Reacquainting Myself With Chinese Food

A very high proportion of Chinese that immigrate abroad are from the Guangdong province. As a result, most Chinese food found overseas and especially in the U.S. has Cantonese undertones. I have been deceived all these years with flavors I thought to be universal in Chinese cooking. However, in the Hebei province, I might as well be eating in Russia or some other foreign land. It is so different. Everything is almost always a little spicy, seasoned or pickled cold dishes are common, wheat (noodles and bread) dominates over rice, hearty dumplings are often eaten as meals, and peanut sauce is as much a staple as Cantonese soy sauce.

UPDATE [5/17]: Below is lunch at the English teacher's office. The dumplings all have different  fillings like egg, rice noodle, and mushroom or celery and pork.  You can also request different colored skins just for kicks. The tin dish contains spicy eggplant.

Hot pot or xia bu xia bu is one of the more popular dishes that peanut sauce goes well with when mixed with garlic and cilantro. 

To be honest, I'm not a big street food person, but it is easier to order for me since I can see exactly what goes in to it.  I have still had some disappointments though, so I stick to the basics.  A typical late breakfast for me is usually fresh soy milk, man tou (a flavored bread roll), and a baked sweet potato.

Of course there are snacks too. These are candied crab apples and other fruit.

 These fresh apples at the market bear the mark of their orchard.  I thought the sticker was pretty nifty.

There is also a small population of Islamic Chinese in Qinhuangdao which I suspect might also be Uighurs.  I stumbled across them because they run some of the cleaner dining establishments that serve laghman or lamian in Chinese which means "pulled flour".   They go light on the grease and hardly ever use MSG.  Plus, it's amazing to watch while they pull a block of dough briskly in to perfectly formed noodles to be stir fried with a light topping of vegetables and meat.

Although by the coast, in Qinhuangdao red meat is an important staple to most meals. When my parents visited earlier in April, my mother had a hankering for lamb which is a common livestock in Hebei.  Below lamb slices are served lightly battered and fried with hot sauce and mustard.

At Shanhaiguan we stopped to get skewers of chicken, lamb, and beef tendon. To the right is a cold dish of almonds, cucumber, and tomato.  The soup in the forefront was a deliciously new combination of risotto-like dough pellets, egg, and tomato.

At first I tried to avoid Western food, but now I actually find it interesting to see the Chinese interpretation.  Below is a European inspired buffet establishment that brews it's own beer and also incorporates the Brazilian table-side meat carving service.  However, they don't have the red and green signal piece so you have to make sure to tell severs to skip you when you're stuffed or they relentlessly fill your plate.

Quakes and Quarrels

Natural disasters are an unfortunate occurrence of life, but for a nation ravaged by nearly two consecutive earthquakes with a simultaneous drought in the Southern province, it seems almost unfair. I am definitely late in this post about the Yushu-Qinghai Earthquake but it still warrants some thoughts. Despite Yushu county's remote location on the Tibetan plateau, rescue efforts have been swift with more than 11,000 soldiers, about 1,500 professional rescue workers and 2,800 firefighters and police specialists.  However, most volunteers are not accustomed to the high altitude of the area and become vulnerable to altitude sickness and shortness of breath.


According to a recent CCTV broadcast, local residents--although unskilled-- have been valuable assets in utilizing the area's resources and being immune to altitude sickness.  Interestingly enough,  the majority of locals in Yushu county are of Tibetan ethnicity and do not speak nor understand Mandarin  Chinese.  The earthquake's rescue efforts have become a test as well as an opportunity for the government to show its softer side in regards to  long-standing political and cultural tensions between the Han Chinese and Tibetans. 


I love the picture above because it captures the diversity of rescuers (Tibetan monks in red, Han Chinese government workers in orange). Let's hope that a common ground can be maintained for now.

Destination Dalian: Day 2

This is the above ground portion of Victoria Square; a 3 to 4 level subterranean shopping complex. It's a bargainer's dream but I wouldn't quite label it a black market because most of the shops are independent stalls that push more than just knock-off designer merchandise.  If you visit, bring a good supply of water and bread crumbs to leave a trail because the place is a sweltering rat maze from all the MR-16 light fixtures and schizophrenic interior layout.

On this particular day, I was hunting for a good carry-on travel bag. I liked these funky, vinyl ones (especially the metallic ones inside) but refrained from buying in favor of something less trendy and inconspicuous.

This is New Market Shopping Mall;  a department store style shopping experience.  There are very few walls. It appears to be inspired by the circus with different themes for each floor.  Below, the sporting goods section has a corridor that looks like a race track.

There is also Park Place, probably the prettiest of them all. Every store has access to natural light thanks to a glass curtain wall that encases the entire front facade. The stores are stepped back and face a 5-story atrium.

We had lunch at the top floor food court, but before that, here are shots of some swanky salons along the way.  They were definitely over the top, but I like the gilded, giant mirrors.

The lattice work on this window display below is my last spa project coming back to haunt me, but I like the simplicity of the wooden words balancing on the branch nonetheless.

Hot pot, huo gou or xiabu xiabu is popular in Northern China because it's cold.  However, the more the selection, the longer it takes me to decide what to eat.

Unfortunately, it was hazy and rainy when we went to the coastline, but Dalian's Xinhua Beach is a real estate developer's playground. Condominiums rise right next to convention centers, trolley tracks run in front of mansions, and an amusement park is thrown in along with the mix.

Destination:Dalian Day1

I never heard about Dalian before my cousin Elsie moved here, but Lonely Planet touted it as "the most relaxed and liveable city in the northeast" with "plenty of 20th century architecture, an impressive coastline....and some serious shopping to dub it as the Hong Kong of the North". That last part alone was enough to lure me across Bohai for the weekend. This is what I saw when I first stepped out of the train station.

So Dalian owes much of it's cleanliness and modernity to the fact that much of it's infrastructure is barely one hundred years old when the Russians leased the land from the Japanese after the Sino-Japanese War in 1898 and named the area Dalny to be their main Asian trading post.  The Russians did most of the city planning with streets that radiate off of circular parks. It looks pretty on a map, but a mess when it comes to way-finding.  The city cycled through a few more occupations before finally being handed back to the Chinese in 1950 after WWII.  As a result, much of the architecture is a Euro-mash up of many different styles.  We'll start with the touristy Russian street which is Dalian's first street.

Towards the financial district around Zhongshan Park, most of the buildings are Renaissance revivals.  Below is my favorite building built in 1909 with a modern addition recently added. It is currently used as a branch for the Bank of China.

This is the Dalian Hotel, a Baroque Renaissance recreation built in 1914 by the Japanese and what is now Citibank, built in 1908.

I really enjoyed a lot of the entrance doors I saw and might do a series on that later.

I would like to do a series on mailboxes too, but I doubt I will be seeing any more this quaint.

Religion is a growing trend in China, but many places of worship are owned by the government and therefore share resources.  That means if you donate to your church, there is no telling where the money will go; it may end up  buying incense for a Buddhist temple in an entirely different city.  Therefore, there are also private churches (which basically just operate out of someone's home) and a slight ideological rivalry between the two.  Below is the church that my cousin, Elsie and her family attend which is public.

Elsie's daughter Johanna made deviled eggs for the Easter potluck.

They don't have dishwashers in China, but they do have a dish sanitizer which uses positive and negative ions to kill bacteria.  Interesting. It reminds me of the air purifiers I used to sell at Sharper Image before they went out of business. I still don't know if there's any truth to ion technology. 

As the day was winding to an end, I was itching for a drink.  However, as the visiting "aunt" it was definitely better to set a good example. So, I opted to press my face up to some windows instead.

I could not figure out why this was called Soho Bar other than the fact that they tried to go for an industrial vibe with all the distressed metal.