Friday, November 26, 2010

Don't Fear The Bean Curd

Being a vegetarian in China, I'm relying pretty heavily on soy for my protein these days. But it’s cool, because they do everything you can imagine with soy here. In the fresh food section of the supermarket you can buy tofu (豆腐, dòu fu) in several styles: there’s the basic white medium-firm tofu like you see in the west; extra-firm sliced tofu that’s been marinated and smoked; tofu that's been rolled into a fat little sausage while it's still fresh and then marinated and smoked; plain or marinated semi-dried tofu that's made in big flat sheets, which you can cut into strips to make some damn tasty low-carb noodles; tofu cubes that have been deep fried until they go puffy and have a chewy texture; spongey tofu sold in round, flat, pancake-like slices; and tofu that's been aged for a richer flavour and a chewier texture. I’ve even seen soft tofu sold in tubes - I have no clue how you’d eat it, but I think you squeeze it into hotpot to make noodles or something. I’ve also seen what appears to be tofu cut into shapes that resemble prepared squid, likely also for hotpot.

And tofu is but one humble speck in the glorious bean curd galaxy. There are tons of equally delicious soy products that can’t really be classified as tofu. In the dry goods you can get bean curd that's been made in flat sheets and then dried in densely rolled tubes, meant to imitate a nice chewy chunk of beef tendon when reconstituted and stir fried or added to hotpot. Delicious, chewy bean curd skin (豆皮, dòu pí), which is made with the skin that forms on top of soymilk while it's being boiled, can be bought dried in sheets, sticks, and cute little bowties. A wide variety of seasoned dried tofu (think tofu jerky) can be bought in regular or snack-sized vacuum sealed packs. In the ready-to-eat section of the supermarket, which is totally awesome despite being completely un-foodsafe and a really good way to get sick, you can buy all the above varieties of tofu prepared a million different ways with various combinations of veggies, meats, noodles and seasonings: spicy tripe and bean curd skin salad, bean curd faux tendon with green beans, tofu noodles with long strips of seaweed, sliced tofu sausage and lotus root, etc...so much fun just to walk around and look at.

And that's not all. The snack shops sell a super-soft fresh tofu, very tricky to eat with chopsticks, which you eat dipped in a mixture of chillies, oil and salt. Another one of my favourites is tofu pudding (豆腐脑, dòufu nǎo, lit. “tofu brains”), a super-soft tofu with a gorgeous light, silky texture, which I’d previously only eaten Hong-Kong style chilled and topped with ginger-flavoured syrup. The local style is completely different, though – served warm, and, like everything else they eat here, topped with chillies, Sichuan peppers, preserved vegetables, salt and green onions. Semi-dried, marinated and seasoned tofu (香豆腐, xiāng dòufu) can be bought on skewers from the snack shops and street vendors.

Another popular street snack is the infamous stinky tofu (臭豆腐, chòu dòufu), tofu that's been fermented in some kind of yeasty brine until it has an ungodly reek that you can follow for blocks. Last week, after passing by several times before and chickening out, I finally bought a bowl of stinky tofu from a street vendor by my school. And it was delicious - fried golden and chewy on the outside, soft and fresh on the inside, and smothered in chillies, Sichuan peppers, cilantro and green onions, with a generous sprinkling of salt. The smell and flavour are somewhat reminiscent of a strong cheese and the flavour is actually quite mild, nowhere near as strong as the smell. It's surprisingly palatable; as long as you didn't tell them what they were eating, the chilies would probably put more people off than the tofu. Even my super picky roommate liked it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will definitely be making it a part of my snacking repertoire.

These are only the things I’ve discovered in a short time here, with my untrained eye and limited Chinese. I’m having so much fun discovering the infinite possibilities of bean curd, I've decided to launch a bean curd mission: I’m going to sample as many types of bean curd as I can get my hands on. Guess this means I'll have to try those scary preserved tofu cubes you buy in sticky dust-covered jars in the emptiest aisles of the Chinese supermarkets...

Chinese lesson of the day:
素食者
sù shí zhě
vegetarian

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Walking in a Western Wonderland

Yeah, so, still having trouble finding the time for this blog. But that’s good, I guess, because when I’m not blogging it’s probably because I’m studying our out having an adventure. It really is a shame about the pictures refusing to upload; if I could post pictures I wouldn’t feel compelled to write such long posts!

Just like they said in Pulp Fiction, some of the coolest things you encounter while travelling are the little differences. Obviously, in China, a lot of the differences aren’t so little, but the little ones are no less fascinating. Yesterday the roommate and I took our Chinese friends Benson and Paul to Chongqing’s hip, urban Shapingba district to introduce them to some of the Western novelties that can be found there and to see how they translated into Chinese. The main mission for the day was to find an authentic slice of pizza, but we ended up spending the whole afternoon cruising the shops and restaurants for a taste of home. The first place we found after we got off the bus was a Dairy Queen and we rushed in to get our friends their first Blizzard. I opted instead for something that I’m pretty sure has never graced the menu of a North American Dairy Queen – a strawberry and red bean Iced Cap. We weren’t disappointed - the Blizzard was served upside down, just like at home, and our friends told us it was the best ice cream they’d ever had. At over 30 Yuan (five dollars) per ice cream, which is shockingly expensive over here, the prices were authentic as well.

Wandering through Shapingba, we were beckoned by a KFC, a McDonald’s and a Starbucks, but as we’d already set our hearts on pizza, we didn’t stop till we saw Shapingba’s fabled Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut in China is not the tacky family pit stop it is back home. Servers in headsets and smart uniforms opened the glass double doors for us as we approached and ushered us up the curving, purple-carpeted staircase to a window seat in the upper dining room overlooking the boulevard below. The enormous menu was in both Chinese and English and included appetizers, salads, pizzas, pastas, and rice dishes, as well as a selection of bubble tea, milk tea, wine, cake, and ice cream. The one thing it didn’t have was a vegetarian pizza, so I ordered a miniature seafood pizza for myself and the rest of the table shared a Hawaiian. My seafood pizza was generously piled with squid, shrimp, crab sticks and real mozzarella – I actually forgot I was in China for a second as I ate it. My roommate declared the Hawaiian pizza authentic and it seemed to be a hit with our friends, as well. Again, the prices were insane by Chinese standards, although at about 100 Yuan for a large and a small pizza, it was probably a little cheaper than a Pizza Hut back home.

After the pizza I debated taking everyone to the Starbucks around the corner, but decided as I’d already experienced the Chinese Starbucks I should really try something new. We ended up going to Holiland (好利来, Hao3 li4 lai2), a Chinese coffee and bakery chain that I’d heard had decent coffee for a fraction of the prices in Western places. Sadly, my Americano was burned to crap. Oh well.

Next we spotted Watson’s, a British drugstore, and went to check it out. Apparently they were having some kind of huge sale, because the place was packed to the rafters and it was nearly impossible to move. We elbowed our way through the shampoo and cosmetic aisles and were about to leave in fear for our lives when we spotted the snacks at the other end of the store – Walker’s shortbread cookies! Lindt chocolates! And…oh my god…Kinder Surprises. We snatched a couple of choice items, braved the line to the cash register, and got the hell out. Benson, for some reason, was particularly excited about the little Lindt chocolate balls. I was really excited about the Kinder Surprises, which were wrapped in an extremely curious kind of bubble packaging I’d never seen before. When we got them home and opened them up I was shocked to discover that there was no cleverly layered hollow chocolate egg, no little plastic yellow capsule stuffed with dismantled toy parts. The plastic bubble-egg separated into two plastic-covered halves, one containing the toy and the other containing what appeared to be a couple blobs of chocolate and cookie crumbs suspended in a pool of white chocolate, which was apparently meant to be spooned out with the little plastic spatula-thing that came sandwiched in between the halves. In my childish anticipation of cracking open that familiar chocolate egg, I was kind of disappointed for a moment, and then I remembered that I was in China, dammit, and that this really weird Kinder Surprise was actually a cultural experience. So we put the toys together, played with them for a bit, and then ate the weird chocolate puddle thing. The blobs turned out to be delicate chocolate-covered wafers filled with chocolate hazelnut cream, a lot like Ferrero Rocher, and the puddle turned out to be some kind of fudgy white chocolate hazelnut concoction. It was amazing. You’re all getting some for Christmas.

Chinese word of the day:
好吃
Hao3 chi1
Delicious (literally, good eat)

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Operation Gay Bar

Chongqing isn’t as cosmopolitan as Beijing or Shanghai or as westernized as Hong Kong, all of which have a relatively visible gay community. Having spent most of my life in one of North America’s gayest cities, I’d come to China expecting to encounter some major culture shock in this area. What I hadn’t expected was to find myself living in the gay capital of China. As it turns out, Chongqing has a huge gay subculture, albeit a rather underground one.

It took some searching, but a couple weeks back I managed to track down the names of a couple gay bars and find a friend who was interested in checking them out with me. Pretty much all the nightlife here is in Jiefangbei, which is about an hour away by bus, and bus service back to Beibei ends at around 10 o’clock at night, so a night out is really a night out – unless you want to pay for an hour-long cab ride, you’re stuck there till the next day. So we prepared ourselves for a weekend trip and set out on Saturday afternoon with plans to find the bar, check into the nearest hotel, grab some dinner and then go party the night away.

By the time we got to Jiefangbei it was dark out, and we only had a vague idea where the bar was, so we asked everyone we passed for directions as we walked. After half an hour of searching, we found out it had closed. Not to be discouraged, we decided to go to another gay bar which was somewhere nearby. My friend didn’t know the way, so she called a friend, who called a friend, and eventually we got a call saying that one had closed, too. At that point, I started to worry, but then the friend told us that there was another gay bar only a few blocks away. We set off in search of the other bar, asking at least a dozen people for directions, until we finally found ourselves in a rubble-strewn alley next to a partially demolished building. We were about to give up and look for the next bar on our list when I saw a sign at the other end of the alley with some familiar-looking characters on it – it was 天堂酒吧 (Tian1 Tang2 Jiu3 Ba1), Paradise Bar, the one we’d originally planned to go to. After taking a look inside to confirm that it was indeed the right place, we found a little hotel around the corner, got a room for 88 yuan (about $14, and hit up the roadside snack stalls for dinner and some snacks to sustain us through the evening.

At around ten we went back to the bar, which was now completely packed. The nightly drag show was about to start and there were no tables left, so we ended up sharing a table with the group of girls just in front of us. The shabby exterior, we discovered, hid a pretty decent interior. The place was huge but not too exposed, with lots of tables tucked off in intimate little corners, all within eyesight of the stage in the middle of the room. The ceiling was filled with funky chandeliers and tiny hanging lights which reflected off the mirrors on the walls. They even had a gogo cage, although there was nobody dancing in it.

We sat down, made introductions, and ordered Chivas and lemon tea for the whole table. A drag queen in a curly blonde wig tottered over with a tray of snacks and served us little plates of chicken feet, spicy marinated seaweed, and dried tofu on the house. One of the girls taught us a drinking game and we all chatted, rolled dice and tossed back shots as we watched a troupe of impossibly pretty drag queens do a few dance numbers and shriek their way through a Beijing Opera. The show lasted until midnight, and was clearly the main attraction of the bar – there was no dance floor, and by 12:30 the place was deserted. We thought about checking out another place but weren't really in the mood for another search, so we called it a night and headed back to the hotel. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to dance at all, but we'll just make that our mission for the next outing.

Chinese word of the day:
同性恋
tong2 xing4 lian4
homosexuality

Monday, November 1, 2010

Hikes, art, and sketchy restaurants

I know, I know, I’ve been slacking on my blog lately. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. On weekdays I spend my mornings in class and much of my afternoons doing homework, which is insanely time-consuming when I have to read a long passage full of unfamiliar characters. Since the Chinese writing system is pictographic and not phonetic, when you run into a character you don’t know, you not only don’t know what it means, you don’t even know how it’s pronounced, so you need to look it up twice – first to find out how it’s pronounced, and then to find the definition. It turns a simple homework assignment into a long and arduous task. When I feel like writing, I don’t have time, and when I do have time, I’m really not in the mood to spend it writing! I’ve had a good couple of weekends, though.

The weekend before last I climbed Jinyun Mountain again. I went with a few friends and we walked all the way from the school to the mountain and took a longer route up, stopping every half hour or so to rest and have some snacks. We stopped at a farmhouse that had an orange orchard and I had my first-ever fresh orange, straight off the tree. I even got to pick them myself! A little further on, we stopped again at a nice picnic spot for a snack, and while we were eating a vendor carrying large two large cans on either end of a bamboo pole over his shoulders appeared and started hawking his wares. In the cans he had noodles, hot tofu pudding, disposable bowls, chopsticks and cutlery, and various sauces and toppings, so I was treated to fresh Chongqing-style tofu pudding topped with chilli oil, salt, green onions, preserved vegetables and crunchy yellow beans. At the peak we met a group of girls who turned out to be from Southwest University, and we spent the rest of the afternoon walking and talking with them. On the way down we stopped at a different Daoist monastery, even more beautiful than the one I visited last time. By the time we got back to the school it was getting dark, so we stopped at a dingy little family-run restaurant for dinner, where I quickly caught the attention of the students at the table next to us and spent the evening talking and downing beers with them. By the time we finally left the restaurant around eleven o’clock, we were all carrying on like best friends. Though I never did hear from any of them again.

Early the next morning, slightly the worse for wear, I dragged myself out of bed for a trip to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute to see their huge 70th anniversary art show with my friend Xu Bixi (许碧溪), an art major I met through my friend Benson. After an hour-long bus ride through Chongqing’s crumbling, rubble-strewn, pothole-riddled suburbs, we finally pulled up outside the school. It took us almost half an hour to find the exhibit, but we were looking at art the whole time; the entire campus was covered in it. A 20-foot high statue hung by its knees over the railing of the school canteen, arms trailing to the ground. Being a Sunday, the art seemed to outnumber the students; large silver human heads, mosaic archways, antique wedding beds, salvaged stone archways, and abstract sculptures were scattered all over the place. The place is worth a visit even without the art show; it’s like a giant playground of art. The art show itself was in a series of long, narrow buildings all squeezed together with just a narrow corridor of space between each, with each room opening off the corridor filled with art. We spent the morning walking from door to door down the corridors, stuffing our eyes with art, and then we went to the student village just outside the gates of the campus for lunch. The village was awesome; not only was it full of great little shops and snack stalls, it even had a few midway rides!

After lunch we went back to the art show, but we were tired and I wasn’t feeling great, so we just checked out a few pieces and then caught the bus back. By the time we’d rattled and swerved our way back to campus it was clear that I had more than a hangover. By some miracle, I made it back to my room without incident, and it was a couple days before I left again. And I’m never eating at that little restaurant by the campus again.

Anyway, this post is too long already, so I’ll have to post the next weekend’s adventures as a separate instalment. Oh, and I seem to be having trouble writing accents on my computer right now, so instead of standard Pinyin I’ll just write the tones in as numbers (1=high flat tone, 2=rising tone, 3=dipping tone, 4=falling tone, 5=neutral tone).

Chinese word of the day:
食物中毒
Shi2 wu4 zhong4 du2
Food poisoning