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Monday, May 12, 2008

Chinese Dinners and Bloody Marys

Living in China involves a lot of eating and drinking... whether you like it or not!
*** I don't like it, I love it ***


The past three days we "had" to go out for big dinners every night... Let's start on Friday. Miriam is leaving Kunming after the weekend and decided to throw a goodbye-dinner. So we all gathered and went to the very best restaurant in town: Hong Dou Yuan. With very best I mean food-wise because the interior is pretty bare. No decorations except for some old movie posters on the walls. But the food... absolutely delicious! My two favorite dishes: "xiang cu niu rou ding" & "song shu yu" a.k.a spicy beefcubes & sweat-and-sour fish. The beef: 22rmb, the fish: 35rmb... I am so going to miss this amazing and incredibly cheap food...

On Saturday we were invited by one of Shoshannah's former students: Daniel. Together with two of our friends, two of his students and some relatives he took us to another (a bit fancier) restaurant on Wenlin Jie. A lot of food was ordered as well as a bottle of baijiu (the (in)famous Chinese liquor). Last time I met Daniel was at the PhD banquet last year and he found a good drinking buddy in me, so that had to be tested again...
About twenty toasts later we finished all the food and two bottles of baijiu! It was great experiencing the real Chinese style of dining again. And we found out that not all Chinese like baijiu... just check the movie and pay attention to the face of the girl in the middle ;-)


The eating and drinking on Sunday was kind of our own "fault"... We decided that it had been too long that we had a little party at our place, so we invited a bunch of people to go out for food and have drinks (Bloody Mary's) at our place afterwards. This time we went to the restaurant Shos and I really like. No idea what it is called officially, but we call it "the window place", because the vegetables and meat are displayed behind glass and you order by pointing to the food and telling them how you want it prepared (no menu available). Their best dish is an eggplant dish called "yu xiang qieze" but this one has a crust around it making it even beter than the normal one! It is so good that we had to order three of them to satisfy everyone... Shos and I go to this restaurant so often that the owners know us, come and say hello (they don't speak any English) and even give us a discount every time we go there :-) It isn't much, but small gestures like those make you feel extremely welcome at a place!

At home we made Bloody Mary's, talked, played some drinking games and simply had a good time. We also found out that Bloody Mary's aren't really the kind of cocktail you want to drink all night long... So after a while we switched to Sprite-Vodka and Gin-Tonic ;-)



In between I also went cycling with John (a really good friend of Sophie). We did the northern route, about 60km through some beautiful countryside. Although the weather wasn't great, we enjoyed it a lot and it was good practice for John who will be cycling from Turkey to Berlin in a couple of weeks...





Now on with class preparation, installing Linux on my pc, organizing pictures, reinstalling Wolfgang's computer, checking for jobs, fine-tuning our trip to Holland, downloading programs for Shos to learn some Dutch, getting lunch and so on...

Ganbei!!!
Ruudje

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fijn te lezen dat jij nog niet 'weggebeefd' bent!
maartje

Anonymous said...

Regel je kont naar NL en laat hier de boel maar op haar grondvesten trillen. ;) Mark

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