamie spoke Chinese, but even that didn’t cause much of a stir. Once, in the place where we ate most of our breakfasts, I attempted to say “thank you” in Chinese, and even though it’s a hard word because it has a sound that we don’t have at all in English, the young man behind the counter laughed and said (in Chinese) that my Chinese was very good. (That is not the consensus opinion.)
Here in Yulin we get stared at constantly. We went into a little fast food joint one day (imitation Western food; I’d much rather eat local food but we couldn’t find anything open because of the holiday), and the young folks in the booth behind us laughed out loud. Later I nodded and said hi to them and they were perfectly friendly; the staring doesn’t seemed to be hostile, because every time I’ve smiled at or spoken to someone I get a friendly response. In the grocery store one day, I had a few moments of rare separation from Jamie when I waited in the produce section with our vegies (you have to have them wrapped and weighed before you leave the section), and he went off to grab something else that also needed to be weighed. Three women who worked in the store were just standing around staring at me, so I said “ni hao” (“hi” in Chinese), and that set them all smiling and talking to me a mile a minute, and of course I couldn’t understand any of it, except that I caught the word “mama,” which, amazingly enough, means “mother.” I tried to say (in Chinese) that I don’t speak Mandarin, but either they didn’t understand my pronunciation, or they didn’t really take it in, because they kept right on talking. When Jamie came back we were able to have a little conversation that mostly consisted of saying hello and Happy New Year. Elsewhere in the store a man with a little boy in tow said “Happy New Year” (in English) and we returned the greeting and everyone smiled and that was nice.
One day on a walk we ran into an elderly man Jamie knows, a retired farmer who lives around here and walks very slowly with a cane, and with him I had a nice little chat with Jamie’s help as interpreter. He asked me what I think of China so far and I said that it’s amazing and interesting and that I have so many impressions I can’t even sort them out. He was very sweet, as are all the older folks we’ve talked with, mostly meaning the men at the guard house near Jamie’s building, who are just tickled that his mother is here.
On the day of Spring Festival we walked to the nearby shopping district. We were about to cross a street when a guy stopped his van, rolled down his window, said “Hello” in English, then asked Jamie in Chinese why he hadn’t gone home for the holidays. Jamie shrugged and said his mother had come here. That seemed to satisfy the man, who then said “Happy New Year” in English and drove off. He was a complete stranger.
Sometimes people say “hello” and just laugh. I have to battle a tendency to be offended or alarmed by this, but Jamie told me a story about being in the park one day and having a young couple who were walking near him look at him and talk and laugh. Since Jamie, unlike me, can understand Chinese, he was able to pick up that they were laughing because neither one wanted to be the brave one and try to speak to him in English. So their laughter was at themselves, not at him.
I am working on my own reaction to the staring. If I’m tired and crabby, I tend to keep my eyes down so I don’t see it and therefore have nothing to react to. If I have more mental energy, I tend to greet some people and not others. Sometimes they look away, sometimes they just keep staring, but far more often they get a big smile and say hi back. Not infrequently, someone will walk by us, staring, and then when we’re out of eyeshot and walking in opposite directions, say “Hello” -- usually with a laugh. I’m not sure what this is about, and I keep fighting the tendency to do a little mind-reading. The smiles and greetings that usually come when I say hi help with that.
Thinking of home - without a doubt, people who look “different” (by any number of measures) can get treated oddly or offensively in the U.S., and probably everywhere else on earth. On the other hand, in a lot of the U.S. these days the population is so diverse that though there is always the potential for a reaction to someone “different from me,” there’s no way to define “different from ‘all the rest of us’” because “all the rest of us” are a crazy quilt from everywhere. In China, it’s still overwhelmingly Chinese people, and it seems like it will be a very long time before that changes, if it ever does. Especially in a frontier outpost like Yulin.
Early on in his stay in Yulin, Jamie wrote that on the street he sometimes feels like he’s a on display rather than being seen as a real human being -- I called it being the organ grinder’s monkey. Now I’m seeing it first-hand every time we go out in public.
In Beijing, even in the neighborhood of our hotel where there were hardly any other foreigners around, people didn’t pay much attention to us. Beijing is a city of 15 million people, so I suppose they’re urban/urbane and absorbed in their own bustle. Sometimes people gazed, but they really didn’t seem all that interested in us. Sometimes they were a little surprised that Jamie spoke Chinese, but even that didn’t cause much of a stir. Once, in the place where we ate most of our breakfasts, I attempted to say “thank you” in Chinese, and even though it’s a hard word because it has a sound that we don’t have at all in English, the young man behind the counter laughed and said (in Chinese) that my Chinese was very good. (That is not the consensus opinion.)
Here in Yulin we get stared at constantly. We went into a little fast food joint one day (imitation Western food; I’d much rather eat local food but we couldn’t find anything open because of the holiday), and the young folks in the booth behind us laughed out loud. Later I nodded and said hi to them and they were perfectly friendly; the staring doesn’t seemed to be hostile, because every time I’ve smiled at or spoken to someone I get a friendly response. In the grocery store one day, I had a few moments of rare separation from Jamie when I waited in the produce section with our vegies (you have to have them wrapped and weighed before you leave the section), and he went off to grab something else that also needed to be weighed. Three women who worked in the store were just standing around staring at me, so I said “ni hao” (“hi” in Chinese), and that set them all smiling and talking to me a mile a minute, and of course I couldn’t understand any of it, except that I caught the word “mama,” which, amazingly enough, means “mother.” I tried to say (in Chinese) that I don’t speak Mandarin, but either they didn’t understand my pronunciation, or they didn’t really take it in, because they kept right on talking. When Jamie came back we were able to have a little conversation that mostly consisted of saying hello and Happy New Year. Elsewhere in the store a man with a little boy in tow said “Happy New Year” (in English) and we returned the greeting and everyone smiled and that was nice.
One day on a walk we ran into an elderly man Jamie knows, a retired farmer who lives around here and walks very slowly with a cane, and with him I had a nice little chat with Jamie’s help as interpreter. He asked me what I think of China so far and I said that it’s amazing and interesting and that I have so many impressions I can’t even sort them out. He was very sweet, as are all the older folks we’ve talked with, mostly meaning the men at the guard house near Jamie’s building, who are just tickled that his mother is here.
On the day of Spring Festival we walked to the nearby shopping district. We were about to cross a street when a guy stopped his van, rolled down his window, said “Hello” in English, then asked Jamie in Chinese why he hadn’t gone home for the holidays. Jamie shrugged and said his mother had come here. That seemed to satisfy the man, who then said “Happy New Year” in English and drove off. He was a complete stranger.
Sometimes people say “hello” and just laugh. I have to battle a tendency to be offended or alarmed by this, but Jamie told me a story about being in the park one day and having a young couple who were walking near him look at him and talk and laugh. Since Jamie, unlike me, can understand Chinese, he was able to pick up that they were laughing because neither one wanted to be the brave one and try to speak to him in English. So their laughter was at themselves, not at him.
I am working on my own reaction to the staring. If I’m tired and crabby, I tend to keep my eyes down so I don’t see it and therefore have nothing to react to. If I have more mental energy, I tend to greet some people and not others. Sometimes they look away, sometimes they just keep staring, but far more often they get a big smile and say hi back. Not infrequently, someone will walk by us, staring, and then when we’re out of eyeshot and walking in opposite directions, say “Hello” -- usually with a laugh. I’m not sure what this is about, and I keep fighting the tendency to do a little mind-reading. The smiles and greetings that usually come when I say hi help with that.
Thinking of home - without a doubt, people who look “different” (by any number of measures) can get treated oddly or offensively in the U.S., and probably everywhere else on earth. On the other hand, in a lot of the U.S. these days the population is so diverse that though there is always the potential for a reaction to someone “different from me,” there’s no way to define “different from ‘all the rest of us’” because “all the rest of us” are a crazy quilt from everywhere. In China, it’s still overwhelmingly Chinese people, and it seems like it will be a very long time before that changes, if it ever does. Especially in a frontier outpost like Yulin.
Yulin: Downtown
Thursday, 2/18/10 -- my first trek to downtown Yulin. We walked the usual ten minutes to get off the campus, missed the bus, and luckily caught a cab right away. Yulin is laid out longways roughly northwest to southeast along a river. The campus is toward the northwest edge, and quite detached from the downtown area and, for that matter, the rest of the city. East of the river there are three streets that roughly parallel the river and that constitute “downtown” -- Third Street, nearest the river; then Second Street; then First Street, which is a restored old market area.
On the ride downtown the cab crossed the river, drove under a gate in the old city wall, and dropped us off, as Jamie had requested, at Century Park. We strolled through the park, which Jamie says is crowded in warmer weather but which was almost empty that day. After the park we crossed second street and then walked along an uphill alley to First Street and the old market. A lot of stores were still closed for the holiday season, but some were open, and the street was bustling with walkers. We got a lot of stares, as usual.
Away from the wind it was a pleasant, mild day. The flip side of being in a place that gets almost no rain or snow is that it’s almost always sunny, and that’s nice.
Pictures here.
On the ride downtown the cab crossed the river, drove under a gate in the old city wall, and dropped us off, as Jamie had requested, at Century Park. We strolled through the park, which Jamie says is crowded in warmer weather but which was almost empty that day. After the park we crossed second street and then walked along an uphill alley to First Street and the old market. A lot of stores were still closed for the holiday season, but some were open, and the street was bustling with walkers. We got a lot of stares, as usual.
Away from the wind it was a pleasant, mild day. The flip side of being in a place that gets almost no rain or snow is that it’s almost always sunny, and that’s nice.
Pictures here.
Traffic
The U.S. State Department website’s section on China says that travelers should understand that drivers here consider traffic lights and rules of the road to be “advisory” rather than “mandatory.” The U.S. State Department isn’t kidding. The number and mix of vehicles on the streets of Beijing is mind-boggling, and naturally there are mobs of pedestrians too, and everyone is playing chicken with everyone else at all times.
A street with 3 or 4 or 5 or 7 lanes in each direction has a bunch of lights, and there’s a lane on each side for smaller/slower vehicles (bicycles, bicycle-driven carts, motorbikes, motorbikes with enclosures on the back, etc. etc. etc.). The latter don’t obey any traffic signals. Drivers turning left often have a left arrow at the same time that walkers have a green walk sign, and the left-turning drivers habitually beep their horns all the way through crowds of walkers and bikers in intersections. In Beijing we always made sure to stay with the crowd, because in the end the drivers don’t actually plow people down (at least we didn’t see anyone do that), though they look like they would if they thought they could get away with it.
We did see the immediate aftermath of an accident on the way to Mutianyu (the section of the Great Wall we went to). There was a car pulled off to the side of the road with a guy talking frantically on a cell phone. There was a trail of small bits of debris leading to the center left of the road, where a woman was cradling a man who had obviously been hit. There were no officials on the scene yet. Traffic was going carefully around the whole sad mess.
For the first few days in Yulin there was the additional thrill of having to walk on slippery snow-covered pavement. Jamie usually just grabs my jacket sleeve and guides me through. In Cambridge I am perfectly capable of knowing when to walk through traffic, and at what pace, and when not to, even now that I have creaky old knees. Here, no way. The mutual understandings about who gives way in what situation are all different.
In some places there are walkways built over the streets, so that people can choose to go a slightly longer way around (with stairs), but more safely. We walked over one of these in Yulin that Jamie said had just been installed -- he had seen it brought to the site. A couple of the pictures in the Yulin/Downtown album (coming up in the next post) were taken from it.
Some pictures of Beijing traffic (and commerce) here.
A street with 3 or 4 or 5 or 7 lanes in each direction has a bunch of lights, and there’s a lane on each side for smaller/slower vehicles (bicycles, bicycle-driven carts, motorbikes, motorbikes with enclosures on the back, etc. etc. etc.). The latter don’t obey any traffic signals. Drivers turning left often have a left arrow at the same time that walkers have a green walk sign, and the left-turning drivers habitually beep their horns all the way through crowds of walkers and bikers in intersections. In Beijing we always made sure to stay with the crowd, because in the end the drivers don’t actually plow people down (at least we didn’t see anyone do that), though they look like they would if they thought they could get away with it.
We did see the immediate aftermath of an accident on the way to Mutianyu (the section of the Great Wall we went to). There was a car pulled off to the side of the road with a guy talking frantically on a cell phone. There was a trail of small bits of debris leading to the center left of the road, where a woman was cradling a man who had obviously been hit. There were no officials on the scene yet. Traffic was going carefully around the whole sad mess.
For the first few days in Yulin there was the additional thrill of having to walk on slippery snow-covered pavement. Jamie usually just grabs my jacket sleeve and guides me through. In Cambridge I am perfectly capable of knowing when to walk through traffic, and at what pace, and when not to, even now that I have creaky old knees. Here, no way. The mutual understandings about who gives way in what situation are all different.
In some places there are walkways built over the streets, so that people can choose to go a slightly longer way around (with stairs), but more safely. We walked over one of these in Yulin that Jamie said had just been installed -- he had seen it brought to the site. A couple of the pictures in the Yulin/Downtown album (coming up in the next post) were taken from it.
Some pictures of Beijing traffic (and commerce) here.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Chicken feet and pig's ear
Guess which one of those items I tried today,and which I was very glad not to be pressured to eat?
The pig's ear was too chewy for me to be able to say I actually liked it, but the spicy flavoring made it okay. The texture is reminiscent of squid, which I've had in sushi and, if I remember correctly, in some kind of Italian salad. But squid is better than pig's ear -- just my opinion.
As to chicken feet -- well, like I said, I dodged that bullet.
We socialized with two separate families today -- lots of good food and pleasant company. We took a walk this evening and saw some stars for the first time since I've been here, and the 3-day-old moon sinking in the west. It was about 1 degree F. outside, and windy.
More stories soon.
The pig's ear was too chewy for me to be able to say I actually liked it, but the spicy flavoring made it okay. The texture is reminiscent of squid, which I've had in sushi and, if I remember correctly, in some kind of Italian salad. But squid is better than pig's ear -- just my opinion.
As to chicken feet -- well, like I said, I dodged that bullet.
We socialized with two separate families today -- lots of good food and pleasant company. We took a walk this evening and saw some stars for the first time since I've been here, and the 3-day-old moon sinking in the west. It was about 1 degree F. outside, and windy.
More stories soon.
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Beijing buildings
The neighborhood where we stayed in Beijing was on a relatively human scale, but you could look in any direction and see tall buildings, lots and lots of tall buildings. When we took cab rides, and for miles on the way out of the city to the Great Wall, there were tall buildings, old ones, new ones, isolated ones, clustered ones. No doubt I'm just a country girl from rural Maine, and most of the world takes this kind of thing for granted, but I had fun taking pictures, some of which are here.
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