Adventures in Vegetarianism

China is a country big on its meat so the concept of 'vegetarian' strikes many as rather odd.  Pescatarian is a bit more understood but only just. And ordering food can be a bit of a nightmare when even the most vegetabley of dishes comes adorned with pork--pieces, chunks, sauce.  Fortunately, I'm not the world's best vegetarian.  I've taken to picking through and around the meat pieces.  I must also say that I am partial to the odd dumpling with residue, as such.

But all this meat must make its way to your plate in one way or another.  And this is where the market comes in.  These markets are dubbed as 'wet markets' and sell produce that needs to be watered down to stay fresh--fruits, vegetables, fish and often, meat. The prices are cut rate, the produce is a much higher quality than that of what's found in local grocery stores and it's all very 'fresh'.  In the context of China and meat, fresh means stick-it-in-a-bag-alive-and-clobber-it-over-the-head-when-you-get-home.  Wherever possible. If you're feeling a bit squeamish about it, the kindly market attendant will do the killing and clobbering for you.

Overall though, I must respect the Chinese culture of meat.  First of all, there's no dressing up and euphemising what goes into dishes.  The language calls it what it is: niurou,  yangrou, zhurou--cow meat, sheep meat, pig meat. And when the Chinese kill an animal, they eat all the parts of it: feet, beaks, intestines.  There's a pragmatism in this and though I doubt it's in reverence for the animal, I prefer to see it this way.  Let's respect you cow, sheep, pig by using all parts of you.

And when I say everything, I mean everything:

And Western non-standard animal foods are fair game.  This is difficult to digest (pun intended?) for many (read: me) but, again, I will have to respect other cultures' rights to eat what they wish.  For the most part, the pickings were pretty standard.  But then we got to the turtle, snake, bullfrog section.

I'll be honest.  We struggled.  We tutted over the turtles with the thoughts of buying a load to liberate them into the city's sewers.  But in the long run, that only works in fictional children's television shows and so we walked on. 

October happens to coincide with hairy crab season and people buy them by the boxful:

I can't say I understand all the hype but in big, small and hairy, they get consumed.  

In Sichuan province and further afield, langoustines get boiled in a spicy sauce and covered in sichuan pepper--an herb that has numbing properties.  Three langoustines in and you can no longer feel your tongue or lips and drinking a glass of water becomes remarkably challenging.  

 Suffice to say, the market is not always a pleasant experience.

 But in a country of 1.6 billion, the Chinese have figured out how to divide those loaves and fishes.
                                      
And they're pretty happy about it.

On the Way to Adaptation

Today is the fifth of October.  Today I am wearing shorts and a long sleeve shirt—the sleeves are rolled up; the sleeves are a ruse.  I’m inside Costa Coffee, which is currently blasting the air conditioning because it’s hovering between 26-28 degrees Celsius outside.  Summer weather, really.  And I have a nostalgia for home.  Not an aching, urging, blatant one.  More a gnawing sense of deprivation—one part need for autumn, one part need for being understood, one part missing the people and places I know and love, the people who know me and get me. 

I’ve been told this is normal.  It’s a dip in the graph of the experience of expat life as illustrated in an apt article found here: While You're Away

I think I'm in the midst of the upcurve of culture shock and coupled with: pictures of CMU homecoming weekend on Facebook; the impending plethora of crap this work week promises to be; and the fallout of the end of a week of holiday, I was always bound to feel a bit meh. 

Sometimes it's hard to actualise that every day in a foreign country is not an adventure and that real life gets in the way.  I must remind myself that I am allowed low moments in the far flung adventure I signed myself up for.  

Fortunately, my fabulous friends help me put things in perspective.  My good friend Ian recently emailed and, to paraphrase, reality checked me: 'Just think what you would have said to me in this email if you had chosen to stay in your old job??’ 

This is true.  I don’t regret this decision.  Most days, I’m a little bit in love with it. But not like I thought I would be.  I’m not an international school lifer, not at this point, anyway. I finally, finally, finally, have an acute sense of home.  This ‘home’ isn’t my home country but nevertheless, it’s my chosen reality.  I miss London—snuggling up in pubs, ridiculous accents, students with bad attitude, even the rain.

Possibly it’s everything I did in the lead up to leaving.  In my last six months in London, every weekend was a mini-adventure.  Walks through Brixton and Tooting, ukulele shopping in the East End, sushi on the 48^th floor of a building in the city. I was a tourist in my own town. But it was easy to do and I’d like to believe I’ll continue on upon my return to Blighty.

Don't get me wrong, London's just as broken as everywhere else—wankers on Boracles with severe, trendy haircuts and entitlement to match; handbag stealing petty criminals; spending too much money on things that are half the price in the rest of the country; maniacal bus drivers who head-to-toe soak walkers by barreling through puddles at 45mph.  There were some real low moments.  But I love it.  And it took going away to recognise.

If absence makes the heart grow fonder then okay London, I get it.  I love you.  

Notice You, Noticing Me

Friendly or otherwise, most countries have a word for their foreign visitors.  In Ghana, we were referred to as ‘obruni’, direct translation: white person.  In Thailand the person who looks like they could be of some kind/any kind of European descent (or just non-Asian) is a ‘farang’.  Here in China, laowai is the colloquially segregational term used to distinguish the difference. Tranliteratively, us laowai are ‘old or always outsider.’  And maybe we're not old, but we often struggle to blend in. 

I’m lucky in the fact that my hair is dark.  But I can’t hide my hips (ie. I have them), my feet (bigger than the average lady’s), my double eyelids (again, I have them), my lack of Mandarin (trying, honestly).  Less subtly, I can’t rock hair bows the same way a Chinese girl can and on a humid day, my hair does this curly frizz thing that no stylish, well-put-together Chinese girl’s does. You can't have it all.

In Shanghai, the hub of international business, our laowainess is largely ignored.  People are used to us here—we’re no freak show.  The odd tourist on The Bund may look fascinatedly at you and smile in your direction because they’re probably from the countryside.  But that’s it. 

So Xi’an and Chengdu were a bit of a surprise.  Between the five of us, as the shortest, darkest member of the group, I blended in the most.  But I was travelling with: Carla, the token ginger girl; Kimberley, the tall Canadian; Aine, the blonde Irish girl; Nathan, whose distinguishing feature was that he was a white man travelling with four white(ish) women.  There were stares, gawks, not-so-clandestine photos snap, snap, snapping away.

The sight of the white people eating, resting on the metro, having a conversation sent people all a flutter.   Note, not everyone.  But enough people to know that when you looked up, you’d often be staring into the eyes of an entire family scrutinizing your day’s fashion decisions, skin care regime.

 In Chengdu, a 50-something man took to following us through the central square.  In front of the world’s largest statue of Mao, he feigned a series of photos of the Chairman.  It was believable until we turned the opposite direction and his tripod followed.  And followed. And followed. 

And every time we turned to wag a finger in his direction, he turned like a puppy that thinks that if you can’t see him eat the rubbish out of the bin, then there’s no way he possibly did it.  There's  an acute lack of object permanance. Or maybe this country has no shame when it comes to photographs.


He finally took it one snap too far so I begun to wage war on this one-man paparazzi.  Iphone in hand, I stared our voyeur down and began snapping back. He smiled.  I smiled.  And I continued snapping.  He stopped, briefly.  And then in a venture of defeat, he sort of slinked away, tail between his legs, as such. 

Victorious, we ambled slowly away taking in the splendor of the square.

In our wake, a familiar snap, snap, snap returned.   Our friend was back, this time with more camera-wielding friends of his own.  Lesson learned: in China, some things are not worth the fight.

Chengdu…The Pandas!

It is possible that in the giant panda, the world has found a species too stupid to maintain its own place in the world but entirely too cute to let eat its way into extinction. 

And I can remember reading an article with my students by Chris Packham, a BBC nature show conservationist who argued that pandas should be let to die.  My girls were up in arms—How could we? Why would we? That’s just cruel!   

But then you’re presented with compelling evidence: pandas survive on low calorie bamboo, the equivalent of a human chewing on celery, only celery, for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day of its life.  In order to get enough nutrition, a panda must eat for 10 hours a day.  And even then, it’s so exhausted from eating, it must sleep afterward. 

Or this: on average, pandas get their Marvin Gaye on for maximum of three days a year—their fertility and sexual desires peak at a ‘meh, I can’t be bothered to run away from this other bear kind of looking at me’ just once a year; and even then, a panda pregnancy is so volatile that doctors cannot measure whether Ting Ting or Tian Tian is pregnant until it actually gives birth.  In fact, a recent CNN headline reads: ‘Panda May Have Faked Pregnancy for more Buns, Bamboo.’  Not that I blame the girl, I’d probably do the same for some good Chinese buns.  And I suppose it shows a certain kind of ingenuity, but still.  

I’ll end on this fact.  Let’s say a panda eats enough bamboo and does have enough energy to get in the mood and the pregnancy sticks, as such.  Well…panda cubs are born so tiny that, often, the mother accidentally smothers her young by sitting on the barely larger than pupae sized cub. 

Folks, I think pandas win the Darwin Awards of the animal kingdom. 

And still, they’re so stinking cute we tourists (and nearly half the population of Chengdu) pay 100RMB (£10/$15) to flock to the Chengdu Panda Research and Breeding Sanctuary.  Willingly.  Freely.  And commence to snap at least 200 pictures throughout the palatial zoo/park in a short period of time. 

Panda babies, panda kindergarten, panda adults in various states of nap, red pandas.  Followed by panda paraphernalia.  The panda is China’s big business.  And I loved every single second of my experience there.

And I’ll do it again.

Chengdu pastoral

Walking around Chendgu was such a delight.  Maybe it lacked that huge megalopolis vibe or possibly we had the perfect combination of great weather and great experiences.  Regardless, things were uniquely China there.  

Highlight of the quirky bits of Chengdu proper:

Deep fried crab legs on a stick, not really worth the effort:

Heads of…?

 From our hostel:

 Pagoda in the garden of a famous ancient Chinese writer whose name escapes me:

 Aubergine--grilled and fried and ladled in grease.  But the most delicious thing I have ever tasted:

 Sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason:

 Sichuan cooking class and the big knives!

 Evening chanting at Wenshu Monastery.  It took us an age to find them but was totally worth it:

 

 Chinglish: 'The Italian thick taste is thicker.'

 In the Tibetan quarter, which just turned out to be a series of Tibetan shops.  But the colours were nice:

 Laundry day!

 What to do with an old cruise ship? Turn it into a block of flats, of course:

 Jealous of the Chinese ability to sleep anywhere and everywhere:

Love, love, love Chengdu.

Chengdu

The second stop on our week-long trip took us to Chengdu, a city known for its spicy cuisine and final resting place on the trail to Tibet.  We didn’t have time for the latter but indulged, probably a bit too much, on the former.  And again, like you cannot really explain, I fell in love almost immediately with Chengdu.  It’s recently been voted China’s fourth most livable city and you can understand why.

It’s clean, people are friendly, there’s lots of green space, lots of delicious street food and a delightful panda sanctuary just on the outskirts of town, or as far as you can call a city with a population of 14 million ‘town’.  If that doesn’t convince, perhaps that the world’s biggest statue of Mao lives here might do the trick. 

It helped that our hostel, Flip Flop Hostel, was awesome.  I reserve that word for only the truly awesome.  But the location, the staff, the rooms, the lounge space, the tours, were just that.  And it was less hostely in the fact that we stayed in a double and a triple room with just our travel mates.  No bunk beds, no 4am I got home really drunk so let’s turn the lights on moments. 

On our first evening we wandered to a famous series of alleyways called Kuanzhai Xiangzi or ‘The Wide and Narrow Alleys’.  Impossible for it be both these things, we were greeted with narrow lanes recently preserved and dating back as far as the Qing Dynasty.  If you’re not up on your dynasties, that one ran from 1616-1911.  Locals and Chinese tourists fell in love with taking pictures with various old world scenes painted on the brickwork along the lanes and we meandered our way to a Hotpot restaurant located just on the edge of one alleyway or another.  The outdoor patio was heaving with locals which is always a sign that the food must be good. 

 

So we sat down at a hotpot table, essentially a gigantic square picnic table with a circular depression in the middle and a gas stove under it.  We were approached by a waitress who spoke at us; we tried to communicate and we failed spectacularly.  This was the waitress’s cue to hand us the menu—generally not a problem due to the Chinese people’s love for picture menus.

This menu was a piece of A4 paper covered in mandarin characters.  Our language lessons didn’t extend this far and despite our best efforts to play matching games with our pocket dictionary, we couldn’t read a thing.  Nothing.

We looked around desperately trying to make the meal a success.  This was made more difficult by the fact that hot pot is not a meal you order individually.  Essentially, you order a broth—hot, very hot or a combination of both, and then you choose the vegetables, meat and other condiments you want to dip into it.  It’s a bit like making a giant vat of soup at your table only you don’t drink the broth.  We pointed, we stuttered, we failed. 

And finally Aine personed up and grabbed our waitress by the arm and dragged her to various tables across the patio.  She nosed her way in pointing at other seated customers’ trays of mushrooms, lotus root, tofu.  She moved her again and again until we thought we had enough. 

It was then that the family seated next to us took pity on our souls and offered up their ten-year-old daughter: ‘Can I help you?’  We almost cried.  And this kind, chubby, beautiful little girl helped us order noodles, courgette, beer.  We communicated our thanks, took pictures with the family and accepted their gift of figs bought from a man wandering past the terrace. 

When our hotpot broth arrived I can only comment on the fact that hot was an understatement.  Half of our concoction was laden with finger chilies, more than a hundred of them.  The cursory chopstick dip into the pot yielded the fire of a thousand suns, to quote both Shakespeare and Ten Things I Hate About You.  We dropped the odd noodle in, for experiment’s sake.   Once was all it took to understand that that was a silly thing to do.

2 hours and 60RMB (£6/$4) later, we ambled into the night to enjoy a little passagata home. Chengdu, we're charmed. 

Hua Shan Mountain

Xi’an has prime real estate near some of China’s most spectacular mountains.  I use near in the way an American might—two hours in the car from Xi’an gets you to a mountain range that dances in the sky and skims the clouds.  Legend, and history, has it that it’s one of the most dangerous climbs you can take.  Google Huashan mountain and you'll be greeted with images of a literal plank walk with nothing but a carabiner cradling you to the rock.

Suffice to say, we opted for a rather less adventurous route.  

We left around 10am ish for our journey and crowded into the back of some kind of Toyota, no small feat for five people.  In shorts, carrying fruit and water, we feigned preparation for the day.  In our minds we imagined climbing from the bottom of the mountain to the middle station, taking a cable car to the top and then running round and taking the shorter cable car down. 

At 12:30pm, the tourist scene dictated otherwise.  Between epic pre-Golden week queues and a 6pm sunset, we immediately modified our plans.  We waited in a queue to get on a 20-minute bus ride to get to the queue to get on the cable car.  At 3:00pm, we planted ourselves firmly into a box that would propel us over a series of peaks that defied logic. 

At their highest, this particular set of mountains pierces the sky at 2,500 metres. That’s over 1.5 miles high.  Logic would dictate that 5 adults with 7 university degrees between them would be able to work a few things out.  Namely, that shorts might be a bad idea. We layered as best we could—I had a cardigan, Kim a coat and scarf, Aine the same.  It was cold.  And from the confines of a cable car, the wind blew us nearly sideways.  The blue skies that existed at basecamp were long gone.  Replacing this were gusts of wisps of clouds with the occasional drop of rain.

Up, up, up we went.  I won’t lie; I was terrified.  Station by station, we climbed into the heavens.  At one point, after reaching what we thought was the crest of the mountain range, we tipped over the top and were met with a punishing valley below and an impossibly higher peak in front.  We couldn’t see it before. And I swear to you, the sharp intake of breath from all of us set the world’s axis on tilt, if only briefly.

An hour after we started, we reached the top.  The wind only intensified and the temperature plummeted to a balmy 12 degrees Celsius.   We got a lot of looks and a lot more exclamatory muffles from the locals.  This was nothing compared to what we were thinking ourselves. 

Upon our 4pm summit arrival, we had exactly two hours to explore, get ourselves back in the queue and back down the mountain.  We weren’t quite sure what would happen if we missed the last cable car back, but with a Chinese driver waiting for us at the bottom, we weren’t about to try and find out.

Exploration was therefore short lived.   And the weather began to take a turn for the worse.  Clouds and raindrops whipped their way past and through us in our attempts to reach the proper summit.  We were blown sideways at points.  It’s a testament to Chinese architecture that little teahouses dotted the cliffside.

teahouse on the hillside

Holding onto chains and clinging to the side of the mountain, we made our way to the East side summit viewpoint, a term I use loosely as visibility was zero at this point, adorned with red flags. 

deceptively blue skies and whipping winds to the top

turning weather just about to hit

We abandoned attempts at reaching the West side summit and put ourselves back in the queue down.  By the time we got to the front, the sun had set.  And blustering wind accompanied our entire journey in the dark back down the mountain.  Our cable car swayed precariously from side to side.  I imagined the precipitous valley beneath and turned my palms purple from pinching them so tightly. 

In short, and as it turns out, I'm no mountain explorer.