Hutongs

Just took my first midterm in China... and I did sooo badly.  It was in my Labor Economics class and I was not prepared enough at all.  The teacher made it seem like it would be similar to the homework problems, but I cannot even understand how that is possible because it was so much harder.  The other international students and I looked at each other after the test was over and was like, "what the hell just happened."  Sigh... I might be over reacting, but I'm pretty sure I barely passed that test, if even. At least it's over? 

Well anyways, onto more happy topics! Beijing has many different cultural and historical things to offer.  I’ve been able to visit a lot already like the Summer palace, Tiananmen Square, great wall, and the silk market just to name a few.  Another thing Beijing is known for is the hutongs.  Hutongs are essentially alleys of old Chinese neighborhoods.  The government has recently started making more of a push to preserve these areas for their cultural history after many were demolished for new roads and buildings. 

This past weekend, I went with my friends Alex and Stefan to visit a famous hutong area called Nan Luo Gu Xiang.  I had a really great time walking down the street and getting to see a whole bunch of different types of shops and I got to sample a lot of different street food than what I’ve seen in Beijing so far. I’ve realized about myself that when I visit places, I like to go where the locals are.  Touristy places like Tiananmen Square and the Summer palace are nice, but I really enjoy going to less tourist places and the feel of them.  It’s crazy how even the less touristy places are always filled with people.  But when we were walking around the more residential areas of Beijing, it was definitely much quieter than many other places in the city.

Residential streets

Entrance to the busy street of Nan Luo Gu Xiang

Communist gear anyone?

Casually selling ready-to-drink mojitos in a street stand

 I've mentioned before in my blog how I liked Taiwan better than Beijing, and one of the things that was a lot better was the food. Especially the pastries!  In Taiwan, a famous bakery is called 85 degrees C.  I thought it was only in Taiwan, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw it while I was out shopping a couple days ago!  It made me soooo happy.  And the bread was delicious =D

YUMMMM

My favorite! Bou Lo Bao (Pineapple bread)!

Escape from Beijing - Tianjin

Sorry it’s been such a long time since my last update!  Time flies by so fast now I can’t believe it’s been over 2 weeks since my last post.  Things have slowed down a bit so I feel like there’s less to fill people in on… and I’m lazy haha.  But I’ll go with my first reason since that sounds better :P

Last weekend, I went with some friends to a city outside of Beijing called Tianjin.  It’s to the southeast of Beijing on the Bohai Sea.  It’s a historic city that apparently is the largest industrial base and trade centre in northern China.  It was a gorgeous city and the architecture was amazing.  It had a much more European feel than any place I’ve been in China so far.  The only thing that detracted from it was how bad the pollution was.  I didn’t think anywhere could be worse than Beijing, but man was I wrong.  Maybe because it’s an industrial city so there’s more pollution?

Pollution ... blegh

On my trip to Beijing I got to experience the high speed train for the first time!  We took it from Beijing to Tianjin and it only cost 55 RMB (~$9) each way!  It was different from my other experiences with trains so far in China because the high speed train is newer and cleaner.  We were at Tianjin in 30 min!  I can’t even fathom how fast it must have been moving because being inside the train, you really can’t tell at all.  

When we got to Tianjin, our first stop was an area that was called the “Italian Style District.”  It was essentially an area with Italian inspired architecture and “Italian” food.  At least the Chinese take on it.  From my experiences eating in Beijing so far, different culture’s food here tastes just a littttttle bit different from what it should be.  It was interesting getting to walk around and see the buildings and whatnot.  We ended up eating Thai food in the “Italian Style District.”  Kind of ironic but none of the Italian food looked good :P.  And the Thai food ended up being pretty tasty!

Italian Style District

Yummy Thai food

We also got to visit an area called Gu Long Da Gie.  Which is essentially a long street with a whole bunch of shops and food stalls lining it.  China is fillllled with these!  Nothing too different from what we’ve seen before, but always fun to walk around.  We mostly wandered our way through the city since we didn’t really have a set plan on what to do while we were there.  We probably should have… because after we returned, we realized there were a couple more popular sites that we missed out on.  However, right before we got back to the train station to head back to Beijing, we got to see a really pretty river with gorgeous buildings lining it.  It was nice to end our trip there with such a nice view.

Entrance to Gu Long Da Gie

Night view along the river

 One thing I've noticed while being here is that there are surprisingly a large population of Koreans here in China.  And Tsinghua especially.  So there is a lot of Korean food and Korean supermarkets around  Tsinghua.  The food I've tried has been pretty tasty so far (Bibimbap!).  I was in the Korean supermarket a while ago and saw some interesting things...

Cream Soda with milk sound tasty to anyone?

How about Korean spam?

Or maybe silkworm pupa?

Fall is in the air

Brrr, it’s gotten a lot colder here in Beijing.  Highs are around the mid 60s and it gets pretty chilly at night.  A couple nights ago, it was 39 degree F.  Even though I’m from Minnesota, I do not like being cold so I have been bundling up like crazy.  Good thing I brought a lot of long sleeve clothes.  The weather changed so fast.  A couple weeks ago it was still shorts weather.  

Onto what’s been going on in my life! This past weekend a friend of my performed in a cultural festival at Tsinghua University.  The school had organized the event as a way for Chinese students and International students to learn about each other’s culture, traditions, and cuisine.  My friend is from Myanmar and I got to see her perform a Burmese dance, which was pretty cool.  It always intrigues me how different cultures use intricate hand movement a lot in dancing versus their body.  I know especially in Indian dancing, a wrong hand sign can mean completely different things.  The Korean association on campus also performed Gangnam Style at the festival and I was blown away.  They had a guy dressed up to look exactly like in the video, and everyone performing knew all the dance moves.  It was crazy! I wish I was able to get a good picture, but I wasn’t in the front and we all know I’m vertically challenged so I didn’t get a good shot :P  I got to walk around to see the different booths representing different countries.  It felt like I was back in the US for a bit, especially because each booth had free food!  Even Chinese students know that free food brings in college students haha.  There was an American booth, but it was a little sad looking.  They had peanut butter sandwiches to showcase American cuisine which I found really amusing.  Peanut butter is expensive here though.  A small jar of pb can easily be $5-6.

Free Korean food!

American booth with our pb sandwiches

Burmese dancing

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed here is that milk is unrefrigerated.  When I first got here, I didn’t drink milk at all because I was worried I’d get really sick from it.  But after talking to a couple people, they have told me that milk is treated differently here.  They do some flash heating thing that makes it so that milk doesn’t necessarily need to be refrigerated and can even last six months (isn’t that crazy?!). Apparently this is done in other countries as well, who knew?  I tried unrefrigerated milk a couple days ago, and even though it tasted a littleeee bit odd, overall it was still good.  And I’m still here and not sick, so I guess it’s not bad to drink!  

This past week has been the most relaxed for me by far.  Because there is so much to do in Beijing, any free day I had, I usually had plans to go somewhere and see something.  Now I’ve been able to do a lot of the things in Beijing (although I’m sure there’s a ton more to see) so the focus is a bit more on school.  What has surprised me being here is that even Chinese students at Tsinghua University can be slackers! Who would have known?? I thought all Chinese students here would be pretty good about not procrastinating and doing quality work.  However, in my Financial Management class, I had a group project with a couple other local Chinese students.  The deadline for them to send me all the information so I could compile it by Monday for class was 12am on Sunday (between sat and sun).  I still hadn’t received all the parts by Sunday night!  It was beyond frustrating trying to go around getting everyone’s part and it reminded me of being back in Carlson :P.  Lesson learned, all college students are somewhat the same.  There are some good students and some bad students everywhere haha.  Another surprising thing is that they don’t require citations here at Tsinghua!  When I was compiling the paper, the parts that people were sending me were clearly taken directly off a website and copy pasted into the paper.  Some of my group members hadn’t even bothered to change the font to match the rest of the paper so it was even more obvious.  It made it really difficult to compile everything because it would be hard to make sense of things they were trying to say because they had just pulled it out-of-context from a scholarly article.  But I guess its ok at Tsinghua because no citations are necessary?  I found it very odd that plagiarism is not looked down upon here.

I had sushi in Beijing!  I had heard some people warning me not to eat fish in Beijing because of bad chemicals in the fish and whatnot (although looking back I’m not sure that’s true), but I had a really bad sushi craving recently so my friend Sara and I went to get our sushi fix!  It was really yummy! And really cheap!  We got three rolls and a piece of sashimi and it only cost us 52 RMB (approx $9)!  That’s about the same cost as one roll back in MN or even less than a roll! Mmm mmm mm.  My tummy and wallet were both satisfied =)

Food Adventures

The Mid Autumun Festival break has now ended so that means back to school/ work for all of China.  I enjoyed the break so much, I was not looking forward to going back to class on Monday.  But anyways, things have somewhat slowed down here in Beijing as I don’t have any plans to go anywhere sightseeing like I usually do.  But in lieu of that, I have been eating a lot of reallllly good food.  Which is what this post will be about.  FOOD. It’s everyone’s favorite topic, right? It sure is mine =D  I will shamelessly admit that sometimes when people post pictures of their trips, I will skip all the pictures of the sights they’ve seen and jump straight to the ones with food.  Then maybe after seeing those I’ll go back and look at the others.  Yes, I do that.  Don’t judge.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, as of yet, I’ve found the food in Beijing to be somewhat below my expectations.  I really want to visit Hong Kong and try their food as I’ve heard it’s amazing, and I want to visit Sichuan for some spicy food!  From what I’ve noticed, noodles and bao zi are pretty popular here.  There’s also this one type of street food that I’ve seen around that I really want to try.  It’s called jian bing.  When they make it, the cook spreads a pancake like batter on a circular flat iron and cracks an egg onto it.  They then flip it over so the egg is cooking on the other side and slather on a bunch of different sauces and pastes, and depending on who is making it, they put lettuce, cilantro, onions, etc. on it as well along with a thin fried piece of dough.  It always looks sooo good but I’ve usually seen it after I’ve eaten so I still have yet to try one.  I will report back when I do!  You can see a video of what I'm talking about below.

Anyways, back to Beijing.  I’ve been asking around to see what kind of food Beijing is known for here and the answer I usually get is Beijing Duck (which is apparently the same as Peking Duck).  So this past weekend, a couple friends and I went to go try it.  Usually eating Beijing Duck is pretty expensive as I’ve heard of people paying over 250 RMB for a meal (~$45) which is expensive comparing it to the fact that you can get a full meal for 6 RMB (~$1) in China.  However, our meal only ending up costing us 36 RMB (~$6)!  And it was pretty tasty for the price.  We ordered a Duck set, an eggplant dish, and a pork dish.  

Eggplant with green peppers

Pork dish

Duck side dishes

The star of the meal... Duck!

While we were there, they had a party room right next to our table where a huge group of guys were having some beer filled party or something.  Everyone in that room must have been very drunk as we heard shouts coming out of the room all the time and every couple minutes the doors would open and a red faced, barely can walk guy would come out and stumble around.  It was a somewhat amusing, slightly sad sight to see.  I don’t think one sober guy walked out of the room that night.  Oh, and it was only like 7:30pm.  The Asian guys get the party started early!  Some of the guys looked realllllly young too.  There doesn’t really seem to be a drinking age here in China as I’ve never seen anyone denied alcohol, even if they look pretty young.  I’ve also never been carded in bars or clubs which I know for sure I would back in MN.  Oh, the good and bad of China =P

Onto my next delicious meal!  I had been hearing people talk about a coffee place with good waffles and French toast called Maan Coffee.  So my friend Sara and I went to go try it out.  They had plastic displays of the food they offered in their display cases and it all looked really yummy!  I wasn’t in the mood for something too sweet this time, but the next time I go I’m going to have to try a chocolate waffle with ice cream. MMMM, CHOCOLATE.  However, this time I settled with the Strawberry toast which was essentially a big block of bread (yum!) with some strawberry swirl in it topped with strawberries and sweetened condensed milk.  I was a very happy, sugar high girl when I finished.  The decorations in the coffee shop were really cute too and when you ordered they gave you a teddy bear to help the waiters identify you when your food was ready.

Display case.  Doesn't it look good?!

Mmmmmm

Onto my last food adventure this week.  Being here in China, it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t try something a little of the ordinary.  One of my friends mentioned how he had recently tried Donkey meat.  When I first heard it, I was instantly against the idea of trying and didn’t think too much of it after.  But I mentioned it to another friend of mine later, who is really open to trying new things, and she really wanted to try it.  She convinced me to go with her, and I’m happy she did.  The restaurant we went to was a small shop that specialized in only Donkey meat as almost item on the menu included it.  We ended up ordering a Donkey sandwich for each of us (which was only 4 RMB! (~$0.70), and a big Donkey meat soup that had napa and clear noodles in it.  I first tried the sandwich.  I took a deep breath… and took a big bite.  It tasted like… meat haha.  And really tasty meat at that!  I can’t really describe it but either the meat itself or the seasoning they use on it made it taste really good.  The soup was delicious as well.  Lesson learned from this meal is that I need to be more open to trying new things.  Maybe the next time I talk to you guys, I’ll have tried dog! (Just kidding!! Dog lovers please don’t kill me)

The name of the restaurant was literally "Donkey Meat Restaurant"

Donkey noodle soup

yummy Donkey sandwiches

Here in a China, you see a lot of weird things.  Many times, I just accept it or turn my head and keep walking.  But there’s something I’ve been seeing around China that I can’t help but laugh every time I see.  They are these weird hat things that people wear.  They’re made out of paper and originally take on the shape of larger toilet paper tube.  However, the ends expand so that they can fit over your head.  This invention makes absolutely no sense to me.  It doesn’t block the sun or rain as there are holes in the paper once it expands and it would not be a good fashion statement as they are a bright, multi-colored contraption.  I couldn’t help but take a creeper shot so you guys could see what I am talking about.  What do you guys think?