China Hope Live » Things we’ve eaten

“Cats are friends, not food!”

Joel — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:55:44 +0000

I’m not kidding; that’s exactly what these signs say:

Currently in the Chinese media, and now all over the English China blog world, is the news that China is considering passing a law that would make it illegal to eat dogs and cats. But even if it passes, I have my doubts that those hypocritical pork-eating bourgeois specie-ists will succeed in enforcing their shameless attack on cultural practices that go back thousands of years.

The image on the right is a bag of dog meat one of our Chinese teachers gave us as a gift.

Anyway, I just couldn’t pass up sharing a photo of a sign that says “Cats are friends, not food!” （猫是朋友，不是食物）。 Also visible in the photo:

“Refuse to eat cats.” （拒绝吃猫）
“Please show humanitarianism, set them free.” （请发扬人道主义放过它们）
“Cherish humanity’s good friends! Refuse to eat cat and dog meat.” （爱护人类好友！拒绝吃猫狗肉）
“Refuse to eat cat and dog meat. Cherish humanity’s friends.” (拒食猫狗肉爱护人类之友)
请口下留情 is a play on the phrase 手下留情 (“restrain your hand”), as in showing mercy or sparing someone’s feelings by not meting out more punishment than is needed, often in the context of criticizing. On the sign they switched “hand” (手) for “mouth” （口）, so it might mean something like, “Be merciful; please restrain your mouth”.

For our personal encounters with cats and dogs as food in China, including a downloadable translated menu from a local dog meat restaurant, see here:

This is a dog meat restaurant near our old apartment:

The last time we ate dog, at a Korean restaurant with one of our teachers and her Korean fiancé:

Honestly, it tasted better at the dump-of-a-restaurant two photos up, but it wasn’t great at either place. Not like some of the donkey I’ve had.

Free frogs

Joel — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:07:42 +0000

We went out for hotpot last night and the restaurant sònged us two “cow frogs” (牛蛙):

One for the spicy side, one for the regular side! Nice of them to not throw out the skin.

Lots of restaurants in Tianjin have frogs in tanks near the front door so you can choose them fresh; it’s not anything all that extraordinary. This was the second time we’ve had frog, but the first time they were diced up and fried to unrecognizable smithereens.

Jessica made us move the frogs off the table after I took this photo because “they stunk.” And she wouldn’t let us put them in the pot until the end because she didn’t want to get the soup “all frogged up.” Pregnant ladies apparently have superior olfactory powers, and ought not to be argued with.

Balloons, noodles, and blog issues

Joel — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:15:46 +0000

Stupid blog stuff
The blog’s been down a lot the last few days. So 烦得死去活来！ I don’t have time or know-how to fix it, but thankfully we have friends here who are smarter than me. Hopefully we’ll do all the upgrades and maintenance and stuff that I’ve successfully(?) avoided so far out of fear of messing everything up, and things will go back to normal — I guess this thing just couldn’t stay in 2003 forever. For now it’s limping along; if you get a blank page with a weird error message, that’s why.

Photos!
From today – of all the $0.50 fried noodles in Tianjin, her’s are my favourite:

From Sunday before last – a bit of colour in the morning commute:

Riding that close to all the cars is normal.

Mid-Autumn Festival (Moon Festival) 2008

Joel — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:11:01 +0000

With the neighbours for the Mid-Autumn Festival. It’s the same family that had us over during Chinese New Year. “Grandpa Song,” a regular with the Old Boys’ Club, just had a quadruple bypass.

We had dinner at their apartment with their son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, and then when for a walk in the park to look at the moon, since that’s what you do during the Mid-Autumn Festival. We brought apples, peaches, and bananas, as that’s supposedly a good gift for someone who’s just had a major surgery.

Monday night was the foreigner moon cake party. Everyone brought their left over moon cakes (most people don’t actually want to eat the moon cakes… they’re mostly for giving and receiving) and we played má jiàng (麻将).

Last year’s Moon Festival was also in Tianjin, and the year before that was at a rooftop barbecue in Taipei.

Our neighbours greeted each other with “zhōng qiū kuài lè” (中秋快乐 / Happy Mid-Autumn).

How to: Avoid consuming dodgy products in Tianjin

Joel — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:50:25 +0000

My first teacher three semesters ago warned me: you can buy produce at the local vegetable market, but avoid packaged food products from there or from little first-floor window shops, even if it’s the same label as what’s in the big supermarket. Chances are too high that it’s fake. Sometimes you can tell by the way the label is glued on crooked or has minute differences.

We’ve more or less followed her advice, but even in the supermarkets things can look dodgy – like a row of glass vinegar bottles that all have different amounts of vinegar in them with sloppily glued on labels.

Today I didn’t follow this advice, and stopped at a first-floor window to get a bottle of jiaozi vinegar on the way to eat lunch (fantastic Muslim beef sandwiches from a different first-floor window shop). I carried the vinegar bottle into the school since I was heading straight to class after eating, and a classmate joke, “You bringing beer to class?” Then I took a second look at the bottle, which you can see on the here.

Now, I’m all for recycling (it was routine for class pop bottles to be reused as pop bottles when we were in east Africa), but I’m not so sure I trust this one.

Sorry Xu Laoshi! Next time I’ll 听 your 说的话！

Drink this

Joel — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:12:46 +0000

When Jessica was sick a while back, I went to the vegetable market and asked the lady who sells tea what Jessica should drink for her cough. She gave me this:

It’s more interesting than drinking water, and it looks cool, too. The little brown nut-looking thing turns into the big see-through brown blob in the cup. The top photo is one cup’s worth of stuff, and how much of each thing you should put together.