Environmentalism

I wouldn't think of China as a "green" country, but at least in the city they seem to have taken up the environmental movement. There were recycling cans everywhere, the city looked clean, and I stayed at a "green" hotel (just like any other hotel, but with signs saying it was green).

A facade, for sure, because I was told I visited during one of the rare weeks the city wasn't choked with smog.

However, I heard on the news, and we have to assume it was government propaganda, that the government's environmental moves, to close polluting factories, was one of the reasons behind China's slowing growth rate. The government was trying to sell pollution. Pollution=jobs is the story in China, much different, and more believable, than the "green jobs" talk we hear in America.

You gotta stop and smell the roses

Or stop and watch a kite.

At the unknown restaurant

I have no idea what the name of this restaurant was. It was in an area full of factories, which we were told had once been farmland. When the land was taken from the farmers, to make sure the farmers had some income (and keep them from protesting), the farmers had been given apartment buildings near the area. Factory workers rented the apartments, and the ground floor of the buildings were rented to restaurants which the workers streamed into during lunch brake.

We walked past this to get to the restaurant:



The place had the feel of the Old West about it.

This shot, this shot, and this shot were all taken in the same area.

It would be called a slum in America, but I loved something about it. The food I had there was the best I had in China, and it would compete well with a Vietnamese restaurant in the US.

We were told it served Sichuan-style food. Things tended to be spicy and flavorful, with smokey flavors in many of the dishes. They seemed good at cooking fatty-parts of pork and vegetables. Some of the food tasted very familiar, sometimes in odd ways. I had greens there that tasted exactly like Campbell's chicken noodle soup.



Clockwise from the bowl of rice are: a fish and tomato soup, chicken (tasted exactly like Buffalo wings), cucumbers in chili sauce, and greens.



This is the best dish I had in China, bacon. It came to the table still cooking with a flame underneath it. It was smokey-tasting and peppery. Everyone picked through the vegetables to get to the bacon.

Manual labor

I saw an amazing amount of manual labor in China, with an odd absence of power tools or safety equipment. Even at construction sites. Here's a movie, showing heavy wheelbarrow action:



Here's another showing a guy shoveling stuff, in one of the top stories of a huge skyscraper:



It also gives you a little tour of the construction area. They would be building these beautiful, modern buildings and all around them would be shacks where the workers would live. And they didn't look like nice shacks either:







Even some of the half-built rooms of the skyscraper were obviously being occupied:

Sidewalks

I saw lots of sidewalks in Xiamen:



Beautifully paved:



Some of them had had raised tiles, which felt wonderful to walk on with tired feet. But the sidewalks were even more multi-purpose than you might think:



Lots of times when you were walking you had no idea where the street ended and the sidewalk began. Sure, there was a raised portion meant for people, but that didin't mean cars wouldn't be there, too. Often the sidewalk was used as a parking lot, so you could be walking on the sidewalk and see headlights in front of, or behind you:



Did I mention most places don't have street lights? You really had to pay attention.

The homeless

I saw two beggars the entire time I was in China, and they had real problems (one of them had no legs). There were plenty of people selling stuff on the side of the street though. Why don't we have that in America? Because it's illegal. Our unintended consequence of banning most street vendors is beggars everywhere. And our only response to beggars is to try to ban them or force them to live as dependents, instead of letting them be productive members of society.

We have a sick society in some respects and it's our own fault.

Crossing the street in China

It's very dangerous to cross the street in China, and probably stupid to videotape yourself doing it, but everything for the blog!

You'll notice in the movie that even though people are walking across the street, cars, and even city buses, are traveling over the crosswalk. And as soon as we moved out of the way, they were traveling behind us, too. Taxis are especially prone to this.

There are spots on the street, part way across, where people will wait. Double yellow lines seem like one of these spots, not that Chinese drivers pay much attention to lines.

I'm assuming there was some rhyme or reason to it all, but I always tried crossing when Chinese people did and I never got hit (although I know someone who did).

In China, free internet access ain't so free

When I saw the "Free Internet" terminals in the Shangai International Airport there were a few sites I wanted to check out. Drudge Report, Instapundit, even flickr could all be accessed. But Twitter and anything on blogger, like Althouse, just showed error notices when you tried to access them. You could search for Althouse and find links to Althouse, but there was nothing there.

What's on Althouse, blogger sites, and Twitter that the Chinese government doesn't trust its citizens to see?

Day shots: Xiamen, China

My Best Coffee

Michael_Haz: Jason, I'm curious - were you able to get coffee in China or was tea the only beverage?

Yes, and most places that sell coffee make a big production of it. I saw some of the best presentations of coffee in China--lattes in glass cups so you can see the layers, that sort of thing. The coffee vending machines offer lattes and cappuccinos; every style of coffee you can think of plus some you've never heard of.

At work people are offered tea and bottled water. If you want coffee you go to a coffee house which never offers just coffee, they always are restaurants with huge menus, usually with some western-style dishes and often ice-cream.

One of my co-workers who had been to China recommended we try My Best Coffee, a chain of these coffee houses, because the menus also contain English.

It had some weird translations like "Fried French Fries", but it was understandable:



I'm there with a coworker; when I make my order "something" happens and it seems like every waiter and waitress in the place comes to our table. It was every tourist's worst nightmare. They were all looking at their watches and talking about time. I have a very limited ability to speak Mandarin and they had very limited ability to speak English, but they were finally able to tell me I was only able to order Chinese food at the current time. Which was strange because I thought what I ordered was Chinese.

I ended up with this (I think it's also not Chinese, but they were probably just humoring me):

At the Peony Restaurant

A Xiamen specialty: jellied sea worms, with a mixture of peanut, chili, and wasabi sauce. They were eaten with toothpicks.



The white bits in this dish are pieces of fish. I think the were made into a paste, extruded, and then steamed:



This is another Xiamen specialty, noodles with different mushrooms:



A cute crab:



A big fish:



This was a fancy restaurant, with lots of private rooms; two or three servers to a room, bringing in dishes and serving beer in glasses.

Everything was served family-style (except the noodles), so each dish was placed on a big lazy-susan and we took whatever bits we wanted. There were more dishes than I have pictured here, and they were all subtly flavored. Each was brought out one at a time and we were given small dishes of vinegar and soy sauce to dip our bits of food in. Nothing was sweet or salty. I think this was Catonese-style cooking, and they didn't seem to like spicy either. Most Westerners would consider the food bland, but you really had to focus on the textures and how each dish tasted compared to the others. It was a cerebral eating experience. I'm sure some of the pleasure comes from eating unusual things, just like an American experiences eating sushi.

The serving style lent itself to eating slowly, so there was a lot of time for talk, which was great because we had such a nice host.