Today is Mid-Autumn Festival in China and Ava's family celebrated with our good friends, the "Dancing Family", and their relatives in a Muslim restaurant yesterday evening. JD and Ava are front right. The woman in green, centre, is Ma-in-law who is still begging to be allowed to live with us again after her "final straw" outbursts a couple of weeks ago. On her left is "Drunkle", Ava's permanently drunk pseudo-uncle whom JD calls "Smelly Man" as he never washes. Yes, we do have a rather weird and dysfunctional family here! As ever, when the most of the food has been eaten and the conversation gets too fast or heavily dialect for me to keep up with, I usually take JD out for a look around the restaurant grounds. We both get bored at these sort of events after a while. This sign caught my attention, with it's completely unnecessary "mess" in the middle". Now what's all that about?
Ma-in-law won't be entering Masterchef anytime soon. Today's lunch [from top right, clockwise] was pig fat, fried pig fat in breadcrumbs, week-old chicken (reheat 'til you eat!), dried chilli, and lotus root soup (with added pig fat). I couldn't stomach much to be honest. So guess what's for dinner later...
Some of Jiajia's well-to-do customers go to quite extraordinary lengths to show their gratitude for her special help and generous discounts. Last week, one such lady had a box of live crabs airmailed to us from Suzhou, 2500km (1600 miles) away. So yesterday we invited some friends over to help us eat them. I didn't partake myself, because of possible gout repercussions, but I did enjoy watching JD's mix of curiosity and revulsion as he gingerly fingered one of the (dead) hairy creatures. Very funny. If there's one area where JD is often less than well-behaved, it's feeding time. He makes a huge fuss when offered milk or solids, and shows little interest in snacks, juice or fruit. We think part of the problem is a quickly-bored mind and a burgeoning desire to do everything for himself. Having cartoons (or Chinese "X-factor") on the TV has kept him distracted enough to be fed up to now, but he increasingly prefers to be given a spoon, a fork or a pair of chopsticks and have a go at feeding himself. It inevitably ends up in a huge mess, but he seems to enjoy the process!
Tomorrow is mid-Autumn Festival where Chinese families get together to exchange over-priced, but lavishly packaged, pastry cakes and gaze at the full moon (clouds permitting). The mooncakes can be filled with meat, meat/sugar(!?), fruits, bean paste or egg. Not being able to read the box means it's always a bit of a lottery and, being dry and mass-produced, I've never eaten one I've really enjoyed. However, that didn't stop me entering an online competition to win 300RMB (£30) of hand-made mooncakes from a top Kunming Hotel and, lo and behold, I won! They made a good gift for a generous friend of ours and she, in return, gave us a box of eggs, which are much tastier. Dave and Esme spent some time watching me teach today. It was great for my students to meet other foreigners and quiz them. Some of them thought that Esme was Dave's wife which was quite amusing. They couldn't believe Esme was only 16 - let's just say she isn't as conservative in her looks as most Chinese teenagers are! It was fun for me too, to have Dave and Esme there sharing what is obviously a very important part of my life. And, of course, plenty of dumplings for lunch! I had a nice meal with Glyn (Head of Lattitude Australia) and Kelly (Lattitude China Co-ordinator) last weekend. It was good to get a sense of Lattitude's bigger world picture, as I often only focus on the volunteers to China whom I train every 6 months. We may think that the authorities and schools here cause big issues, but when you hear about Lattitude's problems in, say, India and Vietnam and you realise that Chinese bureacracy is comparatively efficient and honest! The new restaurant we tried had tasty food, attentive service and some glorious Chinglish on the menu. The "Lazy food" looked fun but we finally decided against a glass of "Iraqi Cloud Water"! Apparently the Chinese makes no sense either! A British town is only a city when it has a cathedral. In China, the main indicator of civilization is the level of fast food (in my mind, anyhow!). And Kunming made a leap forward from MacDonalds & KFC when Starbucks arrived last year and Burger King opened here last month. I finally found the BK this week and had myself a bit of a Whopper. The meal tasted great, but the service was chaotic. The electronic tills were all broken, so staff were writing down orders on scraps of paper, handed to the cooks, and customers were given handwritten IOUs, as there was no access to the change in the tills. Laughable. I'll be back though! I spent today acting the role of a manager of an international French company! A friend of Ava's needed to convince some farmers in a town outside Kunming that she works on behalf of a French agricultural company. Indeed she does but, for countryside folk, seeing is believing and papers can be forged. A real life foreigner is indisputable, however. and thankfully it seems English and French are indistinguishable! After a couple of hours of negotiation, contracts were signed (or fingerprinted in the case of some of the less literate workers) and then we all went off for a meal. The land is being rented to grow thorny bushes which are higly prized as burglar deterrents in France and cost a lot as a result. They say it looks more beautiful than fences and barbed wire though, in my opinion, not THAT much more! Still, mission accomplished. By way of a thank you, I was given a bag of potatoes, a leg of ham, two dozen eggs and a live chicken. Result! Jiajia's friend gave us a box of organic vegetables as a Spring Festival gift a couple of days ago and, to my surprise, it contained a small bag of Brussel sprouts. I've not seen them for sale in Kunming before - for Christmas dinner we buy them from Shanghai (1500 miles / 2400 km away!) and get them shipped to us! But it seems there's now a farm in Kunming who grow them, and other vegetables, for export. I asked Jiajia to ask her friend where the farm was, so that we could try and buy some more in the future. Then, four hours later, her friend turns up at the house with a huge box of Brussel sprouts. 10kg (22lb) of them!! Now I like a Brussel sprout as much as the next man, but I think it will take me a year to get through that many! Thank goodness for the freezer. And no naked flames in the bedroom please!!
We've had this odd-looking vegetable a couple of times at home recently. It looks a bit like Brussel Sprouts and tastes similarly yummy. I'm a big Brussel sprout fan, so I was intrigued to find out exactly its English name, if it has one. Inspired by recent Holmes TV series (both "Elementary" and "Sherlock") I started my investigation... Ma-in-law mumbled something like "Urgh! Sigh!", and the nanny later confirmed that "er cài" (儿菜) is its name in local dialect, literally "children vegetable"!? Ava couldn't help - she didn't even know how to write the local name in Chinese characters. The first two colleagues I asked at work had no idea what I was talking about. The third said it's proper name was "Da tóu cài" (大头菜), which translates literally as "big head vegetable". However, further investigation revealed this to be swede or rutabaga. Another fellow teacher, "Kelly", agreed to look into it for me and came back with a proper name of "bào zǐ cài" (抱子菜) which translates literally as, "holding babies vegetable"! And the English for that comes back as "Brussells vegetable". Bingo! And that seemed to be the end of the trail. Until, that is, I typed in "Brussel sprouts" into another online dictionary and found a totally different name, "qiú yá gānlán" (球芽甘蓝). The mystery continues... While Britain gets all upset when microscopic traces of horse meat are found in its beef lasagne, China has to face up to the bizarre news that its much-loved donkey meat(!?) has been found to have been contaminated with ...errr ...fox!? Click here for more! One of the big perks of my job is my bosses' hospitality and my colleagues' cooking prowess, which combines to make an outstanding Christmas meal each year. Andrew [far left] is an ex-pro chef, with Julian [far right] a keen amateur. Robert [middle] opens up his huge house and well-equipped kitchen, while his wife Rachel buys copious amounts of food, including ordering Brussel sprouts online! So, fifteen of us enjoyed a wonderful Christmas meal this evening. We indulged (rather too heavily in my case) in a huge turkey, Brussel sprouts cooked in three different ways, gravy, bread sauce, carrots, beans, pumpkin soup, roast potatoes, stuffing, onions, apple sauce, red cabbage, caramel flan, Christmas pudding and cartons/bottles of various beverages! I think it will take me a year to digest, but you don't often get such high quality western food here, so why not make the most of it? The last whole school meal was to a very classy buffet, but fellow-teacher Kelly and I weren't able to attend because of Lattitude training duties. So yesterday, we had a catch-up lunch at the school's expense. And boy, what a meal. The restaurant (amusing called "Gloden and Silver Jaguar"!) lays on between 200-300 different dishes to choose from, and it's all-you-can-eat. They specialise in seafood, and as well as oysters, shrimp and various shellfish they also offered sea cucumber, shark and crocodile! I'd deliberately not eaten for 18 hours before, and so the temptation to gorge was immense. The seafood I could ignore (gout dangers), but there were still 200 other dishes to try. After 2 hours I could barely walk! Didn't even bother with dinner that evening. or breakfast today, come to that! Regular blog readers may recall I train a new selection of foreign teenagers for Lattitude every 6 months. The latest intake - only 9 this time - arrived a few days ago and we are already in the middle of the 8 day course. There is a British and an American guy and the rest are Australians. As can be seen in the photo above, the welcome meal on the first evening was "cross the bridge noodles" with a free dance show thrown in for good measure!
A couple of days ago I thought I spotted golden arches from the bus as I returned home. I investigated further today and, yes, it's a newly opened branch of McDonalds, just twenty minutes walk from my house on HongShan DongLu! Were I to walk home from work it would be exactly halfway along the 40 minute route ...so tempting! With my usual heavy bag of books and 150 steps to climb up the hill to my house, I think I'll continue to take the bus most days, but further temptation today came in the form of their opening "Two-for-One" deal. My resolve crumbled and I stuffed myself with four burgers for just 20RMB (£2) ...a very welcome change from rice and noodles!
I was part of a day-trip to ChuXiong yesterday, to visit two of the Lattitude vounteers I trained back in March. ChuXiong is a town or 200,000 people, about two hours drive from Kunming. Harry and Daniel are the first volunteers to be placed there, in a large Middle School (3500 students). We watched them teach two very successful lessons [see above] and visited their huge 3-bedroom apartment, followed by a meeting with the school leaders. Lunch comprised an interesting selection of local dishes, including one I'd never experienced before - some sort of wild plant with fairly lethal-looking thorns still in place [see below]. Tasted OK, though!
My term ended yesterday and the school celebrated with a delicious buffet meal in a revolving restaurant. There used to be a time when I knew most of the names of the 100 or so staff in the school. No more. Although I recognise most faces, I'd struggle to name more than 30-40% now. After the meal we had a performance party. Various teachers and admin staff did dances, singing and party games. I did a comedy magic turn, which went down very well. It culminated in a volunteer [see photo below] secretly putting a 50RMB (£5) note in one of four envelopes. I then proceeded to burn three envelopes and when she opened the remaining one and showed it was empty, there was an audible gasp from the audience. Worth £5 to get that reaction! Later I won first prize in the lottery however - a gift voucher for 300RMB (£30). So overall a profit, and a great way to end a good term! Ava was invited to a countryside dinner by a well-to-do friend of hers yesterday and insisted on dragging me along. After an hour's drive, we found the restaurant where ten men were already drinking spirits, smoking and tucking into the dishes. They proudly showed us the fried grasshoppers, bamboo maggots and a chicken-and-snake soup. They claimed that snake meat is good for your eyesight. At 2000RMB (£200) for one grass snake it's not so good on the wallet. Ava avoided all the oddities, claiming pregnant women can't eat strange foods. I managed a bit of everything, including the "snake blood rice". Not great.
We took the train to Guangzhou today. There are handbag and shoe markets there which give Ava a wider range of goods items to sell. It took seconds to buy a ticket, the train was on time, clean and speedy - British Rail please note! The coffee was a rip-off though; 30RMB (£3) for a paper cupful? On the way home we bought our coffee in advance from the KFC by the station. Much cheaper and just as tasty. We headed for Shenzhen's IKEA today. Ava loves the shopping possibilities there (my role seems to be to put the brakes on the more wild purchase opportunities). As for me, I allow myself to be dragged there for the food. Despite the queues, the cheap and authentic Swedish food is too tempting to ignore. This time I managed meatballs AND spaghetti bolognese (and brocolli, chicken wings, soup, cake, juice...). Great nosh! I enjoyed this Fire Escape sign. All good advice, except What's the third Taboo? I need to know. Is it something we can't talk about?? Ava and I joined a dozen others for a fantastic Christmas meal at my boss's house yesterday. One of our foreign teachers is an ex-professional cook and spent 7 hours preparing the meat (a huge turkey and a ham), 6 veg (including my favourites - brussel sprouts - shipped in from Shanghai!) and 2 desserts - all done to a very high standard. Having played badminton in the afternoon (first time in a month - I'm feeling a lot healthier at the moment), I told myself that my overindulgence was almost justified! Happy Christmas all!
One of the four places where Ava and I had our 2-day "professional wedding photoshoot" a year ago was Guandu's Old Town. After having some pictures taken with the local senior citizens at one of the temples there [see above], we promised to return later with some prints for them. I've felt guilty ever since as, although we made the copies, we never went back to pass them over. So, with a free day on my hands today and Ava in Shenzhen on business, I made the 3-bus, 1½ hour journey back to Guandu to track the oldies down and fulfil the promise. Unfortunately, the rear of the temple is now locked up and there were no OAPs in sight. The monk couldn't help, but an incense seller outside recognised two men in the photos and promised to pass them all on for me. A quick bowl of noodles, a takeaway of some local speciality Guandu Baba (pancake things) for Ma-in-Law and it was back to the buses for the trip home. Mission accomplished!
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AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
April 2024
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