China 2017: Muslim Quarter

When last we left our very unheroic hero, he had arrived in Xi'an a full day late, without sleeping, appallingly jetlagged, and in the early stages of adjusting to powerful mind-affecting medication, to find his hotel politely reporting they had never heard of him.

Well, you may say. Well. Well, well. Um. I mean, I had definitely made a booking, and had money taken for the booking, and I have a fair amount of confidence that STA Travel weren't scamming me.* On the other hand, these nice people couldn't find a record of my booking or payment. What a conundrum, you might say; rather a pickle, isn't it?

*they had of course used an intermediary, and in theory they could have been scamming me; but I was far too tired, nauseous and language-shocked to think of that.

Obviously I'm not about to do anything outrageous, like throw a tantrum, or burst into floods of tears, or demand to speak to the manager, or proclaim that I was being treated appallingly, or threaten to write to the Telegraph, or insist that they give me a room, or suggest that they might be wrong, or imply in any way that they might personally be at fault, or look cross, or sigh heavily. I must confess I do at one stage raise one eyebrow and show them my booking printout, but in my defence, I am very tired and assume this was all some simple misunderstanding, and no actual injury was intended; though I do of course later send an anonymous basket of flowers.

Anyway, I look sheepish and tug my right earlobe a couple of times, and apologise several times for troubling them, and murmur in an embarrassed way that there seems to have been some kind of mistake. These moments are when you realise you're abroad, because this does not send the entire staff into a frenzy of anxious activity; nor does a grizzled veteran named Pam or Tom emerge from a secret abode, plonk a brick-red cuppa down on the desk and stare thoughtfully at my passport for a minute, before rummaging in a hitherto-unnoticed drawer and producing a document that explains and resolves the whole affair. In Japan, too, this behaviour would probably have caused the silent flaring of emergency lights in a back room, from whence a crack team of customer service marines would have sallied forth to deal with the seething client before any kind of rampage could ensue. In China, for some incomprehensible reason, they appear to take my mild demeanour and friendly tone as an indication that I'm not stressed or irate about the latest in a string of exhausting failures, and we can discuss the whole situation at length.

My Chinese is definitely not up to this. I have probably never been happier to have a native speaker on hand to help. Between us we relay information back and forth for a good fifteen minutes, comparing different screens and sets of paperwork - I dig out my laptop and fire that up in case it helped (it didn't). Eventually they offer to give me the room, since I do seem to have all the right information, for which I assume HT's silver tongue and obvious trustworthiness is responsible. Personally I tend to have more of a "police are anxious to speak to this Caucasian male seen in the area" vibe. I agree to email my travel agent and ask them to provide more information so we can resolve this in the morning; one of those occasions where the 8-hour time difference causes problems!

After my very late arrival, HT suggests we go for a walk. We head to the nearby city centre; it has a concentration of interesting historical areas that I remember well from my previous trip. The sun is slipping lower in the sky, casting soft yellow light.

Here's my route: you can sort of follow along, although China and Google maps don't play well, so I suggest you use Baidu maps instead for street view exploring.

The underpass that encircles the heart of the Old City

^_^

Left: The central square by the Xi'an Bell Tower. Right: Archival footage! I took this back in 2008, at the same Starbucks. The lady is Joanne, who was on another volunteer programme. One day I'll get around to blogging about that trip...

Looking up towards the Bell Tower.

I believe this is a hotel and/or restaurant in the Bell Tower Square. Left: 2017. Right: A view from the bridge in 2008.

This man is creating elaborate pictures inside a bottle by very careful application of sand.

How many different kinds of shop is this? And more importantly, why? I count: shoes, bubble tea, whole coconuts, and dried fish products. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just... not a combination I would have predicted, you know?

Muslim Quarter

This district has a high concentration of Muslim residents; I assume this partly relates to Xi'an's historical role in the Silk Road, bringing traders from across Eurasia. It has all kinds of stalls and shops, and is a hotspot in the evenings. I've heard it's also a hotspot for pickpockets, so as an exhausted tourist I try to take good care.

It's also busy most of the time, day and night. There are plenty of souvenir shops here was well, and an excitingly windy covered market; but this time we don't go in there.

This is not particularly busy by the standards of the street.

Quite a lot of the stalls are dedicated to food. Below is an artisan making traditional sweets, kneading and stretching and twisting dough hung on a hook. It will be cut up and rolled in various combinations of nuts, spices, sugar and other flavourings. On the left you can see deep-fried squid and crustaceans, which are eaten like a lollipop.

These ladies run a sweet stall - quite a popular one as you can tell by the number of staff.

After a wander round, HT takes me for a meal. She recommends a regional delicacy called Majiang Liangpi (麻酱凉皮, Májiàng liángpí). These are cold noodles, served with a sauce based around black sesame. I try some, because it's not like I get the opportunity often. Unfortunately, between exhaustion and the unfamiliar taste, I find I'm not able to eat very much. I know sesame paste is one of the more acquired tastes in Chinese cooking, so I'd like to try and get used to it.

I think the green place in the centre is the entrance to the restaurant, but it's hard to be sure.

This is the upper part of just one of the buildings that line the Muslim Quarter. There are lots of these striking buildings near the city centre. I love the architecture.

As the evening sets in, it starts to get busy - people are finishing work, or deciding to head out with the children, and congregating here to take advantage of all the food stalls.

We decide to call it an evening, and HT kindly escorts me back to the hotel. On the way I take this photo, to help show off the sheer sense of vastness that I always get in China - the cities are so big, so tall, and although Japan was similar in some ways, Xi'an also has (unusually?) some big wide open spaces that highlight it even more. I suppose the areas of clustered tall buildings have a claustrophobic feel, whereas when there's a break in them, it gives you the space to more fully grasp the size of what you're dealing with?

I got way too attached to this function.

Shimmin Scones

I've been asked for the sugar-free scone recipe I mentioned in May.

This is a set of variations around the theme of my parents' recipe, which they have from my grandparents. It may be centuries old for all I know, although I suspect not because self-raising flour is pretty modern.

Sugar-free scones

You'll want the following ingredients:

• 8oz self-raising flour
• 2oz margarine (or butter)
• Spices to taste
• 1/4 pint water or milk
• 2oz dried fruit

Mix the flour, spices and marg together, then slowly drip in the liquid. It should start to gather into a ball of dough with a claylike texture - it'll never get quite dry, but it should get easy to handle. If it becomes really tacky you'll need to add more flour.

I use a food processor which has only a blade (no blunt stirrer) so I throw the fruit in at the last minute. You can add it earlier if you've better equipment than me. If you add it too early, it can be ground up so small it's no longer noticeable, and it'll also upset the balance of the dough because it's basically adding sugar and water.

Although scone recipes normally include sugar, I find a reasonable amount of fruit and spices give it plenty of flavour. If you use butter or jam you should be fine. Personally I don't, but then I make these scones deliberately as a convenient but relatively healthy breakfast - quick to eat and with minimal mess, which means I can eat them at work.

Milk supposedly makes for a more luxurious recipe, but water always does fine for me. The milk recipe doesn't keep as well so that's another reason I avoid it.

Good combinations I've tried include the old staple of cinnamon + raisins, and cocoa powder + cherries. Cherries have a fair bit of sugar in, of course, so that's less healthy; on the other hand it offsets the bitterness of the cocoa. It's quite easy to overdo cocoa, it'll look very pale in the raw mixture but darkens on cooking. Mixed Spice is also a good bet.

I've also had a successful savoury recipe: poppy seed and rosemary, with a dash of salt to bring out the flavours.

Because I tend to make these as handy breakfasts, I divide the dough up into large chunks. You can normally get 3-4 large scones from one set of mixture, squash them out into a flat lump and they'll rise nicely (no need for kneading). Smaller ones work just as well, but need a little more watching because they burn more easily.

Put them on a greased tray and cook at preheated GM7/220C without fan/200C with fan for about 10 minutes. It's worth quickly separating them from the tray when you take them out just in case they stick; slightly tricky as they'll still be a bit soft. I find carefully shaking the tray side to side is often enough to dislodge them. Don't put them in a box straight away, as they'll release a lot of moisture as they cool and it'll fill with condensation. Leave them to cool (maybe with a dishcloth over them) and then box them up. Mine last a working week without going off, which is as long as I've ever tried it...

Lucerne: Gletschergarten

Near the lion, I notice a flight of stairs leading to a small hut, and somewhat intrigued, I wander up. This is the Gletschergarten.

On a whim, I go inside. It turns out to be small and rather nice, and surprisingly interesting in that low-key way that peculiar museums often are. The site is a set of geologically-interesting relics of the ice age discovered during the building of a wine cellar. There are rocks with marks left by the glaciers, and peculiar potholes caused by the swirling action of sand-laden meltwaters.

Luzern: Lakesides and Lions

I awoke to relatively glorious, relatively sunshine. That is, it was not raining, and strands of sunlight were intermittently visible through the clouds. Dragging myself out of bed sometime around 9am, I packed and left for the station.

Zurich: Music, Museums and Miyuko

Strolling down the streets of Zurich, my eyes were drawn to the muesli shop. Yes, you heard that right.

Zurich: Hey Hey We're The Munsters

Today I celebrate being on holiday by not getting up until 9.30.

That might seem so routine as to not be worth mentioning, but I normally get up between 6.30 and 7.30 even on weekends, so for me it's pretty extraordinary. As I said though, ill.

This is relevant only insofar as it curtails my activities a bit, and also means I've missed the hotel breakfast by the time I am functional at about 10.30am. So I head out and buy a few morsels at a local coop. Here I cause confusion by assuming that if a menu simply states "tea", and I ask for "tea", I would receive tea. There is an awkward silence before they try to work out what kind of tea I want, and having no idea what the likely options were I just look confused. All is eventually sorted, although they do put hot frothed milk in my tea for some unfathomable reason. Possibly an obscure form of punishment. Ah, the joys of travel!

May Flowers

I am incredibly belated at writing my blogposts this year, for various reasons (for posterity's sake, I'll note that I'm writing this in November). Honestly, for most of the year I haven't done anything terribly exciting (and certainly not to blog about), but I'm going to spend a couple of posts just throwing out snapshots of my summer.

Spring this year was pleasant; summer would soon become, to my mind, pretty ghastly, but that's still a way off as these photos were taken.

Hamamatsu: the arrival

We hear First Nation commanded to beat the rug - not definitely

Enthusiastic thespian Roman is enjoying endless legal action

I feel like I should feel guilty that the first thing this city brings to mind is terrible cryptic crossword clues, but I don't. I feel vaguely guilty for that, if it's any help.

Osaka: desultory wanderings

Long time, no blog! This post will go up in the past, as though I hadn't failed to write anything for two months. Sorry, I've been busy with, you know, life stuff.

So on arriving in Osaka, and between checking out of my hotel and getting the train on Sunday, I kind of wandered around in that area not doing much. You know those awkward blocks of time - not really enough to go anywhere else and do things, yet too long to do nothing?

So here for your delectation are just some generic photos of Osaka. Luckily, the area I was in is a relatively interesting one where lots of tourists like to go - largely because it's full of shops.

By popular request, here is the map and here is the Google Drive!

I for one welcome our new cerasic overlords

You thought I was going to go to Osaka and Hamamatsu, and you'd get away without any pictures of sakura?

For shame.

Osaka: Non-okonomiyaki reunion

So, why Osaka? Well, the main reason is that while I was studying hard in Fukuoka, M-san has been holidaying with relatives and friends there. Our holidays overlap just enough that it's feasible for me to rush up to Osaka (skipping my last day of class, sadly) and meet her there!

Even better, A-san still works relatively nearby and is able to catch a train over, which means we could get together for a reunion.

Strolling in Hakata

I've actually had very little free time this visit. My class schedule is up from 4 hours last time to 6 per day this time, which with the lunch break has meant 9.30-4pm every day, essentially. Because it's only three weeks in Fukuoka, I've also been socialising pretty frantically, so a lot of days I've been meeting friends for another 4 hours or so. The handful remaining I've done a lot of shopping, cooking and so on.

Anyway, I did end up with a chunk of time one day after school, and decided to wander down south of Hakata. I didn't really visit this district when I was here last time. I'm not sure it's especially interesting, but my time wasn't long enough that it was worth researching and then taking a trip out somewhere more distant - especially when it's getting dark at about 6pm.

From the station I headed south to Minoshima (美野島), which is an area I'd vaguely heard about. It's got various little shops and stalls - not touristy ones like in Hita, but perfectly ordinary shops for actual residents. Nothing too special, but a nice change from conbinis and twenty-storey company headquarters.

Sa- and pi- kuras

My last weekend in Fukuoka got a little complicated. I was lucky enough to have several friends suggest meeting up, but then ran into complications trying to actually schedule things. I suppose the trouble is that you can easily schedule one uncertain thing into a known schedule, but trying to juggle several things without any idea when they might happen is tricky.

What I did manage was to meet KT-san again. This time we didn't arrange anything as ambitious as going to another town (possibly a shame in retrospect, but the weather had been iffy) but just went for a walk around town. Obviously, we started in Maizuru Park.

More sakura and I'm not sorry

This week, KM-san suggested we go out for tempura. It's been eighteen months since we last went, so I was glad to go with her (via a quick trip to a certain otaku shop to buy a nerdy present for a delightfully nerdy friend).

We went to Hirao tempura near Tenjin. The way this works is that there's a vending machine-style order system. You insert money, choose a meal option and buy a voucher. You then go inside and work your way through the (seated) queue. When you get a seat at the bar (and they're bar seats, so I tend to find them a bit less reassuring than something firmly on ground level) you hand over your voucher. The staff are in the middle of the restaurant, with people seated all around them.

Okonomiyaki II: revenge of Okonomiyaki

So I've been wanting to eat okonomiyaki again for about eighteen months, in fact, and KM-san kindly offered to go with me.

My schedule this year is much more consistent; I start at 9.30am and have classes until either 3pm or 4pm, with an hour for lunch and brief breaks between classes. There's more hours because this year (not being a long-term student) I'm on the conversation course track, not the generic track.

Unexpected Cuisine

We met fairly early, so we had time for a coffee and a walk before we went for food. I needed them too, as I'd inadvertantly eaten too much lunch and was very full!

I'm staying in Hakata, so we wandered north a bit in search of Higashi Park (東公園).

Jersey: Mont Orgueil and the Salty Dog Bistro

My plan for today, Wednesday, is to leave my rather heavy bag here and head off to Mt. Orgueil. Apparently it’s quite big, with a tearoom, and there’s a garden centre with another café nearby. I’m planning a quiet day, pottering and reading an Arthur Machen book. I’ve picked up a new sketchbook and vaguely plan to sketch, though whether I will get round to it is hard to tell.

Another snag has cropped up unexpectedly. As I ate breakfast and tried to sort out a few emails, I had a sudden flare-up of my RSI that made it virtually impossible to operate the computer. I’m not sure whether sketching and so on will actually be feasible either. I’m very conscious of my hands right now and hoping they’ll recover soon! This has the awkward side-effect of making it very difficult to take any notes for my blog. Luckily, I remembered my trusty voice recorder. What I’ll be doing today, then, is making an audio diary and then transcribing it when I recover.

Makizushi'd

As you can see, I started this post months ago in Japan. Still working through that backlog...

So it seems silly to spend six months in Japan without learning to make at least one national dish, right? Let's pick an easy one.

Having already tried this out in cooking class, I knew basically what to do, but wanted to try making makizushi from scratch. It has a lot of advantages. It's healthy, relatively straightforward, you can make it in advance (or at least, some of the prep can be done ahead of time) and it makes a decent lunch that doesn't require reheating.

Bowl of rice! For my first attempt, I didn't have any sushi rice. This caused some problems.

Culture Class: Tea Ceremony

The final entry in my GenkiJACS culture class series! Not only because I've left Japan and am now catching up; but also because I did just about everything I was interested in during my six months.

Tea ceremony! This was something I'd been wanting to do throughout the stay, but somehow it always ended up scheduled when I wasn't available - in class, in Korea, ill... so I was anxious about getting on the last slot, just two days before I left school. Thankfully, this time it came together. In fact, due to the incentive scheme* for writing about your trip, I actually got to do this for free! It would have been shameful (to me, anyway) to get through six months in Japan without taking part in tea ceremony, nor wearing yukata or kimono even once.

* The school encourages people to write about their trip, and you can get credit for blogposts relevant to the school. I should emphasise (for fear of my reputation being besmirched) that this is guaranteed not subject to review or censorship. I simply wrote blogposts and sent a link to the school; they checked the posts were relevant, and gave appropriate credit. Not sure what would happen if you wrote anything particularly offensive, because I didn't.

End-of-trip reflections

So, now that I've finished, come home and had some time to digest it all, I wanted to reflect a bit on my whole six months at GenkiJACS, coming back to my feelings in the half-term update. I'm also looking at the evaluation form I completed at the end of my stay, although I won't post specific extracts.

While I will mention various negatives, it's always easier to pinpoint problems than things that were good. The latter tend to be vague and diffiuse, the former are often specific.

Christmas 2014

I am now, just about, recovered from my flight back and indeed from Christmas. It's been complicated.

The flight itself wasn't too bad. I watched three films, read a bit and kipped briefly. However, the meals service was a bit wonky, since they started serving at the front (and presumably, with business class) and worked towards me at the back. There was a bit of a tendency for things to run out by the time they reached us, so I didn't get any choice of meals and missed out on bread rolls. Poor planning there. Wouldn't be that hard to get me to pick a meal option during check-in.