Forbidden City, Beijing

rainwater urn- invading soldiers scraped most of the gold off of it.

wedding couple

The first afternoon that Jim and I were in Beijing we went to the Forbidden City. It's huge. A guide approached us and Jim negotiated a price. I couldn't hear a lot of what the guy said. I was also, again, miserably hot and had made the rookie mistake of keeping my cute sandals on that I had worn during the plane trip. I should have known better. Anyway, what I got out of the tour was that emperors, empresses, concubines, and lots and lots of eunuchs had lived there over the centuries. All the emperors were extremely paranoid about being murdered. A lot of parts of the palaces are kept behind windows and not well-lit, so those parts were un-photographable.

That night a colleague of Jim's took us to a lovely restaurant for Peking Duck. That dish is a big deal partly because the duck is supposed to hang for about three days and has to be ordered ahead of time. When it comes to the table the chef carves it. The best part is the skin. We were served a variety of vegetable dishes as well.

Jim's Apartment

Photos of Jim's apartment, a brand new building. Jim is growing herbs in his courtyard garden.

The apartment is huge, with a large finished basement that could easily house another family.

This is the street broom referred to in an earlier post. The photo doesn't do it justice. It actually looks great in that space.




The kitchen is a little odd by our standards. It has a "dish sanitizer" that doesn't clean dishes. No oven other than the microwave came with the apartment. Jim got a countertop oven. There is a stove top.

Looking from the master bedroom down the hall. The place has pretty wood floors.

Looking from a corner of Jim's bedroom to his office.

Every bedroom has wall-size floor-to-ceiling windows.

This quilt doesn't quite fit the bed, but the colorful-ness of it looks great in that bedroom. (Only other quilters would care- I made it entirely from April Cornell fabrics.) Jim should be taking back a quilt I made for his bedroom later this year.

Cooking Class

I had made arrangements for a cooking class ahead of time. I had the address and that morning Jack dropped me off in front of an alley and pointed, indicating, apparently, "that way". The address was for the alley, not a specific building. I picked out another number on the address and found that house. Fortunately the owner was looking out for me.

The space was cool. It wasn't sterile like a professional kitchen usually is, but it wasn't too homey either. It was a large space with nice personality.

That day I was the only student, and as I was talking to the owner/translator there were knocks on the door and plastic bags of ingredients were passed in. One of the first things I was asked by the chef, who spoke no English, was whether I was willing to pull the heads off shrimp. At first I thought "ew", but then I reasoned that I had murdered many a lobster before tossing it into a pot of boiling water, so I said I had never done that before, but I would try. Meanwhile, the shrimp were so fresh they were jumping out of their little bowl. I grabbed one of the slimy little things and started to pull the head and it squirmed around in my hands and I wimped out. You can see my "wimping out" expression on one of the above pictures. The chef and the translator laughed and the translator told me she had learned a new word earlier in the year from another American, "squeamish". I asked if we couldn't chop the heads off, wouldn't that be faster anyway. The response was that it was just so easy to pull the heads off. So, the chef pulled heads and I cleaned them up from there.

I was given a Chinese cleaver to do my prep. I never use a cleaver. The chef critiqued me on my knife technique (I'm sure the students in my next knife skills class will like to hear that!), pointing out that I was using the French technique (duh!) and not the Chinese technique. I asked the translator if she had ever heard the expression"You can't teach an old dog new tricks" and that was met with a blank look. I explained what it meant.

Other than the extremely fresh shrimp the only exotic ingredients were the preserved eggs. One was preserved in salt and one was preserved in mud. They both had the consistency of hard-boiled eggs. They didn't taste different, but no doubt there is some lore behind the technique.

So the chef and I cooked away and made Amaranth with Golden and Silver Eggs and Singaporean Fried Vermicelli. Both dishes were good. When I commented that the amaranth tasted similar to spinach, the translator said "No, it doesn't."

In the end, despite my clumsy technique with the cleaver, the chef said my ingredients were nicely prepped, and he gave me thumbs up on my seasoning. Whew. It was fun. I hope to go back.

Zhou Zhuang

One Saturday Jim and I visited this town, about an hour away from Shanghai. I apologize for the placement of the photos. There's gotta be a better way, but I haven't figured it out.

The first woman you see was frying things on sticks with a rig that looked like recycled paint cans. I was trying to be unobtrusive in my photo-taking, but apparently I annoyed her, because she actually barked at me. It was a little scary, so I walked away.

The town is billed as a water town, meaning several canals run through it. The boats are similar to gondolas, and the "gondoliers" will sing if requested. The place was packed with tourists. There was a group of people painting. They looked like a class.

There were lots of little "shops" selling handicrafts. There are a couple of photos of a young woman carving combs. Jim is buying a sandalwood something.
The interior shots are of a home of some importance. The antique kitchen was interesting.

The rest of the town has pretty tree-lined streets with lots of shopping. We went into lots of artsy-type places. There was nothing I needed to own. I was also miserably hot. A lot of the shops were stuffy and their AC was not up to Mississippi standards. Who would think I'd be some place in July and crave Mississippi?