My Favorite Restaurant

As I’m finishing up my program here in Qingdao, China, I’ve probably got one more email after this, and then I’ll be off to Nanjing, China, to start classes at Nanjing University.

As some of yall may remember, part of my work here in Qingdao was to do some sort of community service project. Saturday before last, I completed that project at the Qingdao Museum. My project was to teach a short Saturday course on American holidays for some kids. The kids came to the museum every Saturday for a couple of weeks. Before me, there had been a Texan who had taught them about Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving, but she had to leave, so she couldn’t teach the class on Halloween.

That’s where I come in. I wrapped myself in toilet paper to pretend that I was a mummy, and taught them the history of Halloween and how kids in the US trick or treat. The toilet paper didn’t really hold up on my legs and arms, but it survived on my chest and head. See the pictures in picasa for the frightening results:

As I’m finishing up with my work here in Qingdao, I’d like to tell yall about my favorite restaurant here. Its Chinese name is Brother’s Quick Dishes, but they miss spelled the Chinese word for “dishes.” I’m not sure the guy who owns it graduated from elementary school, so the spelling error is excusable. It’s near my apartment, a friend who lives near me joins me for a meal, generally on the weekends. In the eight weeks we’ve been here in Qingdao, we’ve eaten at this restaurant about twenty times total, trying to get there at least once a week, but usually more often.

Some of my friends asked me for the address so that they could go sometime. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an address. They asked me how to get there, and I had trouble telling them. “Its in a little dirty alley behind some apartments. You’ll see a sign with misspelled Chinese on it, and a little shack and you’ll just know you’re there.” Those were the best directions I could give them.

“Brothers” is on a little dirt street that runs behind several apartment complexes. The ‘street’ is lined on both sides with shack-stores built from left over plywood and roofed with blue, plastic tarps. These shack-stalls sell everything from fairly attractive but extremely cheaply made women’s high heels to buckets, and most things in between. Brothers is located where the street stalls open up into a wider, dirtier market area. Just across from the restaurant, there is a man sleeping in a selling live fish, chickens and other birds, and a chopping block where he’ll kill them for you fresh.

The restaurant’s facilities are not all that much better. The restaurant was built out of left over construction supplies. The walls are made out of old wooden doors and plywood, the roof is made from sheets of metal and a large tarp. The structure is enforced with steel rods. One of the windows is just a large hole where they decided not to put any material. The floors are dirt, leaving it quite messy after it rains. The smell of smoke from the patrons competes with the smell sewage coming in from the market, fighting to see who can get to you first.

The kitchen facilities are also not particularly nice, either. Behind the seven or eight tables that occupy the middle of the room’s space (I hesitate to call it a room), within eyesight, there are a couple of tables for preparation and only two woks for cooking. You really can’t go to Brothers when its busy otherwise you’ll have to wait since they only have two woks and one cook. The water from the kitchen comes down for a little pvc pipe in the ceiling and, like the electricity, is probably being stolen from the nearby construction site.

But the food is seriously the best Chinese food we have ever eaten. The sweet and sour chicken is to die for. Better than anything you would pay for in a fancy restaurant downtown, better than anything you could get in Beijing or Shanghai.

This restaurant has two workers: the cook and the boss/waitor. When we first started coming here the cook had burnt his foot bad, some of the hot coals from one of the two woks falling on him. He had to keep it wrapped in bandages. Those would get dirty with the muddy floor, so he kept his foot encased in a beer box, hobbling around with the thing attached to his leg.

The boss is kind of dim as far as I could tell, but his son goes to Qinghua University, the closest thing China has to an MIT.

The place is mostly frequented by construction workers and sailors. Behind the alley, the Chinese are building eight or ten apartment buildings, each 40 stories high. It’s crazy to watch so much building going on in this economy.

For the pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/agenbite.lee

"A day at the Museum" has my Mummy pictures and "Brothers – The restaurant" has the other pictures

Anyways, that’s about it for now.

Bon Appétit,

Village People

I apologize for not emailing yall sooner. I’ve kept meaning to, but I’m pretty busy. I generally don’t leave school until 10 or 11 at night, and even when I leave, I generally go out to a street-side Shishkabob place and spend another hour or two eating and reading some Chinese political science articles for class.
But that’s for another article. As for news, the biggest thing that has happened is that I got interviewed by the Amatuer Traveler podcast. For those of yall who don’t know, a podcast is kind of like a radio broadcast, but you can do it on your own and you just put it online for people to download. I’ve listened to the Amatuer Traveler podcast for over a year, and I contacted the host to see if I could help him out with anything in China. He asked me to come on the show and talk about Beijing as an independent traveler. So, for those of yall who want to hear what I’ve got to say about Beijing, check it out:
http://amateurtraveler.com/
Click on the above link and then look for my picture and the words “Independent Travel to Beijing, China – Episode 193. Just above the word “podcast,” you can see a play button. Press that, and the program will start up. (Let me know if yall have any issues with this). It’s a pretty big show, getting about four to five thousand downloads a week.
And now for something completely different: this Saturday, I went to my friend’s house and hung out in his village for the weekend. His village is on the northern part of the Shandong peninsula (I live on the southern part of the peninsula). I took a crappy bus made by a company called Iveco (combining the reliability of Russian engineering with everything you love about the “Made in China” brand). After about five hours of bumping across Shandong, I arrived at my friend’s village.
I’ve been to Chinese villages before. In January 2007, I went to a different friend’s village on the border of Yunnan and Guizhou province, in some of the poorest areas of China. I’ve also been to a village outside of Beijing, where my host family owns a vacation home, a richer locale. Each area I’ve been to was pretty different, and this one was no exception: it was not really a village, instead it was more like a series of small factories mixed with farming communities.
When you think of the word ‘village,’ you probably imagine huts made out of mud with straw roofs. There is some of that in China, but not much where I was. My friend was from the poorest village in the area, so it was more like that than any of the other areas. Most of the houses in his village were built with bricks made in a factory just outside the village. The inside of the house was all tiles and concrete. In the center of the house, like most other village houses throughout China, is a roofless courtyard. The rooms of the house are arranged around this courtyard, a little garage, three bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. In one of the corners of the courtyard, there is a cocker spaniel and a couple of birds in cages. I’m putting pictures of the place online.
This village is the poorest in the area, that’s because they don’t have many factories in their village. Nearby this village is a defunct brick factory and a small plastics factory. Surrounding the village is farmland, with corn, peanuts and their most famous product, strawberries.
I’m not sure how long this can continue though. The pollution is starting to have a real effect. The creek that separates this village from a neighboring village is completely black. Trash is piling up on both sides and the banks are the local dump. I saw some ducks were bathing in the black creek, and I told my friend that we had better not be having duck for dinner. My friend said “It used to not be a problem, but in the last 10 years pollution has become a really noticeable problem.” Really? The pollution is beginning seep into the aquifer so that the water from wells is undrinkable.
The other villages in the areas are a lot richer and a lot less traditional than my friend’s. Most have a couple of factories, and much more modern houses, i.e. not made of bricks. One of the villages nearby is one of the richest in all of China. It has almost 10 big factories. As far as villages go, this place is in the money. They have their own mall and their own stadium and they are one of the only villages in China with a KFC (that’s a huge honor. In this country, KFC is where you take your hot date when you’re getting to know her).
Hanging out in the villages was a lot of fun, giving me a chance to relax. The pace is real laid-back. I enjoyed it a lot and I may get to do a lot more of it later depending on where I do my internship next spring. I’ll keep yall informed.
Here are those pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/agenbite.lee
I’ll try and send emails more frequently as I’m finishing up my program in Qingdao.