Summer is just about done, so here’s a photo gallery of “our” Tianjin covering the first half of 2010 (Spring Festival to present): Tianjin 2010 — Spring & Summer. There’s lots to see, like these grandmas in the park having a group eyeball-rubbing session:

The photos come from all over: partially abandoned and bulldozed hutongs in Tianjin’s less developed districts, the Great Wall in northern Tianjin, street markets, etc.

Click a photo to go to our Tianjin 2010 — Spring & Summer gallery.

Pronounced: kōngtiáo bìng
Means: “air conditioning disease”. You aren’t feeling sick because you spent all day out in the blazing hot sun in a humid Chinese summer and got heat stroke; you’re feeling sick because after spending all day out in the blazing hot sun not getting heat stroke you went inside and exposed yourself to the air conditioner. It’s not heat stroke; it’s air conditioner disease. If you still don’t believe: Air Conditioning Diseases Plague Office Workers.

Pronounced: zhèngbù
Means: goose-stepping (in military parades). Also what Tianjin’s university sophomores have to do for hours each day this week . For example:
教官让我们踢很长时间正步。
jiàoguān ràng wǒmen tī hěn cháng shíjiān hèngbù.

It’s time for all the university sophomores in Tianjin to do their mandatory military training. According to my students, this means they have to buy a super-low-quality blue camouflage uniform (the seats split on several of my student’s classmates when they sat down) and march around in formation all day for a week or two. According to what we hear and see out our windows in the sports field beside our apartment, it means a lot of goose-stepping and yelling one-two-three-four. My students didn’t like doing it but said it made them more patriotic.

I didn’t set out to go get a picture, but we were out taking a walk happened upon a … squadron? … doing their drills. Here’s a shot of the young ladies:

I asked my students about it and this immediately led to a common and annoying language problem that plagues both English speakers learning Chinese and Chinese speakers learning English.

Basically, in everyday Mandarin it’s context rather than grammar that determines the difference between “they made me” and “they let me.” My EFL students routinely say things like, “My boss let me work late yesterday” or “they always let us work overtime” because in their heads they’re thinking in Chinese, and in Chinese they’d use the same verb to express both of the above concepts (ordering sb. to do something and allowing sb. to do something). A student today tried to tell me that the drill sergeants “let them” stand very still for a long time, so I hammered out some sentences with her and double-checked with my Chinese coworkers:

The military training officer doesn’t let us (让) talk or look around.
教官不让我们说话或者左顾右盼。
jiàoguān búràng wǒmen shuōhuà huòzhě zuǒgùyòupàn.

The military training officer makes us (让) goose-step for a long time.
教官让我们踢很长时间正步。
jiàoguān ràng wǒmen tī hěn cháng shíjiān zhèngbù.

Sure, people could use other words to say it more specifically, but they don’t! They just say “让” and expect you to know what they mean from the situation. If I try to use more specific words when speaking Chinese, it comes off sounding funny because usually they wouldn’t bother in most situations. Like much of China, that’s just how it is; you can like it, you can leave it, but you’re not gonna change it.

A guy decides to research and drink every single kind of tea in China, one per week, and blog about it. If you like Chinese teas and want to know more about them, this is a great project to check out: The Taobao Tea Trail

“…she’ll get diarrhea.”

That’s right: diarrhea. :)

(This message brought to you this evening by our friendly Tianjin neighbourhood dumpling ladies and traditional Chinese medicine.)

More about free Chinese advice and ‘compliments’:

• 关心-talk: so offensive it’s funny
• No offensive

More about having a foreign baby in China:

• Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 2 — a rock star in the family
• Diary of a Worm in Chinese! (an English / 汉字 / pīnyīn online read-along)
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

More about Chinese medicine:

• Don’t eat that! You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ‘stomach’!
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Chinese Doctor Visit

A journalist with over seven years experience in China is taking a six-month journey through rural China to document the lives of China’s “other billion” — the Chinese who aren’t born, raised and educated in relatively developed coastal cities: “I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. … China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion.”

Living in Tianjin and not knowing about this food is like living in America and not knowing about hamburgers, except that maybe there aren’t giant Chinese corporations more powerful than some national governments selling “oil sticks” and “tofu brains” next to KFC on every potentially profitable street corner on the globe. Still, you can find Tianjin’s local … delicacies … within walking distance of most neighbourhoods here. These local foods are a defining characteristic of the city, and you can feel the warmth and even a little pride from locals when you ask about them.

Breakfast is an especially big deal in Tianjin. Many people don’t like to cook breakfast themselves and the sidewalks are filled from early to late morning with folding tables, plastic stools, and crowds of people enjoying their very public meals.

Last week my sister came from Canada to see us, so I took her out before 6am one morning to sample both the local daily exercise scene and some breakfast. We took pictures, so here’s breakfast, Tianjiner-style, in no particular order. See the warning label at the bottom. Most dishes cost around two kuài ($0.30).

When Tianjiners travel overseas and get homesick, this is the stuff they miss.

1. 锅巴菜 gābacài

I like this stuff, though I wouldn’t have a clue what it’s made of just from eating it: maybe some sesame sauce, strips of something, some pink sauce, thick brown broth, and you can throw in some cilantro and crushed hot peppers in oil if you want. Apparently gābacài (锅巴菜) is a Tianjin original, and it’s seriously high-energy food; you feel like running a few miles afterward. According to this online recipe, it’s made with a mung bean-&-millet broth, strips of chopped, crepe-like jiānbǐng (煎饼), some of kind of gravy made with over ten kinds of seasonings, sesame paste, chilis in oil, pink fermented tofu sauce and cilantro. In standard Mandarin it should be guōbacài, but in Tianjin it’s gābacài — people often think it’s funny if the foreigner knows to use the local pronunciation.

2. 老豆腐 lǎodòufu

My students rave about “old tofu” (老豆腐) or “tofu brains” (豆腐脑) whenever I bring it up in class, but even they admit that it looks disgusting.

From what I can tell, it’s slimy lumps of tofu in an oil bath with some brown (sesame?) sauce thrown in. For me, the taste doesn’t come anywhere close to making up for its appearance. Of all the Tianjin breakfast foods, we liked this one the least. I think my sister stopped after the first or second spoonful.

3. 油条 yóutiáo

Two small strips of dough pinched together at the ends and deep fried, “oil sticks” are pretty much donuts without any sugar or flavouring. I honestly don’t see the point, unless you were trying to consume as much oil as possible without actually drinking it straight, though for some reason I still eat them occasionally. These things are everywhere at breakfast time, perhaps the most ubiquitous of all Tianjin’s breakfast offerings, maybe because they travel easily. 5 máo ($0.07) each.

The wider thing in the fry pot in the above photo is called a guǒbìngr (果饼儿) in Tianjin (薄脆 báocuì in Beijing). Guǒbìngr are thin and crispy rather than donut-y.

4. 面茶 miànchá

If you cooked it in less oil and traded the salt for brown sugar, you could slip bowls of miànchá (面茶) onto a Canadian family breakfast table and no one would notice (assuming that some Canadians actually still have family breakfasts). According to this online recipe and my Chinese-English dictionary, it’s made from millet, sesame paste, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Unsweetened porridge, basically. I don’t know how to translate the name; the characters are the ones for “noodles” (面) and “tea” (茶), but I’m not seeing either in this dish [see comment #14]. Anyway, I’ll definitely be eating this again on a somewhat regular basis, though I can’t say the same or the “tofu brains” in the right half of the photo above.

5. 煎饼果子 jiānbing guǒzi

This is more or less the Chinese breakfast burrito, except that other than having a thin crepe-like wrapper, it’s (sadly) nothing at all like a burrito. The styles can vary and you can sometimes choose for yourself (see a list here), but a standard jiānbing guǒzi (煎饼果子) will be a green onion crepe lined with egg wrapped around a yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) or a crunchy guǒbìngr (果饼儿 — stacked overhead in the photo below), with some sauce and crushed red peppers in oil, and then folded twice. These transport well, and I often see them on the subway in the morning.

6. 豆浆 dòujiāng

“Bean broth” (豆浆) is better known in North America as soy milk, only the Tianjin variety is unsweetened and served really hot in a brimming bowl, scooped out of a big pot. Dòujiāng to-go comes in a bag with a straw. Sometimes they’ll add sugar to it if you ask. I like dipping the yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) in it, but I get funny looks from my Chinese friends when I do this.

This post doesn’t include every single kind of Tianjin breakfast food (there’d be no end; Tianjiners love them some breakfast!), but these are all the biggies. Hungry?

P.S. — Warning

Adventure eaters, be ye warned: This kind of local food is pretty much guaranteed to use the cheapest, poorest quality ingredients, and in China that means something different than it does back home. If, for example, you were deliberately trying to consume “gutter oil” (地沟油), which is discarded cooking oil that’s been skimmed off the sewer slop that was scooped out of manholes and resold in used containers back to restaurants and street vendors, you would eat things like yóutiáo (油条 “oil sticks”) or lǎodòufu (老豆腐 “old tofu”) at places like those pictured above, or you could go to an average local restaurant and order shuǐzhǔròu (水煮肉 “water boiled meat”), which is basically meat and vegetables in a serving bowl filled with oil. Most Chinese dishes use incredible amounts of oil, but the ones I’ve mentioned here use even more than usual and are therefore thought to be the most likely candidates for gutter oil.

Pronounced: chòu měi
Literally: “stinky beautiful”
Means: to smugly and shamelessly show off one’s good looks. Sometimes used in light teasing between friends.

Pronounced: sān sú
Means: The “Three Vulgarities” refers to things officially deemed vulgar (庸俗 yōngsú), low (低俗 dīsú), or pandering (媚俗 mèisú) in the ongoing anti-vulgarity censorship campaign that was launched in late July. English translations of the three vulgarities differ; see here and here to compare dictionary entries.