A stop at the food market

One of the main interests for me in China is the food. It is pretty much the opposite to the food I'm used to back home. A visit to the food market will sort of illustrate this difference.



One this video you'll see a whole hen, a duck, duck feet and some other gastronomic highlights.

It's very popular with living crabs. Don't put your fingers too close or they might catch you.

My girlfriend swears these are not turtles but to me they sure look like that...they've got shells and small little heads sticking out...I felt like buying all of them and setting them free.

Anybody fancy a fish head? I hear they're full of E-vitamin.

The missing link? These fellas looked like something half between lizards and fish.

Different parts of a jelly fish. Is typically eaten raw dipped in soy sauce.

I like shell fish but this is a bit over the top.

How to decorate your new Chinese apartment

There are a few things I noticed all modern Chinese apartments have in common. Keep this in mind when you're decorating your new apartment.

You need a glass table

You need a bunch of expensive alcohol bottles you will never drink (Remy Martin is a sure winner)

If you want to be really modern, you should put in some blue colored lights mixed with the ordinary ones

You need a big couch in the living room


An absolute must unless you want to lose face: a big screen TV

To be on the sure side you better throw in another glass table

Wedding

When you're in China, don't be surprised to be woken up suddenly in the morning by large bombs and the sounds of car-alarms going off. No, it's not the Taiwanese attacking; you might just have the bad luck to live next to a restaurant which charters weddings. In China, fireworks is a natural part in wedding cermonies. Unfortunately for Rochelle's uncle, his 16:th floor apartment is just on level with the fireworks at their explosion level outside a popular marriage cermony restaurant. The video shows the view from the uncle's balcony and the bride's car with its following of black mercedes coming in after her to the hotel. Unfortunately for Rochelle's uncle the restaurant has about 5 weddings per day.

Driving

In China the there's only rule in traffic....get wherever you want to go as quick as possible without getting killed. In the situation below there was a long line of cars ahead of us on the right line so the drived decided to go on the left lane instead to skip ahead. Luckily there was not so much traffic coming towards us. FYI: This guy is a driving instructor.

Instrument

Went to a visit another family which is friends with Rochelle's family. They have two twins, one of which plays the Chinese old-fashioned instrument of "guzheng". She's only 9 years old so you have to give her credit for how much she knows. She had to use fake nails to play it.

Dinner with friends

We went to a dinner the other evening with Rochelle's best friend, her husband, another couple and another two old highschool friends. I told everybody I won't drink any wine since I drank about one bottle of wine the day before that at another dinner and was sort of recovering. The problem was that I was really thirsty and the only thing put on the table at the time was a bottle of red wine so I decided to drink a glas with the host. The thing is, in China it's difficult to say no to drink more than one glas once you started drinking, its kind of inpolite. I told them that previous nights I had mostly been drinking with Rochelle's familys' friends, i.e. older people and that it was not so scary to drink with young people so it was ok. I wish I wouldn't have said that because the host took it as a challenge. We kept drinking. Eventually the host, me and another guy had drunk three bottles of red wine together.

The other guy's face was turning into a color of dark shade red, black and dark blue, which I had never seen before. When I cheered with him he just looked at me with empty eyes, the glas and then made a indistinguishable gut sound of disgust and drank it. The host however seemed completely untouched by the drinks. Me, I was beginning to feel a bit tipsy so I began eating all the "exotic" types of food I didn't consider trying before. Seacucumber may not seem very tasty but when you're trying to stay sober it's a good medicine. We opened one more bottle and thanks to the food I managed to make it all the way through...I even began taking the initiative by handing out the cheers. The other guy appeared to be in another place and after we finished the bottle he crashed in the couch.

Me and Rochelle on the left, the drunk guy with the red/black/blue face with glasses, the host in the middle and the guy on the right who had enough after two beers and still has a nice red tone.

The drunk guy's wife was a piano teacher and sort of added a new dimension to the dinner by playing for us. I asked her if she could play Elvis but she never heard of him.

Fishing trip

A couple of days ago Rochelle's uncle rented a fishing boat for the day in a nearby coastal city. Me, Rochelle, her parents, the uncle and his wife and a couple of other people I didn't know went along. We took out early in the morning and the fishermen put their nets into the ocean.

After a couple of hours it was time for brunch. Menu for the day: duck feet, meat jelly, bones with tiny shreds of sweet meat, pig legs also mostly consisting of bones and water melon. I mostly ate of the water melon. As so many times before the hosts felt a bit embarrassed and said they didn't know that "I didn't eat that type of food". Later on Rochelle made me some rice with soy sauce and vinegar (i.e. baby food) and I didn't have to starve for the remaining 10 hours on the boat. If you look to the left at a photo from the brunch you'll see that the lady is holding a big fat juicy duck foot in her hand.

After about two hours they pulled up the fishing net. About 90 % was trash consisting of paper, mugs, logs etc. and huge wads of a jellyfish that broke in parts in the net. As the final part of the net was pulled up there was a sound of excitement from the group and we saw something that resembled living things admits all the junk. It was mostly small fish, crabs, shrimps and a couple of eels. The idea was that the staff on the boat would cook the fish and that we would all eat it together later on...lets just say I was not planning to abandon my rice just yet.

After a couple of hours we arrived at this really cute little island with a small old-fashioned fishing village. When we arrived there was a gate into the village and a sign that said you had to pay roughly 3 euros to enter thus no body wanted to go there. After a while one in the group asked why they charged money to enter to which one of the old village women which just hung out there said that there was no charge, they were just hanging out. Sometimes its even hard for Chinese people to communicate with each other.

The village was really cute. The villages were sitting outside eating lunch among their farm animals and everybody was staring on them. It was kind of like a zoo with the only difference that the items of exhibition stared back at us just as much as we stared back at them.

Fishermen putting in the nets

Brunch at the boat

Catch of the day

Fishing village with gate in background

Ab initio

I'm Mike. I've decided to give moving to China a shot. After all, China is where it's all going down right now and everybody keep talking about it. Plus, perhaps a more important reason my girlfriend (Rochelle) is Chinese and choosing between staying in Europe or China we both prefered China. I've been to China one time before for a couple of months the previous summer.

I have to say my first impression of China was very negative. People were not nearly as friendly or open-minded as the people I had met in other countries. When I've been to other Asian countries people have always shown a natural curiousity towards me being a foreigner but in China people don't seem to care that much, especially in Shanghai being a very international city. Another negative experience was the food. I come from a region where people are crazy about meat, fat sauces and potatoes. It was a total culture shoch eating the Chinese food. I hated almost all the dishes that were served to me. I just couldn't begin to understand how people coud eat beans and ice for desert, the affection for bones or sweet meat. The positive impression was my girlfriend's family who treated me like a member of their family. They lavished me in gifts and free dinners.

This is my second time around in China and this time I'm here to stay. After I finished my vacation in my girlfriend's city we will go to Shanghai in order to write our master thesis for a major Scandinavian company in the beginning of June. That's when the real adventure will start.