Middle Country (China is the center of the world!)

Oh, Free Speech, how I missed you! After 9 days of censorship by Communist China (I don't know why I feel compelled to always preface "China" with "Communist" whenever I refer to it), I am so happy to have access to blogger again!

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I have a zillion random thoughts on Communist China. Let's start with the name. In Chinese characters, China is "middle country," or the center of the universe. Japan is "origin of the sun," aka land of the rising sun, so apparently the Japanese believe the sun originates in Japan. Dude...can I just say....those are pretty pompous/bold claims by both countries. In comparison, take the Chinese characters for Korea, which mean "Land of the Han people." Humble and straightforward.

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El Hombre and I went to Xian and Beijing during our trip. Xian is the beginning of the Silk road and the influence of other cultures is still present. Xian is home to a large population of Muslim Chinese, or Hui people, and it's not uncommon to see a Chinese woman with a headscarf or a Chinese man with a fez hat. The food of Xian is also influenced by the various cultures that wandered through the region and the primary meat in Xian is mutton, often flavored with spices that I didn't previously associate with Chinese food. One of the most common dishes of Xian is yangrou paomo which is basically made by tearing up a thick, round disc of baked dough into tiny bite sized pieces, then pouring mutton stock and vermicelli over it and garnishing with cilantro, pickled garlic and red pepper sauce. I really wanted to love this dish but sadly I was not a huge fan of Chinese-Muslim cuisine. I don't think Chinese flavors mix well with mutton.

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Random observations:

**Meat on sticks: Chinese people seem to love them. In both Beijing and Xian, the most common street snack you see is meat on gigantic sticks. The most popular meat on a stick is mutton/lamb, but you can also find all sorts of animal innards such as liver, heart, intestine, as well as squid, scorpions, silkworms, starfish.

**Tea is not free. I thought tea was both the obligatory and free drink that ubiquitously accompanied Chinese food but in Beijing and Xian, tea was not free. In fact, sometimes a restaurant wouldn't even have tea. At De Fa Chang, Xian's most famous dumpling restaurant, most people drink beer and we drank fresh soymilk but tea is not even available on the menu. I think Cantonese/HK cuisine does it right - you must have tea to wash down greasy dumplings. When tea was on the menu, it was really expensive - a pot would usually cost 30-60 yuan, which may only be 4-9 US dollars, but if you consider that a bowl of noodles or 12 dumplings could be found for 12 yuan, the price of tea is extravagant.

**No better way to work out your butt and thighs...than to have to squat every time you need to go to the bathroom. Squat toilets (basically modernized versions of holes in the ground) are prevalent in Beijing - whether at the brand new megamalls or high end restaurants or major tourist attractions, squat toilets seem to be the depository of choice. About 60% of the toilets I visited did not have toilet paper so carrying around a pack of tissues is a must at all times. And about 75% of the time, the person who used the toilet before would leave me the nice gift of their pee still in the toilet bowl. I'm guessing that maybe people think that you're supposed to flush the toilet before you use the toilet and not after, but I feel like common sense says that you don't want to enter a toilet and see someone else's urine in the toilet bowl so wouldn't the collective conclusion to that be to flush after you use the toilet?

**On the subject of toilets, at the foot of the Badaling section of the Great Wall, all of the doors to the toilet stalls in the women's bathroom had been removed so that I had to suffer the humiliating indecency of staring straight into another stall where another woman was squatting and relieving herself (and staring at me in return) to use the bathroom. This experienced left me shocked and scarred and I couldn't shake off the humiliation for the entire duration of the hike.

**Northern Chinese cuisine doesn't include very much rice. I typically think of Chinese food as meat or vegetables that are stir-fried, steamed, fried or sauteed, always accompanied by a bowl of white rice. We barely ate rice at all during our trip and that's because Northern Chinese cuisine revolves around flour. Lots and lots of flour. Thick flour noodles, chewy flour bread and buns, generous lumps of fried flour, doughy dumplings with thick flour-based skin. It's an Atkins dieter's hell (not that I'm an Atkins dieter since I think giving up all carbs, especially rice and cereal, is akin to torture). But Atkins may have been on to something - eating lots of doughy products makes you...doughy.

**Dancing in the park (or the town square, or the sidewalk, or anywhere): Chinese people love to dance in public in large groups! In Xian behind the Big Goose Pagoda on a large public square, there were two large groups of people dancing - a younger group of people dancing a synchronized aerobics style hip hop dance and an older group of people ballroom dancing. Ballroom dancing was a common sight in Beijing as well - anywhere there is a public space, you'll find a group of dancers in the evening, and many of them are really rather good. I could see how to a foreigner the sight could be funny, but it's also kind of awesome that people are just out there enjoying themselves.

**I think I could adjust to living in pretty much any place in the world (except Mumbai, which is not a place fit for human habitation - not just because of its amazing filth and pollution but also because of the incessant noise pollution, traffic and its amazing filth and pollution) because after a couple days in any place, the customs and habits of the people of that place start seeming normal and for lack of a better word, correct. So while on the first day I might think that dancing in public or wearing your shirt with your collar up or posing for pictures in the cheesiest positions is funny, by day 2 or 3 I'll start thinking it's completely normal and start adopting the local habits and customs. I'm not just that way with China - I pretty much felt that way about every city I visited during my RTW trip with the exception of Mumbai, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I'm slightly worried about how fobby/Japanicized I'll become after I move there.

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The size, grandeur and history of China was truly impressive but it made me think that what's amazing is that Korea has managed to survive as a distinct country/civilization with its own language, culture and customs with such a massive neighbor to the north and only ocean in every other direction. How did Korea manage to fend off becoming conquered by the Chinese for hundreds, or rather thousands, of years?? The Korean people are so resilient!