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.

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.

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).

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 joked, “You bringing beer to class?” Then I took a second look at the bottle, which you can see on right.

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！

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.

Here are a few photos from the last couple days. There’s a also a new photo gallery from our bike trip today to a run down family shrine and a long-disused church building.

Descriptions are under each photo. All are from today (Sunday March 9) unless it says otherwise.

[left] When I saw the crowds on the bridge and around the banks this morning, my first thought was “Oh no, not another body.” Turns out that the fish were all swimming at the surface of the canal, and people were just scooping them out with big nets. The water level dropped several feet overnight this week, and I suspect maybe the oxygen levels are depleted and the fish are trying to breathe the air, like when I wouldn’t change the water in the goldfish bowl soon enough. [right] Migrant workers are camping in our backyard again. Behind them you can see our neighbours doing their morning tai-qi. We suspect this crew is building fake roofs on all the buildings in our neighbourhood that can be seen from the road. These facades can be seen around the city. They make it look like the roofs are pointed with dormer windows instead of flat with satellite dishes.

Here you can see their food stash as of today – cabbage, flour, and potatoes.

[left] Two of our teachers came over Saturday afternoon to play games, eat strawberry shortcake, and watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding in Chinese. [right] One of them brought some snacks, which included this package of pre-cooked dog meat. You’re supposed to eat it chilled.

[left] This much colour early in the morning in the middle of a usually drab commute is like a kick in the head (the good kind). [right] Jessica buys dinner from a window shop on our way to an evening meeting this last Wednesday.

You could spend an entire day taking photos at this run-down former ancestral temple complex. Half of it is mostly empty (a few architecture students were sketching), but the other half is filled with junk and old men hanging out playing cards and chess.

[right] This is us riding a giant turtle or lion or luck-dragon or something. Click here for the temple complex & abandoned church photo gallery.

My dad told me once how he went to dinner at a family’s home in Vancouver who were recent immigrants from Africa or Albania (I forget). For dessert, they served up dishes of frozen juice mix – the kind that comes frozen in the cardboard can that you’re supposed to mix with water – like it was ice cream. I can’t remember if my dad said anything or not. He may have just eaten it like everything was normal.

Just this week a fellow language student couple told me how they did the same thing when they had some of the teachers over for dinner recently. For dessert, they served a plate of uncooked 汤圆 (“soup spheres,” also called 元宵), not knowing that you’re supposed to boil them. They’re little sweet dumplings made out of glutinous rice flour, which, when they’re cooked, are gooey white doughy balls with sweet stuff inside, usually red bean paste. Uncooked usually means frozen. One of the teachers got a big surprise when she bit down, but then she told them and they cooked them and a good time was had by all.

We were planning to eat some tonight, which is what made me think to write about it, and I was going to show you a picture of what they look like cooked, except I cooked them wrong, the insides all fell out, and we ended up with a rice-flavoured blob of slime.

Just a simple anecdote of how easy it is to ‘not get it’ when you live elsewhere. Makes me have a lot more sympathy for the real immigrants back in Vancouver!

Learning Chinese characters makes our China experience so much richer. You can tell which restaurants specialize in dog meat, for example, and then invite some friends to go try it one night, which is what we did yesterday. I’ve translated part of the menu, and you can download it (*see below) and see what we had to choose from.

The five of us included one other language student, one of my teachers, a local friend, Chuck the Bright Future intern, and myself. Jessica is sick with a bad cold and didn’t come (but she was really looking forward to it). As restaurants go, this was one of the deeper dives, so to speak; it was about as dirty as the converted-first-floor-apartment former-street-vendor noodle windows that I get cheap lunches from, except this was a sit-down place, so the grunge was a little more noticeable. When we arrived, we were the only people in the restaurant – not an encouraging sign.

Everyone was happy to try a little dog except one of our local friends, who actually turned green the more he looked into our big bowl of dog rib stew and contemplated its history. I think he only dipped his chopsticks in the sauce and licked them off. I tried to tell him it was just like a big rabbit (gotta work with whatever vocab you have!), but it didn’t seem to help. Aside from having a lot of gelatinous skin and fat, the dog rib stew was pretty good.

For our first time, and with someone who was visibly ill, just ordering regular meat was fine. But next time I plan to branch out; there’re a lot of parts besides meat to be had in dog restaurants like this. The party that was just sitting down when we were leaving ordered skin, face, and tongue for their hot-pot. See the partially-translated menu for further details.

View the Menu
*I went a couple weeks ago and copied their menu so we could translate it and actually know what we had to choose from. I knew the selection would be a little gnarly, but wow; it exceeded my expectations with the first dish, and then just got worse (or better, depending on your tastes). I kept the basic layout of the original, meaning that everything in my (very) rough (and error-ridden) translation appears in the same order as it does in the actual menu. DISCLAIMER: I was overly-literal on purpose for the sake of learning the characters, plus, there are lots of straight-up errors (‘backbone’ and ‘spine’ I think should actually be called something else). Here’s a sample entry:

Dog face stew………………………18 per dish
扒狗脸 – pā gǒu liǎn………………(盘 / pán)
(lit.: “stewed dog face”)

Download the dog restaurant menu here (PDF).
$1 = 7.5元 (roughly).
Dog dishes are on pages 1, 4 and 5.

P.S.
I suppose I should say something about being obnoxious in other peoples’ countries with another culture’s food: it’s pretty easy to do. Foreigners find something about the host culture that really grosses them out, and so they want to go try it just to have a laugh, usually at the expense of the locals. We deliberately tried not to do that this time. Unlike “Snake Alley” in Taibei (which embarrasses our local friends there, most of whom have never eaten snake and think it’s gross), a lot (the majority?) of Tianjin locals don’t think it’s any big deal to eat dog meat. Some like it, some don’t, just like anything else. I wanted to have fun trying something new and challenge my comfort zone while still respecting our local friends and their culture – this is also pretty easy to do, always worth the effort, and usually a lot of fun.

I know what you were all thinking: Hey, it’s almost December! Where’s our dose of propaganda for November??!

Well here you go, straight out of our very own ‘backyard’:

实施旧管网改造尽心为群众办实事!
shíshī jiù guǎnwǎng gǎizào jìnxīn wèi qúnzhòng bàn shí shì!

“Implement the old pipe network remodeling with all your heart to benefit the masses do actual work!”

The migrant work crew before last installed some new pipes under the road, and the neighbourhood eat watermelon drink tea committee comrades strung banners all over the place when they left. Every household is supposed to pay them (the neighbourhood committee) 10 块 (kuài) a month ($1.34 CDN), but I know at least one retired guy who avoids paying whenever he can.

It doesn’t say “made for women” in Chinese on the box, but it does on the store’s sign. The only thing we can figure is that it’s implying women don’t have to cook dinner for their families if they order pizza instead.

Our Canadian family members and comrades will be pleased to know that Nanaimo bars made their debut in Tianjin last night, which may be a first in the whole of China for all we know. At any rate, we’re claiming the premiere Nanaimo bar cultural overture in Sino-Canadian relations.

We shared them with some friends, who also took some to their neighbours, and I suppose our teachers will also get some on Monday.

My mom mailed a mix from Canada, and found a recipe so Jessica can make them from scratch when the mix runs out.

Those of you who don’t know what Nanaimo bars are can take this opportunity to pause and reflect with wonder on the superior cultural refinement and achievements of your neighbour to the north.