Black or white?

I have already talked about some extreme differences between the Chinese preferences and the occidental ones, such as for example the fact that you will get a glass of hot water if only ask for a glass of water, or the fact that you will be taken to a karaoke if you ask somebody to go out in a Saturday night.

Today I’d like to tell about the color of the skin. In occidental countries, or at least in Europe and America, being tanned is nowadays a symbol of healthiness and sexuality. You just have to go to a beach in summer in any country in Europe or America and you will see hundreds of locals and foreigners in bathing suits trying to get as dark as possible. The year I was living in Montana in the US, the winter was really hard and long, which means no opportunity for getting tan at all. Before the spring started everybody in the state was as pale as the snow. Well, for the spring break I traveled to the Utah state in a hiking trip: I was hiking along the dessert for about one week. Of course, when I returned back to Montana I was similar in appearance to a roast chicken but everybody kept telling me: wow! What a tan! You look nice!.

In China, being tanned is not a symbol of healthiness: they are really scared of getting sun burned and eventually getting skin cancer. Being tanned is also not a symbol of sexuality: tanned people are poor people. If you are tanned is because you had to work on the streets or in the land, what are absolutely not the most desired jobs in China.

Chinese people have come out with some interesting remedies in order to keep their skin as pale and white as possible, some of which are parasols, protection screens or whitening creams.

We all know the traditional Chinese parasols: paper or wood made umbrellas usually with an oriental pattern. These traditional parasols are now made of plastic or silk, and are exclusively for sunny days. More than once I would be working at the office, while the window would show what it seemed a sunny day, the lunch time would arrive and we all would stand up and proceed to walk together to the canteen, only that all my colleagues would be wearing an umbrella. At the beginning I would ask everybody whether it was raining. At this point people would look at me puzzled and probably think that I was blind, – can’t she see through the window that it is a very sunny day? –, “no, it is not raining”, would they answered. Apparently they were not able to associate the fact that they were carrying their parasols (which looked very similar to a regular umbrella to me), with me asking without any reason at all whether it was raining.

>> That’s me wearing a parasol made of paper


The other remedy I mentioned against getting tanned is the protection screen. I just came out with the name, because I have no clue how I should call this:


In the picture you see a woman covering her face with a black plastic screen. Women not willing to carry the inconvenient parasol would use these weird masks, especially while riding their electro bikes. Sometimes I got the feeling I was living in a town of welders. As a complement to these masks, women usually wearing a summer t-shirt would also wear detachable long shirtsleeves so that their arms could be protected from the sun.
The last remedy I mentioned in order to counteract the effects of the sun in the skin is the whitening cream. You can virtually buy no makeup without this Michel Jackson effect.

>> Cream advertising how to get a white radiance


One of my Chinese language teachers told me she quited drinking coke when she was a child because her mother threaten her telling that her skin would turned out black like coke, if she would not stop drinking it. She was then so terrified of turning black that she stop drinking coke on the spot. The funny of the story is that she it in front of another foreign student who was black! Anyway, this paranoia about white skin is only applicable to Chinese people. In the case that you are a foreigner, your skin might even be green colored, that they would not care. I was once told that my tanned skin was beautiful, in opposite to a Chinese tanned skin which looks dirty and disgusting.

Eating in China – Part 1: The ingredients

One of the most fascinating activities that I have experienced in China is the process of eating and everything what is connected to it. In order not to bore you too much with my absurd ramblings concerning this subject I have decided to split my story about eating in two sections: the ingredients and the eating habits.

First thing everybody is asked when coming back from China: did you eat dog?

To your disappointment I have to admit that I didn’t eat dog. I didn’t even see a place where to buy it. According to what I was told – yeah, of course! I also asked the same question to my Chinese colleagues – dog eating is not that popular outside the south of China. I’ve heard several times that south Chinese seem to think the following way: if you can cook it, you can eat it.

Perhaps If I should noun the weirdest food that I’ve seen this would be my choice: duck neck, duck tongue, and turtles. You see these three picks are not “that” weird. The first two are duck specialties. I don’t have a clue what Chinese people would do, if duck would go instinct. There are so many things different dishes coming from them, and all of them are of course classified as “delicious”. The duck neck is a bunch of little bones covered by a very thin skin. In more than one occasion, somebody would bring some duck neck snack bags to the office and distribute its contents among the excited colleagues. Each of them would place a piece of neck in their mouth and play with it until the taste is gone. I once asked a friend what was so delicious in these duck necks, since there was nothing that you could possibly eat. She replied that the good stuff is not what you can eat out of it, but the sense of having this bone in your mouth and playing with it. More or less like a candy only that this variation is made of bone and skin instead of sugar…

>> Ducks in the supermarket hanging like "jamon serrano" in Spain, or sausages in Germany


Duck tongues are completely the opposite to duck necks: only meat, and no bones. They have a pretty hard consistency, more like eating rubber. And the turtles... First thing I see when I go to the supermarket: I’m walking around and all of a sudden I see something like turtles. They were wrapped in a very fancy scarf and they were moving! “These animals are not turtles!”, would say Chen Jing every time I would try to pick on her for eating turtles. Well, these “animals” are apparently a very healthy dish, but also a very disgusting one… even for the Chinese it is not very tasty. Chinese people seem to extremely believe in the healthy properties of the different food, so that you would now and then hear people telling you to try something because it is very good for your eyes, or your body. This is true to the point, that there are restaurants that specialized in healthy food, and I’m not talking about salads and diet food… I’m talking about things such as stewed turtle.

>> Alive "soft-shelled" turtles in the supermarket


This turtle story has remembered me of the high importance that fresh food has for Chinese people. Fresh food in China is the equivalent to good quality, which means that animals are preferably kept alive until the very end. That’s why turtles and other delicacies are kept alive in the supermarket.

>> Fresh fish in the supermarket


Of course, I have also tried many other things that were completely amazing in taste: lotus root in honey sauce, Beijing duck, hot pot in all its variations, tofu in its hundred forms, sweet and sour pork, fish in black beans sauce, and many more.

>> Chen Jing and me eating some tasty Chinese dishes


I could not possible finish this post about food without mentioning the most eaten ingredient in Asia: rice. The next two pictures will help you to better understand how much rice is usually eaten.

>> Mountains of rice in the supermarket
You don’t buy rice in little 1Kgr. packages... When you buy rice, you buy rice for the whole family! The man in the picture is planning on cooking a huge paella.


>> Rice in the canteen
A bowl of rice in the canteen at work costs 0.1 EUR. Yeah, it is expensive! But then you get refill for free! The two Bosch operators refill their rice bowls from the rice tank. The rice tank is always full with rice.

They are singers, we are dancers

I’m going to slowly take up the post writing activity again. I’ve been procrastinating this moment for a long period due to my thesis and all the new things that have been happening to me recently (new country, new apartment, job application, etc.). But stop for whining now!

While in China I started a “post pipe-line” or storage with all the things I wanted to talk about and I couldn’t at that moment. Today I want to talk about one of these subjects, particularly about the discrepancy on the concept of “going out” that we occidental-people and they oriental-people have.

So let’s start for that what WE know: the occidental part. In most of the cases, our plan of going out will include alcohol drinking and dancing (or for some occidental men, watching how other dance). Going to a club is one of the most common things that we perform in order to have fun during the weekends.

However, in the Far East (well, I guess I can only talk about China) the thing changes. Drinking alcohol is not the rule and neither is it dancing. In fact, I would say that most Chinese people are ashamed of dancing in front of others. This might be slowly changing, as more and more young Chinese are feeling attracted by the occidental tradition, including clubbing. In any case, nowadays what Chinese people really like to do during their weekends is not clubbing, but eating and singing. A perfect “going out” plan would regularly include meeting some friend in a restaurant where to share some “delicious” food (in my 6 months in China I only heard the following two adjectives in relation to food: disgusting or delicious) and then go to the karaoke (or the Chinese version of the word, ka-la-o-ki).

>> There we are with some delicious food

The Chinese ka-la-o-ki experience has however nothing to do with what we occidentals understand under karaoke. I didn’t want to leave China without having visited a karaoke, so in my last day in Hangzhou my colleagues from work took me to one. The whole thing, I must say, was completely amazing. We arrived there at around 9 pm and there were about 20 (maybe more) groups of young Chinese waiting to get a ka-la-o-ki room. Yes, a room! That place might have had about 50 private karaoke rooms.

This is the deal: you go there with a group of 3-6 friends and get a private room; there you order some snacks and drinks for the night. This room is fully equipped with all you might need to become a singing queen: huge speakers, two microphones, a computer and a huuuuge screen.

>> Chen Wei selecting the songs in the karaoke-computer

So there we were: two Chinese colleagues, two other guys from Germany and the US, me… and two microphones.

>> Chen Jing and Chen Wei on my right, and Bryan and Stefan on my left

You could notice at the beginning how we three (the occidental fraction) were looking to the air as an attempt to avoid being choice to sing first. Surprisingly for me, my Chinese colleagues didn’t have any reservations at all and took with confidence the microphone and started singing as if they have been borne with a microphone in their hand (a Chinese song was that). How amazing was that! They were not ashamed at all! I was the first from us three to try that with the singing. At the beginning I was so stupidly ashamed that I couldn’t help but doing jokes all the time. But after observing how confident my Chinese colleagues were while singing and how much they seem to enjoy it, I thought: what the heck! If I can do it in the shower, I can do it here. And then it happened something that made me wonder the next morning whether it really happened or it was just a dream: I took the microphone, I chose a random song, and there I started to sing with all my voice and heart, so passionately that when I finished the song my two Chinese colleagues were staring at me, with open mouths and big eyes. One of them even told me, she has never seen such a performance before and recommend me to do it professionally. My last solo before living the place like Elvis was the song from Avrile Lavigne “I’m with you”. Here I must admit that I overestimated my singing capabilities… What I want to say is that I was singing like a cat in heat. Oh well… I guess I need some more practice for singing the high choruses of this particular song… Hopefully the mirror in my bathroom will survive to my singing training hours during the shower time.

My god! I have almost written a book about karaoke! So my dear people, I will finish here my story, but not without saying that I cannot wait the moment to go back to that Karaoke in China (it was really a tremendously relaxing and satisfying experiences). A Chinese expat had its motives when he assured that the thing he missed the most while living abroad was the ka-la-o-ki.