Saturday, February 24, 2018

Welcoming the Year of the Dog

I returned to Beijing just in time to celebrate Chinese New Year. For the Chinese, this is the absolute most important holiday of the year and it is a time when everyone goes home to celebrate with their families. I've had the privilege of celebrating Spring Festival (春节 one of the most common names, in China, for the Lunar New Year.) in the past with two different families. Back in 2004 I celebrated with a family in a village in Hubei province and in 2005 with a family in a village in Inner Mongolia. This year I spent Chinese New Year in Beijing I have concluded that celebrating in a major city is quite different from celebrating in a village.

One of my friends is married to a Chinese woman and they invited several of us over for dinner on New Year's Eve. I happened to be over at their house for most of the afternoon (for some other reasons) and C spent the entire afternoon cooking up a feast. In the evening we could see some fireworks, but we couldn't really hear any from inside. This is because Beijing really cracked down in firework usage. This year they prohibited fireworks from being set off within the five ring roads of Beijing (much like Washington, D.C. has a beltway, Beijing has a series of beltways that make rings around the city - there is no first ring road though). My friends live between the fourth and fifth rings so nothing was allowed to be set off where they lived, but you could see the fireworks that were being set off outside the fifth ring. Many people had thought that the officials had made a rule, but wouldn't enforce it (in China many rules aren't enforced and generally speaking if you don't force people to follow a rule, they don't). When we left that night, we figured out why everyone was following this new rule - there were cops and security guards out on the streets. They were stationed approximately one every 30 feet! As another friend of mine and I took a Didi (the Chinese version of Uber) back to her house (where I was staying), we saw that this continued throughout the city.
When we got back to A's house (A is a Chinese friend of more than 10 years) we needed to put up the duilian (Chinese couplets). Traditionally in China, you put up a pair of duilian on either side of your door along with a piece above the door. These Chinese couplets are a form of poetry and each side has approximately the same meaning and matches in form. They are painted on long strips of red paper and put up to bring good fortune throughout the new year (usually you leave the duilian up all year). Many people buy them, other people will pick one out from a book and make them themselves. A had a student paint hers for her. In addition, you typically put the character 福 (fu- meaning: wealth) upside down on your door because to say fu is upside down sounds the same as wealth is coming. The old people had told A that she needed to get her duilian up by 3 pm on New Year's Eve. We weren't home in time for that and she wasn't worried about it but did feel that she should have it up by midnight. We got home at about 11:45 pm and set to work right away. We successfully mounted the couplets to the door before midnight so we called it good.




The next day we met C and I at a temple fair. I (who is American) and I were both very confused because it was called a temple fair, but there was no temple. You should have seen the confusion on our faces as we asked C and A why it was called a temple fair if there was no temple. The temple fair really was just an opportunity to shop. It was an area with a bunch of shops selling largely cultural items to hordes of people (who also loved to try to take C and my pictures). After a while, we decided to try another spot and went to Chaoyang Park. At Chaoyang Park, we found what was essentially a carnival. We had to pay 5 yuan to get into the park (this was the regular price to enter the park - a lot of Chinese parks charge admission) and then inside were all the overpriced things you'd find at a carnival - food, rides, games, etc. We had a great time and sampled quite a bit of food. Not quite the family celebrations I experienced when I celebrated Spring Festival in the villages.
This appears to be a poster instructing people
to not set off fireworks because of
the pm 2.5 pollution it creates.

This is squid
This is also squid.


Friday, February 2, 2018

it's National Crepes day!

Did you know that in France they have a holiday for Crepes (by the way the word rhymes with step rather than grape)? I can neither pronounce nor write the name of the holiday, but this is something I learned today in my crepes-making cooking class today (they scheduled the crepe class for today because it's the crepe holiday today). Apparently, the holiday is both for galettes and crepes, but I'm guessing you've never heard of a galette. I hadn't until recently. A galette is savory crepe made with buckwheat flour whereas crepes are supposed to be the sweet ones. On this holiday people mostly just eat the sweet crepes because they are quicker and easier to make. According to our chef, the schools are filled with the smell of crepes and all around. He said that since today is Friday and a lot of people won't have time to make crepes that people will celebrate all weekend. After class, I even saw a sign on a cafe with the name of the "holiday" and something about a deal on crepes (I can't really read French after all). Here are some photos from my cooking class (we made a mushroom and onion galette with a bechamel sauce, salad with bacon and a mustard vinegarette, and Crepes Suzette.
I think I did a great job on my galette.

Chef flambeing the crepes

Crepes Suzette
Here's so more food porn from France. This had ice cream
in the middle and a caramel sauce in the cup. The white
peaks are meringue.