From China With Love: Arrivals

15/12/2010

A big snowy dizzy blur. No update on the food front as of yet, having been in China for four hours and only managing to briskly stomp past the ‘restaurants’ selling 20p dumplings and noodles.

This was because my mum and I needed to catch the train from Shanghai to Nantong. See now, I am going to emphasise the plan to ‘catch the TRAIN’. So obviously as soon as the bus from the airport dropped us off some half mile or so away from the train station,, we were bombarded (and I wish I were exaggerating) with private (i.e. illegal, but we shall use that term very loosely here) taxis asking us where we were going:

”Where are you going? Take our taxi!”

”To Nantong, but we’ve already sorted out our transport.”

”What, no! Take our taxi, only 300 yuan! You’ve got too many suitcases. There’s no way you can carry those yourselves!”

”We’ve already got transport, we’re taking the train.”

”Don’t be absurd. Take our taxi, 280 yuan.”

”We’ve got transport!”

”Take our TAXI!!! There’s no fricking way you can carry all of those suitcase by yourselves!!! We’ll drop you by your door!”

”No, we’ve got transport, okay?! Leave us alone.”

”260 yuan?”

”Aaaarrrghhhhh!!!!”


Oh, I have missed China ;)


Lesson learned today: The customer is ALWAYS wrong. Or absurd, apparently.

Update: when we got to my grandparents home, my grandma was so sweet and waited up for us, and cooked us a lovely dinner (which I preceded to take many photos of) which we were eating at 11pm:




All I can say is nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

Today I fly to China! Which means, no baking for TWO AND A HALF WEEKS! No melting 70% dark chocolate in short bursts in the microwave, no licking of the mixing spoon clean afterwards, no dropping of the cake mix on the way upstairs to use my neighbours oven (not that I’ve er, ever done this)…

However, this does open up a whole new blogging opportunity to me. What do they eat in China? Chicken’s feet, pigs tongue, rotted duck egg, oh and smelly tofu – a favourite! I shall try my best to be the weird obnoxious foreigner at the dinner table in restaurants and take lots of photos of the meal. I would say I’ll also go round the food markets and wade around in fish slime and take photos too, but this will be heavily dictated by what my family want to do – my grasp of the Chinese language isn’t fluent enough for me to venture on escapades alone and not get mugged/ thrown fish at.

Hey, could happen.

Then, hopefully I might write something vaguely interesting about it (think the food speaks for itself), and post it up (I’m going to ignore the boring part where we eat loads of rice). But you won’t hear from me for a while, as the Great Firewall of China also blocks Blogger, so you will have to be graced by these posts upon my delightful return :)

So that’s it for now! I’ve got two photos to show you; presents from the UK to friends and family back home:


We’re trying to fatten up our family, whilst giving them type II diabetes, obviously. And judging by those Burberry perfumes, we think that they smell, too.

Anndd some delights from China (this photo was taken in on a trip to Beijing in 2007):


Regrettably I didn’t try any. I really should have, because, you know, at least these maggots were cooked. And dead.

Lesson learned today: always be prepared for mugging or spontaneous fish throwing. Always.

Chocolate and Chestnut Cupcakes

Timer rings, are you listening?
In the gyp room, hobs are glistening,
A wonderful sight, we’re happy tonight,
Baking in a winter wonderland.

Chocolate Macaroons and Micah’s Truffles

Today, I made the mother of macaroons. I was so happy, I made a whole family of macaroons. And then I ate them all. Well, I gave some to my friends, but I ate the rest.

And then I was going to say that the lesson learnt today was not to get born a macaroon but then I thought that this would be taking the metaphor too far, so I shall instead talk about why I love macaroons so much – move over cupcakes, this is where it’s AT.

A cake….in the shape of a dumpling?

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a GIANT DUMPLING CAKE!


This cake was made by a friend and I for a friend’s birthday, and we decided on a ‘Chinese Themed Cake’, for reasons that, to this day, I am not sure of. Plan A was to make a steamed Chinese cake, but this was impossible because neither of us had a steamer, or a big pot, or a steaming tin pot thing. So we moved on to Plan B: a Chinese-y decorated cake, with three tiers and dragons spiralling down them and painted Chinese symbols and lantern shapes; but you just reading that will guess it’s pretty difficult (if not, my birthday is at the end of August). But we were on a strict time budget.