Chinese table manners

Chinese (at least Northerners) love to take their friends and family out to eat and treat them.  Even poor college students will take their friends out for their birthday and insist on paying the whole bill.  My labmate says that it makes him really happy to be able to make all of his friends full and happy too.  They call the Western method of paying (i.e. everyone pays for their own) "AA." Not sure why, but they think it's pretty strange.  Part of it may be that it's hard to find what everyone owes because all the dishes are shared, but I think it's mostly because Chinese people care a lot more about harmonious relationships than Westerners.  If there's something to celebrate or you want to do something fun with your friends, go out to eat!  And it's cheap.  You can eat your fill at an average restaurant for about 35 kuai ($5) and get all you can eat at a really really nice buffet for 59 kuai ($8).

Also, when it comes to boxing up the leftovers (No they don't have Chinese-take-out-shaped boxes here), it's really rude to do it unless your only with your family.  If you go out on a date and ask to box up the rest of the food, it means that you care too much about money and little things and not enough about the person you're with.  Again, may be because of the shared dishes phenomenon. 

When you eat with a bowl of rice with others at a restaurant, you use your chopsticks to take a piece from the communal dish and eat it over your rice bowl, sometimes dabbing it on the rice to make the white stuff exciting.  I do prefer to just spoon the sauce over my rice, but that's not really how it's supposed to be done.

My favorite:  when you're eating soup and/or noodles, slurp as much as possible.  It means you're enjoying it.  I'm going to miss noodle soup the most.

Birthday Parties

Last night, my friends celebrating the birthdays of my two French friends Claire and Benjamin and myself.  We went to a nice French resto called Cafe de la Poste (apparently it's a very stereotypically French name).  It had French steak, French desserts, French wine, and more French-looking people that I've seen in my 3 months here in Beijing.  It was fun to see my friends delighted by the appearance of bread that crackles when you squeeze and and songs that they all knew from home.  The wine was good, the cake was chocolately.  We offered a slice to the French owner man and he was so excited he brought out the aerosol whipped cream, which got me pretty enthused.

Today, my lab group got together to play ping pong (because the badminton courts were all booked up) for a couple of hours before going to dinner together.  I'm pretty bad at ping pong, but it was fun to see all of my labmates and my professor so hardcore and having so much fun.  For dinner we went to "Big Pizza."  This is my first time going to an American restaurant in Beijing and it was pretty funny.  They had a salad bar (awesome), soft-serve ice cream, and pizza.  The most amusing kinds of pizza were "warm banana pizza" and "chicken pizza with blueberry sauce."  Both with cheese of course.  Chinese are a lot more liberal about mixing sweet and savory.  They also had a lot of Chinese-type skewers, chicken wings, and other various dishes.  And "Special Big Pizza Wine," which was like grape juice with a slightly off taste.  It was one of my labmates birthday.

Great news from the lab:  My name is getting put on a paper that I have put some editing time into.  It'll be great to be published!  I'm like a real person now.  I guess I shouldn't talk to soon as it hasn't been reviewed yet, but still very exciting.  I'm also helping to write another paper on the experiment I've been working on here and I should be 2nd author.  My prof. joked that I should come back for a postdoc someday, which is probably a good sign.

A week from now, I'll be waiting for my family in the airport.  

Ultimate at last. and partying.

So apparently I'm bad at reading/remembering, and when I discovered in September that  there was pickup Ultimate at my university every Saturday afternoon, I proceeded to check on Sundays and was very sad when I could not find the game.  I've recently recovered from a serious bout of "I'm lame and refuse to exercise" sickness after discovering that sitting on one's ass all day really does not do wonders for one's girlish figure.  So on a run, I spotted people at the field playing Ultimate, so went to join.  They were all quite funny and friendly people and we played 4-on-4.  I feel so broken; my muscles and joints have become so complacent.  I was complete rubbish and spent most of the short time getting schooled or turfing the disc, but it was great to have a disc in my hands again.  It's too bad I found the group when I only have two weeks left.  Also, it turns out there is an expat team in Beijing called "Big Brother."  You can't say that isn't hilarious.

Yesterday was St. Nicholaus Day, and we did a Secret Santa/Kris Kringle/whatever you call it round of presents with my group of foreign friends.  In addition, you were required to compose a poem for your recipient.  After a slow start, we cabbed to a classmate's apartment near campus.  By the way, this place really made me get excited to have my own place to decorate and make homey next year.  We ordered Indian food delivery (which was fantastic) and snacked on cookies, stollen, and traditional st. nick candies (these are kind of like little gingerbread chunks that resemble dog food, but were actually quite delicious.  The presents and poems were all very cute.  The French girl who got a gift for me wrote a song to the tune of L-O-V-E and sang it to the karaoke track.  It was great to just hang out with good friends in a holiday atmosphere.  I can't believe I'm leaving in two weeks.  

Party number two was this morning.  I finished teaching my English class a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to get together with the class again to hang out.  This morning was their last test ever, and they will graduate soon.  So afterwards, I met them and we went out to eat together.  We went to a buffet called American Island, though the food was Chinese and Asian.  It was very delicious.  It seems that when Chinese people do buffets, they go up for multiple trips at once and get most of the food they plan to eat so that afterwards, they can eat and talk and don't have to get up again.  By the way, I'm convinced the Chinese word for chocolate doesn't really mean chocolate, but rather "brown colored and slightly sweet."  The buffet also included beverages, so all of the boys in the class drank quite a few beers.  I did think it funny that none of the girls drank and all of the boys did.  They are all really cool kids.  (Actually I'm younger than all of them)  It was interesting speaking Chinese with them for the first time, and hearing them crack jokes in Chinese.  I hope to meet up with some of them again in the next two weeks.  It's funny, I now have 42 instant Chinese friends.  

Thanksgiving in Beijing

It's just so overwhelming when you get a week and a half behind.  I'm gonna start from recently.  I'm sick again.  Generic 'Beijing air quality is awful and dry' sickness of just feeling crappy.  It's funny because I rarely get sick at home, but here is seems like everyday is something.

Matt was in Beijing visiting me last week, which was amazing.  The last three days we spent around the campus area and hung out with friends, went shopping, toured campus, etc.  On Thursday, we got off a night train and I had to go hand in my grades for my english class.  Most of the students are seniors, so the class is done early to get the grades in for those graduating this semester.  I gave my final exam the week before, which was quite an experience.  I really didn't know what was going on, but it went pretty well and I think the students did quite well.  I'm hoping to meet up with the class for lunch or coffee every week instead of class until I leave.

Friday, we had lunch with a Chinese friend of my whom I a helping with her applications to US grad schools.  She's pretty cool and it's fun to talk about cultural differences with a Chinese engineering student.  We had hot pot which is always really fun.  Basically, you have a boiling pot of soup in the middle and you add raw meat, veg, mushrooms, tofu, etc. to desired doneness and dip in delicious sesame sauce.  

On Friday night, we went with one of my friends to the home of an American/Chinese family that was celebrating Thanksgiving.  Matt and I contributed pumpkin pie and sweet potato casserole.  We made the ingredients for the pie beforehand and put the filling liquid in a nalgene to bring, which I found really amusing.  The dinner was great:  turkey, mash, stuffing, sweet potatoes with ample marshmallows, green beans, all sorts of American tasting stuff I haven't had in ages.  And of course the Thanksgiving food coma.  We played some games, which Matt and I owned at, chatted, and played with the half-asian children.  The dad was frighteningly conservative Christian ("I know what to do with gays in the military:  put 'em on the front line and give 'em a gun that doesn't work!") and it was hard to keep our mouths shut when he said stupid stuff and contradicted himself every other sentence.  It is kind of frightening that people that are so immune to reason exist.  It renews my fear of humanity and knowledge that people are unreasonable that you really have no idea what they might do.  Even so, it was a good night.

Saturday, the German embassy hosted a Christmas market, which we attended with some friends.  It was naturally very expensive, but brimming with Christmas cheer, not to mention mulled wine and pretzels.  There was a cookie decorating booth, which made me feel nostalgic, and lots of white people.  It was strange not being able to pinpoint my friends in a crowd from their blond/brown hair.  

Yesterday, I saw Matt off at the airport early in the morning and napped and read most of the day.  My friend Maelle returned from a visit home to France yesterday (ironically she missed Matt by about 5 hours on either side) bringing delicious foods, so we supped on spaghetti bolognese (sidenote:  for some reason, I don't like round long noodles.  Fettucine, linguine ok.  Spahgetti not so much.  Don't ask why I don't know.) chocolate cake and French cheeses.  She even brought back a round of camembert especially for me.  It was awesome and helped to cheer me up.  The night ended with "Wall-E."  Oh, fer cute. . .

More on the last week next time.

Boy's day and my experiment (finally!)

In China, 11/11 is singles day.  Four sad lonely lines.  But the day after is specially celebrated by Tsinghua University as Boy's day (girls get their turn in March).  I went with one of my Chinese friends to watch the festivities.  All the girls of a class give gifts to the boys.  My friend's class congregated outside the dorms where the boys were and called them to come downstairs, then sang to them many cute silly songs.  Another group was playing a relay game that involved holding a cup with your teeth and pouring the contents into the next person's cup.  And on and on down the line.  China is so cute.

And. . . my experiment finally got set up today!  It's pretty exciting.  I have to feed it everyday for the next five weeks until I leave the University and test the influent or effluent 2/3 of the days.  It's pretty cute.  I'm sure it will wear off after a while, but it's pretty sweet right now to have something useful to do.  It's a relatively novel application, so hopefully we can get some good results.  Though, believe it or not, seafood processing wastewater is a little rank.

Tonight I went with language partner #2, Yanan, to go have a special kind of fish.  It's called "water fish."  The cook brought out the squirming fish in a bag before we ate to make sure it looked ok, and then 10 minutes later, it came out swimming in a huge dish of oil and chiles (its' Sichuanese).  It was so fresh and delicious.  Yanan is a cute Asian girl studying fashion design.  I'm hoping to go to her studio sometime and see her stuff.  

It seems like a lot of people like musicals here, which is amazing.  I can share my strange obsession with friends.  

Oh, and being lonely yesterday, I pulled Atlas Shrugged off the shelf, and have been opening to random pages and overcome with joy.  It's amazing--or sad--how good of a friend that book has become over the years.

Beijing Food

Ok.  The Chinese food that most of us know and love at home at various Chinabuffets is usually some bastard version of cantonese food.  Beijing food is actually quite different.  Here are some of my favorite dishes:

Egg and Tomato:  literally just egg and tomato fried separately and then mixed with some salt.  

NiuRou Mian:  aka beef noodles.  The noodles are often pulled by hand from a big clump of dough and put directly into water to cook.  Add some savory beef chunks, cilantro, maybe an egg, and a scoop of delicious broth.  I think this is my favorite food. . .

Red Bean Chou:  This is a great breakfast food.  It's red bean (adzuki) and rice cooked in a soup with peanuts and dates.  Slightly sweet, hot and delicious.

Jiaozi and Baozi:  of course.  Dumplings are the kings of the world.  steamed, boiled, fried, filled with meat, veggies, egg, or any combination.  These are awesome.

Jian Bing:  This actually is my favorite.  It's like a big crepe, made on the same type of pan.  Then an egg or two is cracked over the crepe and scallions and cilantro are added.  It's flipped over, and smeared with a sweet/salty duck sauce, and a big fried wonton skin is placed on top.  It's then cracked and folded into a nice little bundle for you to have on the go.

Yogurt:  The yogurt here is of a drinkable consistency and rarely is flavored like fruit.  Sometimes it has sugar, and sometimes it doesn't.  It's a lot like an Indian lassi, if you've had one of those.  You can get the on the street in cool brown crocks you have to leave at the store.

Notice that none of these foods contain soy sauce. . .

Lab work at last!

So I started learning in the lab yesterday.  I guess that was my primary reason/excuse for coming here, but I honestly haven't been all that sad not to do lab work.  But I'm still excited for it.  One of the grad students is working on single-chamber microbial fuel cells.  The ultimate goal for the concept is use in wastewater treatment plants to generate electricity while removing organic material.  He is doing some study on whether or not it improves power output to spin the anode, and is also trying to convert one of the reactors from a batch reactor to continuous flow.

He's going to be gone in Harbin next week to give a presentation, so I'm going to help babysit his reactors and feed them substrate every day.  It's pretty exciting, though a little weird at first.  I think it's always hard to come into a new place to do work, because you have no idea what to do.  

I had dinner with my language partner on Sunday (he cooked Chinese food, and next time I'll make western food) and talked for about 3 hours in mostly Chinese.  Someone who lived down the hall came to chat, and I had an entire conversation in Chinese.  Also, my language partner has a classmate from University who's doing her Ph.D. at the U of M Civil Engineering Dept.  I wonder if I've seen her.

A Day at Jackson Hole

My professor invited the entire lab to his weekend home near Beijing today for a barbeque.  He has a flat near campus that he lives at with his family during the week, but they recently bought this American style house in a neighborhood called "Jackson Hole."  It is designed by a Western American designer and actually looks like a suburb in Wyoming might look.  Complete with Indian statues and Chinese guards wearing cowboy hats.  It was pretty funny.

We went for a little hike in the hills, and there were a lot of pretty big rocks.  I think it's the first place I've been in China where you can't see any trash lying around.  We did the Chinese version of BBQ, where meat is put on skewers are barbequed with some delicious seasonings loaded with MSG.  It was so good.  I finally got a chance to get to know my labmates better, which was fun.  They are all very funny and generally very willing to tolerate my sometimes-disjointed Chinese.  When I came to China, I could not understand much of what people said, but we spoke almost all Chinese today and I probably got about 80% of it, which feels awesome. And I have two more months.  

If you went to fifth grade in my era, you probably played Mafia, and we played it for about 2 hours in Chinese which was quite funny.

Tibet

Ok, so I didn't actually go the the province of Tibet, but I'm on the Tibetan plateau with an 80% Tibetan population, and it seems like many people don't speak Chinese. I've had a pretty Tibetan last few days.

Monday, we went out to eat with two of Matt Ho's Tibetan students. Both are from Tibetan areas in Sichuan province. Adam is a nomad, whose family moves their yak herd every season to a new pasture in the valley they share with 100 other nomad families. They eat zampa, yak, home-made yogurt, and yak-butter tea. No veggies. Jimyang is from a bigger town in the same area. Both want to teach English in the future, and their speaking skills are very good. Sounds like a lot of Tibetan students also want to be tour guides for foreigners. The food we got was delicious. The yak meat, which is absurdly tough and hard to eat, was polished off clean to the bone. Fat, sinew, tendons and all. We also had rice with yogurt of little baby yams. And zampa. Zampa is barley flour, which is the primary crop in here in Qinghai. Tibetans eat this pretty much every day. You take some yak butter and put it in a bowl with warm tea. Then you add the zampa and either some sugar or yak cheese (which is hard as a rock--a little dissapointing for the cheese lover in me) and mix it carefully with your hands. I was really bad and spilled a lot on the table, but the Tibetans were pros. In the end, you have a large lump of the zampa, which is basically delicious cookie dough and you eat it. Pretty good. And it expands in your stomach so keeps you full for a long day of work.

Tuesday morning, Matt and I departed for the Tibetan town of Rebkong (Chinese name: Tongren) some 4 hours SE of Xining by a rickety old bus. It stopped a lot to pick up people, drop them off, re-fuel, have snack people sell things, etc. The road was very mountainous and windy, and there was a lot of construction. It actually seemed like they built the road in 200 meter segments with a 10 meter gap in between that the bus had to slow down to cross.

We visited the monastery at Wutun Si, which is famous for it's Tibetan thangkas--a religous kind of painting. After looking lost for a while, some monks guided us to where we bought tickets, and we were shown around by one of them. First, we entered a prayer hall where the monks were seated in lone lines in a dimly lit room, and were chanting. It was amazing. Sometimes, they would stop and one would go on in a deep, scratchy voice, before the others would rejoin, often using bells. The boy monks (ages ~8) were much more interested in giggling at us than at chanting.

We saw some other temples, all beautifully ornate and filled with people praying (from age 4 to 80). On the way out, we met a monk who was the thangka painting teacher, and he invited us to his house. The monks all live on the premise in small houses that are enclosed in with a courtyard. We entered his house, and he poured us tea and showed us pictures on his computer. He spoke a lot about Tibet and how the Chinese government treats the people, and the way they are discriminated against. He was pretty passionate about it, unsurprisingly. Unfortunately, our Chinese was not good enough to understand most of it, but we got the jist. And he had a really cute little cat. All in all, it was pretty awesome.

For dinner, we had more Tibetan food with yak butter tea. It's just milk tea with butter. The stuff is very warming and very filling, and I guess Tibetans drink a lot of it. Towards the end of our meal, some nicely dressed Tibetans came and sat next to us, and we sould tell they were talking about us. On the way out, two of the women asked if I could take my glasses off so they could have a picture with me. I guess I look Tibetan. That's pretty cool.

Today, I woke up early and wandered the markets before we both went to the monestary in Repkong. It is a dizzying grid of narrow alleyways with doors to the monks' homes. Chanting emanated from some of them. There were also many beautiful temples woven into the site, and many local Tibetans had come to pray or spin the prayer wheels. We wandered our way up out of tourist land and onto the hillside. The people who saw us were usually either amused or terrified. We passed many houses on the way up, and were rewarded with a beautiful view of the temples and city. There were cows and sheep on the hillside too. And prayer flags.

We grabbed some amazing yogurt with honey for lunch and caught the 3:00 bus back to Xining (it seemed a lot bumpier on the way back). The most unpleasant bathroom so far definitely goes to the Repkong bus station. Basically just a trench in the ground. No walls, no garbage. Just throw stuff all over. Icky boodily.

More Tibetan-ness in store tomorrow at the Qinghai provincial museum, but probably not quite as up close and personal. I'd say Rebkong yielded a pretty awesome couple of days and insight into the Tibetan way of life.

My First Peking Duck Experience

Last night, we went out for a friend's birthday to one of the ritzy Peking Duck restaurants in town. We showed up around 9PM, so I was very sleepy the entire time. There was a 30 minute wait, so we took a number and helped ourselves to the tea, pop, water, and wine that was available while you waited for your table (this place was quite fancy and full of foreigners). We sat down and paged through a huge tome filled with elaborate descriptions and pictures of side dishes that you could order with your duck. We settled on a nice variety, and waited for the appearance of the legendary duck. After some time, a man in a tall white hat arrived with our duck on a large platter and began to carve it with no lack of ceremony. I'm not sure if he was really the a cook or someone who just went around carving duck.

So the duck arrived on our table along with a stack of pancakes and 8 accompaniments: plum sauce, various julliened veggies, garlic paste, pickled cabbage, something black and salty, and rock sugar. A friend demonstrated the proper technique for loading your pancake with sauce, duck, and veggies, then folding and eating, all using chopsticks. It was quite an exercise. There was also crispy skin slices which you dipped in the rock sugar before eating (this was my favorite). After the duck came a milky-looking soup. It wasn't clear to me whether this soup was made from duck, or just what you usually eat afterwards, but it wasn't very spectacular.

All in all, I was pretty disappointed with the flavor of the duck. The meat was very moist, but didn't actually seem to taste like anything. The skin was awesome, but how could it not be? I'm glad we went once, but I'm not sure I need to go eat it again, especially for the cost of 70 plates of dumplings.

Street Eats

Yesterday I had the day off, so I went into the old part of Beijing with a friend and wandered the hutongs (historic Chinese streets) that are nestled in between the skyscrapers and commercial complexes that now dominate the city. We were in an area with no other foreigners and there were small stores and food shops and many courtyard style homes that we could only peer into. We passed by a xiao long bao shop and couldn't resist stopping in to try some.

Afterwards we went to the more touristy area, and it was amazing to see the difference between the hutongs where people live and the hutongs where people sell things to tourists. Much more crowded, filled with touristy shops, and alas, less street food.

Later in the day, I returned to central Beijing to Wangfujin Dajie, the huge shopping street: Massive shopping malls, Nike store, Cartier, Nine West, all sorts of shi-shi places. There is a snack street there where you can try just about anything you can imagine. I partook of scorpion (which were alive about 1 minute before consumption), star fish, lamb tripe, and sweet meatballs. However, I didn't have lamb penis or 4-inch centipede.