Be born in Lindsay, live in Vancouver, eat in Guangzhou

This weekend I made a detour south to Guangzhou (广州）, a city in southern China close to Hong Kong. Although the city has over 10 million people I had never heard of it until a few years ago when my company won a contract there. From what I can tell many Westerners are the same.

Still, it is a famous city in China and is well-known for its food. A Chinese proverb has it that for a perfect life one should "be born in Suzhou, live in Hangzhou, eat in Guangzhou, die in Liuzhou". Supposedly people from Suzhou are the best-looking, Hangzhou is the most beautiful city, and Guangzhou has the best food. I am not sure about Liuzhou but I think they are famous for making coffins.

Although I was supposedly coming to Guangzhou for work, in the end I have had more free time than I anticipated, so I've tried to see a few things around the city. I managed to fit in two museums, two Buddhist temples and one park in two days which is more than I've accomplished in Shanghai in a month. The museums were quite fascinating, especially the Chen Clan Academy (陈家祠), a family ancestral hall that now holds a folk art museum. The building itself is exquisite and is basically a museum on its own even without the artifacts.

The park was not far from the museums and I ended up there by accident when one of the other places happened to be closed for the afternoon. The admission is 元10 - it seems normal to charge admission to parks in China. One of the famous landmarks in this parks is the statue of the Five Celestial Rams. The legend is that these rams descended from heaven during a famine and brought spikes to plant in the ground that ensured a good harvest in Guangdong Province ever after.




Of course I was curious about the food so I convinced my colleague Jimmy to organize dinner and see what kind of food Guangzhou had to offer. I arrived a bit late so they had started in on the appetizers and beer. Pearl River Lager seems to be the common local beer - it tastes pretty much the same as all Chinese beer, light and maybe a little sweet.

The appetizers were nothing too different for the most part, some barbecued pork, fried cucumber slices in soy sauce. However they did have one thing that I had heard of and never tried - the 100-year old egg. This is a preserved duck egg that has been aged in lime, salt and a few other ingredients. I had always thought they were buried in the ground, but it seems this is probably not done anymore, if it ever was.

These eggs certainly don't look very appetizing. The white turns into a dark brown gelatinous mass and the yolk becomes a sulphuric green creamy substance. I didn't find the taste too strong myself - the trick is not really thinking about the fact that what you're eating looks exactly like a rotten egg and even smells a bit like one too. Mind over matter. Easier said than done perhaps though.


One of the next things to come around looked like little meat rolls. The kind you might find beside sliced cucumber sandwiches and a tea trolley. Jimmy was a bit loath to tell me what these were but as I was eating one already I figured the horse was gone and no point in closing the barn door now. From the consistency (chewy) I was guessing some kind of shellfish but it turned out to be pork intestine, explaining the convoluted shape. It came with a bit of tofu and some sauce. These tasted fine but they are a little bit of work to eat due to the rubbery texture - I have a feeling the method of cooking probably has some effect here. Or maybe intestine is just naturally rubbery - have to say I lack wide experience in the organ meats department.


Now we moved on to something that, although not so common in the West, is at least eaten by some people. Well, French people anyway. Jimmy found it humourous to make me guess what this one was after trying it. I was highly impressed with myself to get it right - bullfrog. I was led astray initially thinking it was poultry, since it really does taste like chicken (the universal taste for things that are not beef, pork or fish apparently). One of the Chinese guys at dinner said that in Cantonese bullfrogs are called "field chickens". So there you go. Actually this was really quite good and a lot less bony than the previous time I had had frog. Maybe these ones were bigger frogs.


A course of quail soup came next. They bring the pot to the table and then ladle out all the quail meat and arrange it artistically on the plate. Of course the entire quail is included, head and all. Otherwise maybe you might not know for sure if it was really a quail. Good to have the proof right there staring you in the face. The quail in fact though seemed a bit overdone and might have been better left in the soup to keep it hydrated. I'll have to give this a try another time and see if it turns out better.


Finally, the last course was fish. Once again no one had an idea about what to call this fish in English and they weren't too sure about Chinese either. We settled on "tài guì yú"（太贵鱼) - "overly expensive fish". Nameless and overpriced, it was still excellent and probably the best part of the meal.


After all that I was pretty much done for the night. There was some discussion about Chinese cigarette brands before we broke up - apparently a couple of brands are very popular due to having been smoked by Mao Zedong (Zhonghua) and Deng Xiaoping (Panda). So the celebrity endorsement of the Chairman smoking your brand is worth a lot. The current chairman, Hu Jintao, doesn't smoke so nobody is getting a free ride there.

Chinese Word of The Post

袋 dài - bag

Context Now in China you have to pay for any shopping bags you use. It's only about 2 cents each but it's a good move to cut down on waste. I had learned the phrase "yi ge bāo" to ask for a bag but Jimmy informed me that this sounded like I was asking for a purse, or maybe a dumpling. Although I have sucessfully gotten shopping bags using this phrase, I think I will switch to "yi ge dài" on Jimmy's advice.

101 Easy Dishes with Chinese Liquor

I've been doing a lot of solo eating at restaurants, simply due to the fact that I don't know that many people in Shanghai. This is one kind of adventure. A blind man feeling his way through an enormous cuisine with thousands of years of history and dozens of regional variations.

Quite often I really don't know what I'm going to get when I order something. Sometimes people say it's better not to know, but I'm of the opinion that knowledge is power.

Even when I do know more or less what I'm ordering, and what shows up seems to resemble my order, I still have no real idea what goes together. Am I ordering 5 appetizers? Is this gigantic plate of sliced meat really meant for one person? So many mysteries.

Some of the scales fell from my eyes the other day when some of my colleagues were nice enough to take me out for dinner. The restaurant was on the ninth floor of what purports to be "the biggest mall in Asia". It's about 500 metres away from the "tallest building in China" which itself is directly beside the "second tallest building in China - formerly the tallest building in China". I am informed that this title has been changing hands regularly of late. If this does not impress you enough, then there is also the "third tallest TV or radio tower in the world" within spitting distance.



Regardless of the hyperbole, the view from this place is imposing. The Huangpu river cuts Shanghai right in half, and two downtowns - one old, one new - look across the water at each other.

I was pretty glad to let the Chinese guys handle the menu and ordering and finally get a Chinese meal that was halfway organized. They did ask what I wanted to drink though and I got Suntory beer (三得利) along with a quick lesson on how to pronounce the Chinese name (sān de lì). I hope to at least have my alcohol vocabulary under control by the time I go home.


The food was all traditional Shanghainese. The local cuisine has a reputation for being sweet, oily, and using tons of booze. We started out with Drunken Chicken - cold chicken slices swimming in a bowl of bái jiǔ (白酒) - something like Chinese vodka but made from rice and often flavoured with strange herbs. It's strong like bull. But not bad with a bit of chicken in there.

Various other appetizers followed - little shrimps, jellyfish and other things. They were arriving fast and furious and some deft reorganization was required by the waitstaff when an enormous fish was carried over. This one was also bathed in strong liquor though the taste was a bit more subtle than the chicken.

Vigourous debate ensued when I asked the name of this fish. The assembled wisdom had no answer in English, however it was known to live in the Yangtze River and thus could well be a unilingual fish. Further research the next day with the help of the internet proved that it was in fact Tenualosa reevesii - a name of considerably less utility than the Chinese one I would guess.


After some encouragement I gave the skin a try as well. I can report that it tastes ok but getting the scales out from between your teeth really requires dental floss. On the plus, my omega-3 count is improved now I'm sure.

Following the fish was a gigantic piece of baked pork. Some charades were needed to be certain about which piece of the pig we were dealing with but in the end we settled on the shoulder. No matter where it came from, this was a truly delicious dish. The top layer of skin and fat was like a piece of candy and the meat fell away at the touch. I have to find out what this is actually called in Chinese.



No full-on Chinese meal would be complete without hitting all of your typical land animals and several marine species. A beef dish came after this, followed by one Shanghai classic that I had in fact encountered before - crab and tofu in a thick yellow broth. I'm sure it has a more poetic name in Mandarin. This is a fantastic dish, so although by this time I was getting pretty full I made a good effort to have some.



After all these, a few more appetizers arrived as a wind down. Some kind of bok choi fried up with what appeared to be several dozen cloves of garlic - perhaps this was a digestive aid. At the last was the most famous Shanghai dish of all, xiǎo lóng bāo (小笼包). These are little steamed pork dumplings that are rolled with a piece of frozen soup broth - when the dumpling is cooked the soup melts and then bursts into your mouth when you eat it. Usually they come with a piece of carrot on the bottom and some kind of savoury concoction around the top. These are available at pretty much every restaurant you go to and are just about worth the trip here to get them.


Eating your way through China is the work of a lifetime I think, but now I am a bit closer.

Chinese Word of the Post
差不多 chàbuduō - almost, more or less

Context Sometimes the food you get doesn't really look like the picture on the menu. Sometimes it definitely is not what you ordered at all. If you wonder aloud about this the answer you may get is "chàbuduō"......"close enough!".

The sun never sets on the British Empire

The scale in my hotel room doesn't work, and anyway it's in kilograms which wouldn't mean much to me without a mental calculation. But I'm still pretty sure I've lost weight in China.

At least one contributor to this has been a few bouts of intestinal problems, common enough I guess. After a weekend of feeling like hell I went out to look for some drugs - I did have some Chinese medicine offered by a colleague, but I wasn't too sure about it, especially since I can't understand the label. I have a suspicion that it works on the "cleansing" principle though, which could just make things worse.

Western drugs proved hard to find, although further googling has given me some options to try. But on the way, I did run into the ubiquitous street DVD sellers. My interest was piqued, as the TV selections on offer at the hotel are meagre to say the least - I have never watched so much CNN in my life. Satellite TV in general is highly restricted although it seems tons of people have illegal feeds from the Phillipines or elsewhere.

Jeny, the neighbourhood intellectual property bandit, had "The Wire Complete Five Season" in a box - only 20 yuan! A pretty good deal for 5 seasons I thought. Of course it was too good to be true - it was "Season 5", not "5 Seasons". But my new friend Jeny did have all 5 seasons for 130 yuan. Though all I had on me was 110, Jeny said "no problem, bring me 20 tomorrow". Incredibly trusting for a pirate.

So far the DVD's work (not a sure thing when buying on the street), and after watching Season 1 Episode 1, a lot more things from the odd episodes I had seen before made sense. Always good to lay the groundwork.

Given my stomach complaints, lunch today was a tough decision. In the end I went for familiar, which meant the Flying Fox pub, which is ....pretty much a pub. I guess a pub is a pub anywhere you go - one of the more benign legacies of the British Empire.

I had the Irish breakfast which contained all possible varieties of cured and fried meats. It was not bad and the coffee was a lot better than you'd normally expect. Still I couldn't eat too much. Hopefully I will soon be back on the bandwagon of eating more interesting food.

And on the way home, I ran into another imperial legacy:

Chinese Word of the Post

拇指 mǔ zhǐ - thumb

Context The mall where I ought to be able to find some Tylenol etc. is called Thumb Plaza. I'll try this out on the cab driver and see if it gets me there tomorrow.

Sunshine Hotel

Although I do like to go out and eat, sometimes it's easier to eat at the hotel. My floor has its own dining room, and I almost never see anyone else there except the staff, giving me a sort of regal feeling as I occupy the entire place. The dinner is not really a meal, more like a buffet of appetizers. But I can get enough to eat, its about 40 feet from my door, and they throw in free beer for two hours a night...so you can understand that it's the default option often enough.

The staff is bored stiff most of the time so they seem happy to help me with my Chinese. It can be a bit tricky though. Once I asked how I might tell a cab to go to the subway. I got the answer "kē jì guǎn", written out in pinyin with tone marks and characters as well. I dutifully repeated it till I felt confident in the tones and then tried out the next time I went to the subway. To my surprise it worked and I felt quite proud of myself to have used a 3-syllable word. Later I looked this word up and found it did not mean "subway" as I had expected, but rather "Science and Technology Museum" - the name of the closest stop to the hotel. Luckily I didn't try this out downtown or it might have been a lot more expensive.

Tonight was one of those nights, getting back late and having to call into a meeting in Canada at 8:30, it was actually sort of relaxing to eat at the hotel. I think it was a bit better than normal - spring rolls, seared tuna sushi, crab on a stick, other meat on a stick, some kind of shrimp cake. This seems sort of typical for a cross between Western and Asian food that hotels seem to have (in my admittedly limited experience).


The beer is Tsing Tao, probably the most famous Chinese beer. The spelling is the old Wade-Giles system, so it is actually pronounced "qīng dǎo" - like the Peking vs Beijing thing - the older spelling system was not that accurate. It's a pretty good beer for spicy Asian food, light and refreshing.


I normally don't eat too much dessert but today I tried one. Like many of the Asian desserts I've tried, there were flavours that I wouldn't normally associate with sweets. This one was a cherry tomato in a chocolate mousse-like cup. The chocolate actually softened the acidic tomato so it kind of worked.

The fruit with it is some kind of exotically coloured plum - for a while I thought it was a lychee fruit since they told me it was "lǐ zi" (李子). But lychee is actually "lì zhī" (荔枝)....totally obvious, right?



Chinese Word of the Post

厦 xià - building.

Context This morning I was in a hurry to get to work so I grabbed one of the cabs and said "Yindong - Xinjinqiao Lu". Yindong is the name of the building and Xinjinqiao is the street. Lu means street. It is literally around the corner so I figured this was enough info. Plus I pointed. It never hurts to point. Anyway he set off in totally the wrong direction. After further pointing it seemed he was just making a longish turn around the block. After a while it became apparent he was going somewhere utterly different. More pointing ensued and after pulling out my best Taxicab Chinese and making the shape of the building in my hands I finally convinced him of his error...."Oh I thought you meant Yindong Road!" he says (I think). God only knows where this road was. But now, armed with this new word, I can say "Yindong da xia" next time I am late for work. But I will probably still point just in case.

Spicy Scallop Soup

There's a lot to see in Shanghai. But it's hard to show it to others without a camera, and mine is in Canada. So this afternoon I took a field trip into buying electronics in China.



My Chinese source recommended taking Metro Line 1 to Xujiahui, an area with gazillions of electronics places. However said source also told me to go to Best Buy, a big ole Western chain instead of one of the myriad Chinese chains or independent places - perhaps trying to spare me having to haggle. I don't mind haggling, but I have had some bad experiences buying dodgy goods, so...Best Buy it is.

Cameras weren't as cheap as I was hoping, and I had the sinking feeling that I could have gotten a better deal out in the wilds of Xujiahui - but whatever, I came out of Best Buy with a camera, SD card, USB key and 250GB external drive. Hopefully I will take enough pictures to justify all this storage.

This mission accomplished, I looked for something to eat and found Ajisen Ramen, a Japanese looking place down the street. It was busy but they put me at the counter. In Shanghai it always seems that the waiter will hand you the menu then wait while you look at it - I suppose this is good service but it makes me nervous. I tried out some newly learned Chinese - "dong yi xia" - supposedly this is "wait a second". He didn't seem to understand me (which is pretty common!). After looking this one up at home it seems I was probably saying "west a second"...so no wonder. "deng yi xia" (等一下) seems more like what I wanted to say. This is the danger of learning Chinese verbally from people, it's so easy to mess up. Quite often I do get people to spell or write it for me, but of course not everyone can spell correctly, especially other Westerners!



Next to order a drink. Tea seems like a good idea and this word I know - "cha" (茶). However still a blank look. Ok, plan B (as always) is English and of course he does know what "tea" means. He shows me the page of tea selections....without much time to look I order "mint and lemon green tea" for 元15. This seems like an awful lot (though its only 2 bucks) but I am not good when someone is looking at me. We manage to communicate that I need a bit of time to consider my options.

The tea when it arrives is actually iced tea - which is good as they give me free hot green tea anyway and it is pretty warm, inside and outside. The ice cubes are of unknown provenance (tap....?) which gives me pause but only after having drank half of it. Mint iced tea tastes decidedly odd, kind of like drinking a glass of wintergreen gum.

The selection of noodle dishes look really good - beef, tofu, pork, various seafood combinations. I decide on spicy scallop soup, with only one red chili bean marker it's probably something I can handle.

Oddly enough the bill comes now, before the food has arrived. This confuses me slightly and I wonder if I'm being charged for someone else's meal (the place is really busy and the person giving the bill is not the waiter) - however figuring this out is likely to be a huge hassle so I just pay. For some reason I find myself giving money to people on faith like this quite often - it hasn't failed to work out yet but likely has to end in disaster eventually.


The soup arrives - quite hot and very good. It has a coconut flavoured broth with red chilies and green onions and comes with a cool big wooden spoon. The tea and noodles come to 元44 (C$6.50 or so) - not too bad.


On the way home at the subway stop there are a bunch of Chinese skateboarders. Its now just comfortably warm instead of cloyingly sticky - a nice night to hang out.



Chinese Word of the Post
水 shuǐ - water.

Context While pointing at a bottle of water and saying "water" in the ramen joint a helpful English-speaker beside me tells me the word. However the waiter still doesn't bring any. I had known this character meant water but for some reason had forgotten the pronunciation.