Video tour of Zhangye

This is a video I recently put together from some of the footage of Zhangye I shot on my camera while living there. It highlights some of familiar places and people we saw in our daily routine, as well as a few of the odd and unexpected sights that were such a part of walking the streets of small town China. I made the video as part of a China presentation Nissa and I put on in her hometown's local library, which was surprisingly fun and well-received. It's seven months now since we left the country but China, and Zhangye in particular, continues to have quite a strong presence in our thoughts.

Chinese Food: Beef Noodles 牛肉面

Whenever I am asked "why do you like China?", there are two things I never fail to mention: the people, and the food. I haven't done quite enough traveling to know for certain, but surely China has one of the world's finest cuisines. But "Chinese food" encompasses a huge variety of foods. Each region in China has its own particular cuisine, and even particular cities usually have their own specialties. If I go to a nice restaurant in town, the menu will have dozens or possibly hundreds of dishes, some unique just to that restaurant. Though we undoubtedly have the occasional craving for Western dishes not available in such a remote place, I feel that we are pretty spoiled in the food category in Zhangye. In Shanghai for example, I'm not alone in thinking the Chinese food is at best mediocre, though of course they have the advantage of a fantastic international selection. At any rate, food being as important as it has been in my life in China, I thought I might write a few posts describing some of our favorite dishes, starting with niuroumian, or "beef noodles."

This is a local favorite with students, as it originated in this province (the city of Lanzhou) and is one of the cheapest meals you can get, usually going for around 2.5 yuan (or around 30 cents US). I didn't care for it at first as it is pretty spicy by American standards (note the red hot sauce in the picture), but I got used to it and it eventually grew on me. It's also not particularly filling, consisting mostly of some thin noodles and small scraps of beef in a soup, but it makes a great late lunch. Below is an old video I took at a small beef noodle shop during my first year in China. My friend Andrew and I befriended the owner, so he was happy to oblige my filming of some noodle making. Towards the end he can be heard announcing excitedly, "Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodles!"

Guizhou Travels

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After my father and brother left I met up with friend/co-worker/bearer of confusingly similar name Danielle in Guizhou province. Before meeting her I killed a day in Tongren (铜仁). An opinionated woman who resembled Jabba the Hut told me about America over my bowl of local noodles. The only thing I understood was that America is not stable, unlike their stable China.

With limited options that night I wandered into one of the only places open, a karaoke bar. A birthday celebration was in full swing and I was eventually coaxed into joining the party, and even talked into singing Chinese karaoke for the first time. I was pleasantly surprised when the men in the group insisted I drink slowly the whole night. I obviously wasn't in hard-drinking Gansu anymore. A fake platinum blond with a cigarette in the group who exuded old Hollywood cool eventually made sure I went home in a taxi, informing me that "this place isn't stable."

The next morning I watched a blind fortuneteller under the shade of some trees for an hour or so and chatted with the elderly Chinese whose had noticed me. One of them asked me "are you American or Japanese?" Later in the conversation he became confused and said "in your country..... you're Japanese, right?" I was once told a story by another foreign teacher about a blond woman arriving at a school to teach and being confused with the new Japanese teacher. The school also later insisted on giving the actual Japanese teacher a spoon during the first banquet, despite her insistence that they also use chopsticks in Japan. The blind man talked with me for a short time and while making polite conversation I almost asked "are you often busy?" but stopped myself; "busy" (忙 máng) and "blind" (盲 máng) are pronounced exactly the same in Chinese and "are you often blind?" didn't seem like a very polite question.

After several hours on the bus next to a drunk 65-year old philosophy professor who looked like Professor Snape from Harry Potter and adored America, I was in Kaili (凯理) where I would meet Danielle. This was the starting point for our exploration of southeastern Guizhou, home to a wide variety of ethnic minorities, including the Miao (苗族) and Dong (侗族). We passed a couple of very pleasant days in the villages of Xijiang (西江) and Zhaoxing (肇兴), where a way of life completely different from that of the dominant Han Chinese could be observed. We only saw a glimpse of two of the area's many cultures (by official count there are 55 minority cultures in China in all) but each had its own language, style of dress, and architecture, and I found the trip much more invigorating than the many hours of anthropology classes I attended in college.

In Xijiang we encountered a group of about 20 French tourists led by a Chinese-speaking man from Cameroon, and some miscommunication while they ordered dinner led to the unusual situation of A. the man from Cameroon speaking to the Miao hostel manager in Chinese B. the manager speaking back to me in dialect Chinese because I could understand her (only slightly) better C. me talking to the man from Cameroon in English and finally D. him translating back to his friend in French. After dinner I ended up with my first translating "job," as I was asked to expand their English menu by about 80 dishes, a good challenge. Earlier we had noticed a spontaneous but full-fledged game of basketball had broken out between five of the French and a Chinese team in uniform, with a referee and practically half of the small town watching and cheering.

In Zhaoxing I went out in the evening alone and befriended an entertaining group of young Chinese - four likable girls, a portly man from the Bai minority who sang when he lost in our drinking game, and a charismatic man from Guangdong with a serious smoker's voice who had driven by himself all the way from Beijing. Though I couldn't keep up the conversation was much more stimulating than normal (in a year and a half the only time I've seen discussion and even disagreement about the Taiwan issue) and it was one of my more memorable moments of the summer.












The bus rides on winding, bumpy roads through this part of Guizhou were memorable in and of themselves, both for the beauty of the scenery and the curious things the locals brought on board. During one trip a man was standing in the aisle next to me when an unmistakable sound come from the sack he was holding tightly in his hand: "meoooowww..... meoowwww......" When the ride got bumpy this changed into a frenzied "meeOOWWW!!!! mEOOWW!!!!" On various bus rides we saw chickens in a sack, ducks in a sack (one of them tried to bite a baby), and enormous fish in a sack. During a stop for food on one bus ride we heard the yelping of a dog, and quickly realized it was coming from a large, moving sack across the street. The sack, with no visible air holes, was tied to the back of a motorcycle that had just ridden in. This was definitely dog eating country and when two men took the dog out of the sack we thought we were going to watch them kill it on the street right then and there. They didn't, merely tying it up where it could pant and drool as it wished.

Last stop in Guizhou was Chishui (赤水), which is so close to Sichuan you could probably reach it with a baseball and unsurprisingly was the start of Hot Pot country, a distinctive Sichuan meal popular throughout China. Me and Danielle were intrigued by a paper-burning ritual by the river in honor of a deceased relative. It was not a gloomy affair, with the family joking around with each other and one middle-aged man looking simply bored as he fanned himself and rolled up his shirt over his large gut. The city itself was small and quite pleasant, and allowed for a couple of outings to nearby waterfalls and surrounding bamboo forests.

Video - Guzheng Performance

A performance from my guzheng teacher:



And a performance from another student/teacher at the school, on an instrument called the xinzheng (新筝) which has the same range as the piano:

Video - A Long Way From Home

Recently I purchased some video editing software which, together with an anti-virus program, set me back 7 yuan (just under $1). At least in a place like Zhangye there is not just pirated software and movies, there is only pirated software, freely available on the shelves of the electronics stores. The only drawback is that the program is entirely in Chinese. However, I lucked out and found video tutorials in English on the company's website, and after some trial and error I figured out how to use it. I'm also somewhat familiar with computer vocabulary in Chinese, as my Windows and Microsoft Word are in Chinese. This can be a hassle sometimes, but on the other hand I like the challenge. Anyway, I've put together some of the early videos I took with my digital camera in China and made it into something presentable. All of it was taken in Zhangye during my first term of teaching.