Our good friends Peter and Judy visited for a meal (by Ma) yesterday evening and a jam sponge cake (by Judy). Dorta watched how it was made [see photo] and we are fully expecting imminent gateaus and pavlovas from her. Peter and Judy are just in Kunming for a few months this time, though they have been regulars here for some years before. AND they brought me five curly-wurlies from the UK ...woohoo! Welcome here any time, chaps!! (Check out Peter and Judy's blog by clicking here)
We returned back to Kunming today from our trip to TongHai. We've been eating way too much food, thanks largely to YangPing's generosity. A Dai minority meal, a Hui (Muslim) minority meal, this meat and vegetable stew [see photo left] in a special copperware pot and a "3 dishes speciality" meal at a famous restaurant en route home [see photo right] - the three dishes being chicken, fish and goat. Also, Yang Ping's maid cooked us a lovely meal at her villa, and not just us, but 10 of her shopping mall employees too. So we've all returned a little bit fatter and a little less fitter.
One place we didn't try in TongHai, though, was this fast food joint selling "HAMBUGERS". Without the "r", it didn't seem that appealing! Tonight is mid-Autumn Festival - the second biggest festival in China. As we prepared the ingredients for the hotpot, Ava, ma-in-law and I realised we had bought far too much food for just ourselves (plus Ava's "uncle"), so we also invited a couple of our foreign friends, Sam and Gemma, who study Chinese at Robert's School. They helped us work our way through perhaps half of the food before we were all full up. Guess what we're eating for the rest of the week...?
I went out for a hotpot meal with Ava and a couple of her friends last night. It was a surreally international affair. One of her friends works for an Australian company, the food was Vietnamese [check out the revolutionary poster on the wall] and the accompanying background music was South African. All enjoyed in China, of course. We had a nice goodbye meal for Monique and Peter [back of the photo] this evening at a Japanese restaurant. They are off next month to teach English in Morocco and will be very much missed at our school. They sit opposite me in the Teacher's Office and I always describe them as the "grin/groan" pair. Monique was generous enough to laugh at any and all of my awful puns while Peter would groan if it was bad and go ominously silent if it was really bad. Kunming's loss is Morocco's gain.
I hosted my annual Eurovision party here last night, thanks to a DVD recording sent by my UK friend, Ratch. Only five friends and colleagues came this time, so we had plenty of food and drink to go around. None of us was particularly impressed with the Swedish winning song, "Euphoria", but then the UK entry was no better. We had most fun predicting (with some accuracy) the political voting of each nation! Fellow teachers Monique and Peter (left) are moving to Morocco next month, so it was a chance to say goodbye to them. Jan and his wife (and fellow teacher) Juvy, in the centre, are having a baby later in the year, so they'll return to the Philippines for that. And our Australian teacher Ross, and French teacher Manou, both left a few weeks ago, too. So there's a big turnaround of foreign staff next term, Emily (right) is a local, so at least I'll see her again. Ma-in-law made dumplings and then headed for bed. Jiajia was working until late and arrived just as everyone was leaving. A fun evening all the same.
The foreign teachers and our secretaries were all invited to Robert's (my boss) house for a marvellous barbecue meal yesterday. Andrew, one of the foreign teachers and a regular badminton adversary of mine, used to be a cook in a restaurant, so spent most of the day preparing the dishes and concocting various yummy sauces. By 7pm, I had won the pre-meal mahjong game and we settled down to burgers, chicken legs, bean salad, green salad, roast vegetables and two huge racks of ribs! Then some table-tennis and Wii games to work off a few of the calories before heading home. Great fun. What are the food treats I can't buy in China and miss the most? Well, in order, pork pies, Branston pickle, Curly-wurlies, cup-a-soups and Weetabix. But maybe not for too much longer. A Chinese company has just bought the U.K. company that makes Weetabix. So maybe soon YOU will be asking ME to send you packages containing your favourite cereals! Ha! There was an odd selection of food on offer in TengChong. At the top left of the photo are little fish (so fresh they wriggle for a while as they are skewered and placed on the barbecue). Bottom left and middle are flattened chicks(!?) and bottom right are stickfuls of grasshoppers. Which would you opt for? No choosing the apples, now!
We met up with some friends for a huge buffet lunch yesterday. We know Peter and Karen, next to Jiajia and I, from when they briefly lived in Kunming. They have two lovely kids, Connie and Cosmo [left and right, centre]. Poor Cosmo dislocated his neck 6 months ago jumping on a football (?!) and has had to wear a brace since then. The family were heading off for a holiday in Macau, but managed to meet up with us en route.
After saying our goodbyes, Jiajia headed off to the markets again to buy more stock for her store. It's always interesting to see her at work, picking out which items she thinks will sell, accepting some prices given to her immediately, while bargaining hard about others. She has a great rapport with all the shopkeepers, despite only seeing them briefly once a month. In this store, she persuaded the salesman to show me his monkey impression for the camera! Jiajia has been gradually buying cooking equipment and looking up recipes for making foreign food. Her latest attempt was for a cheesecake. We didn't have biscuit crumbs though, so made do with crushed waffles. We had managed to find cream cheese, but not sour cream (so, yoghurt) or butter (margarine) or castor sugar (granulated) or vanilla flavouring (give up). So it was a rather "unique" cake that emerged from the oven, and later the fridge. Edible? Just. Cheesecake? Not really. But a valiant first effort in the circumstances! It's that time of term again, when my evening adult classes draw to a close and the school braces itself for the doubling up of children's classes (presumably to deny the poor kids any chance of a break!). So last night was the end-of-course meal with the adults. Most of the regulars were there - a nice bunch of talented young adults [L to R: Arex, Rebecca, Linda, Andrew and Ava]. Andrew is off to study in America shortly, but the rest (except Ava!) are talking about continuing next term, which will be great. Last night was really cold - very unseasonal - but it got gradually warmer today so my parents, JIajia and I spent some time doing a little bit of shopping in the city centre. We decided to cheer the shoe-shining ladies up a bit by having a mass buff! They good-humouredly haggled us up to a total cost of £1. Then, as an early birthday treat for Dad, Jiajia treated us to a lovely meal at Pizza Hut. Luckily this, and the later tea, was all English food, as Mum had a nasty throwing up fit in the evening, but can't blame it on any Chinese food! Fortunately she'd recovered by bedtime. Mum and Dad are tackling the food here with varying degrees of success. Yesterday's meal at Ava's was thoroughly enjoyed, and we've been to our fair share of Westerny restaurants too. But when typical Chinese food is the only option, there have been some issues! One is the chopsticks, which they can do really well for 5-10 seconds and then it all goes to pot and the spoons and forks (brought along) are broken out! The other is the food itself which is either too dry, too wet, too hot or too cold! Dad tried to out-stare the duck [see photo], but the duck won! Today marked a sad day. My breadmaking machine was gifted to me back in 2005 by a VSO volunteer when it arrived for her from Australia, smashed to bits in the post, just as she quit. I managed to get it working with sellotape, screwdriver and superglue, and it was something of a lifeline, being 14 hours from the nearest decent bakers. Now, over 5 years and 150+ loaves later, it's finally making its last loaf. Dough leaks out, something electrical seems to be burning inside, the plug only works intermittently and my flour and yeast supplies have finished. More importantly, Ava has a new breadmaker machine at her flat and there's a decent bakers next to my school. So after this last loaf, it's into the communal rubbish tip, as I shed an emotional tear! While I made a pasta dish for our dinner yesterday, Jiajia announced that she wanted to make a banana milkshake. I made one last week which we enjoyed, so I foolishly let her loose with a liquidiser and the ingredients. A few minutes later there was a whoosh and a sploosh and I walked into the dining room to find this sight [see photo]. Milk, yoghurt and pieces of banana covered the table, the floor and the walls! I've suggested that Jiajia stick to woks in future ...anything more complex seems to invite disaster! I spotted these tails "hanging out" at a local butchers the other day! The shopkeepers thought it very amusing that I should be taking a photo of them! Apparently they are not for eating, but for assuring customers that the meat on sale is from dairy-type cattle and not the gristly water buffalo that you tend to get more in the countryside. I'd have thought a simple sign would have sufficed but I guess, come the Summer, you'd find it harder to keep the flies off the meat with a sign, right? Jiajia has been keen to try and cook Western food for some time now. So with a recipe sent from my Mum at the ready she tried her hand at goulash yesterday (once she'd stopped laughing... "gou la shi" in Chinese means "dog poo"!). We shopped for the ingredients in the morning, tracking down paprika, failing to find button mushrooms (we settled for Chinese "not wild" mushrooms instead) and later realised that Ava's house does not contain a tin opener (for our tinned tomatoes). The finished product was very tasty, served with fresh bread (from the French "Carrefour" supermarket) and looked just like the picture in the recipe [see photo]. What a good cook I've found! We're tackling casserole next. My adult class were studying the theme of "international foods" yesterday evening. When given the imaginary choice between hamburgers, pizza, sandwiches, sushi, coffee, chocolate, french fries and noodles, 5 out of the 8 of them plumped for noodles! Despite thier talk about wanting to travel the world and experience new things, most Chinese are happier with what they know - you can take the Chinese out of China, but you can't take China out of the Chinese! Good news for them, then, as the Yunnan Government last week announced it was freezing the price of a bowl of noodles! With the ongoing drought here (hard to believe now with heavy rainfall outside as I type) having destroyed many crops, food prices have been rising. But the local government know that a more expensive bowl of noodles will get people really annoyed, so the price has been fixed until October! I celebrated with a bowl for lunch today [see photo] ...and yes, it was still 6RMB (60p)! I read today that the "top dogs" in Beijing are currently debating whether to pass a law making it illegal to eat dog - the end of a centuries old tradition in China. Apparently the new pet-owning middle classes are finding the custom increasingly "distasteful". It's a tricky decision - on the one hand it is a bit disconcerting to see a tail-wagging, tongue-licking "man's best friend" being taken on a last "walkies" from the market to the oven. On the other hand, dogmeat is jolly tasty! Chinese New Year kicked off here at midnight last night, to the sound of fireworks and crackers all over the city. Jiajia's flat is up a hill, so we were able to see an impromptu and ad hoc display, building up to the usual 12 o'clock cacophony. This year is the "Year of the Tiger", here seen exiting a Kunming taxi! Jiajia's Mum had been out earlier in the day shopping for food and had prepared all the ingredients... Ava than took over and cooked up a variety of delicious New Year speciality foods, which I was delighted to help them devour! We were all stuffed by the end. Jiajia's only other relative, an adopted, and frequently inebriated, uncle managed to turn up just half an hour late for a couple of fags, a couple of bottles of beer and a bowl or two of food, before heading off to his friend's for more of the same! Today is also Valentine's Day (the next time it falls on Spring Festival Day will be in 38 years' time). Being our first, it was a particularly special day for Jiajia and I. Jiajia and I fancied a hotpot yesterday evening and headed for a unique and locally famous restaurant near Green Lake. It was a "one-price, all-you-can-eat" affair, but with the novelty factor of dishes of raw food sailing past your table, floating on a "stream" that runs throughout the restaurant [see photo]. These are fished out and chucked into the hotpot to cook. We chose the least spicy option for the steaming hotpot [see photo], but it still managed to blow our heads off when we tried it! Thankfully, unlimited soda drinks were part of the all-in deal, and the waiters happily diluted our potful, with a barely disguised smirk. We ate our way through a multitude of dishes, scooped from the river, with eyes watering and frequent trips to the free (and non-spicy) fruit stall! Not unsurprisingly, we both reported significant WC activity this morning! One of the best changes I've discovered in Britain since returning is the proliferation and accessibility of decent pub restaurants. With smoking banned and all-day opening hours they are now really pleasant places to go. A new (to me, anyhow) national chain of pub restaurants, "Wetherspoons", offers cheap but substantial meals and my parents and I have been frequenting our local every now and again. Their breakfasts are particularly enormous and good value [see photo]. After one of those you can happily skip lunch and just have a snack for dinner! |
AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
May 2024
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