Learn Chinese and travel to China
One of the principal features of the Chinese school is competition: no matters which grade you can get, the important thing is how is your grade compared to the others in your class; never mind how fast you can run, the important is to be the fastest in the school; never mind whether your class is clean or dirty, the important is that it’s considered cleaner than the others. Following this flow, the last idea of my school has been a cooking competition. [Read more...]
The Dongbei is the North East region of China.
Even if people tend to associate China with rice, this isn’t exact. While in the South of the country the staple food is rice, in the North is wheat. Especially in the North East, they also eat a lot of potatoes and corn.
The restaurant from Dongbei are within my favorite Chinese restaurants (perhaps at the same level of Xinjiang’s restaurants).
They are quite cheap and you will always get plenty of food. Every time I go to eat “Dongbei,” I end up eating too much and blaming myself to be such a greedy pig. But let’s check the photos of Dongbei food! [Read more...]
When I talk about “Xinjiang food” I refer to the traditional Uyghur cuisine. The reason is that here about half of the population belongs to the Uyghur minority, a Muslim ethnic group that has its own language and culture.
Even if Xinjiang is part of China, its food shares much more characteristics with the Turkish and Central Asia food. So, every time I need a break from Chinese cuisine, I go to a Xinjiang restaurant (they are all around China). [Read more...]
“Rather go without salt for three days than without tea for a single day,” Chinese Proverb.
I’m in love with Chinese tea. I drink it every day and every time I come back to Europe I bring some nice tea packages to my family and friends. Most important, I bring a ton of tea for myself.
My favorite Chinese tea is the Long Jing, the green tea produced close to the West Lake of Hangzhou. I also like flower tea and Pu’er, the fermented tea from Yunnan Province.
If you do a quick search on the internet you’ll find a lot of information about Chinese tea.
So I decided to limit this first article to two topics that I found interesting: the different classes of Chinese tea and the most famous tea brands of China (for each class of tea there are many different brands, for instance you have the Long Jing green tea from Hangzhou, the Bi Luo Chun green tea from Tai Hu and so on). [Read more...]
A malatang cauldron.
When I was in Europe, the only Chinese dishes that I could get were fried rice, noodles, spring rolls and beef with mushrooms. I couldn’t afford expensive ethnic restaurants and most of the cheap Chinese spots adapted their dishes to the European taste in order to attract more customers. Now you know why the main dishes of a Chinese buffet all-you-can-eat are often the french fries or the chocolate ice cream.
A couple of months ago I started to bring my camera to the restaurants with the goal of documenting my experience with the “real” Chinese food. This is the first episode: say hello to Chongqing malatang.
It’s more than two years that I live in China – the country of dog-eaters by default – but I’d never seen a slaughtered dog.
It may be because I only spent a few weeks in Guangxi and Guangdong Provinces, the Southern provinces where the habit of eating dog meat is most common.
Or maybe because eating dog meat is not as common as people think and you have to make a conscious effort to find it.
The point is that it took me less than two hour of sightseeing in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, to find a dog butchery.
Well, it wasn’t exactly a butchery as there were two girls selling raw and roasted dog meat (thịt chó in Vietnamese language) on a table in the street.
This is a controversial topic in the West.
We do not eat dogs. We consider dogs as part of our family. I personally grew up with a German Shepard called Apo and I love dogs. Almost as much as I love cats. And I distrust people that dislike animals.
But before you get mad at the Vietnamese for eating dogs – or at me for showing these pictures, – think about that.
In India you go to prison if you kill a cow. In California people can legally butcher AND eat cows but slaughtering a horse is forbidden. In Italy we eat both cows AND horses. However we are horrified by people that eat dogs.
In Northern Vietnam eating dog meat is a widely accepted tradition. This is their culture and we should accept it, even if we disagree.
This photo gallery show slaughtered dogs. If you think it may hurt your feelings, you should leave this page now. [Read more...]
