Sun Wooy/Xin Hui - Guangdong, China

We flew to China for a week over the Lunar New Year holiday to spend some quality time with those of  Connie's family who have not moved to NYC or Toronto.  We didn't do too many normal touristy things, because this was a family-oriented vacation - meaning a lot of seating around living rooms, accepting tea, rejecting salty prunes, and making sure Lizzy doesn't embarrass herself and us too much.  These are a few bits and pieces strewn together thematically in an attempt to make some sense of it all:

Home-Coming
This was Connie's first trip back home in over 15 years, and according to her she could hardly recognize the place.  She complained things looked smaller and more crowded than they had used to, but she was generally in awe when visiting the places of her childhood: the rickety-old building where she grew up, the elementary school and its swimming pool where she practiced for meets, the old and disused ancestral home in the rural Banyan Tree Village... We met old neighbors who recognized her on the street, old school mates who took us out for dinner, and lots and lots of family and their families.

We have a fairly unique family unit (each of us born in a wildly different place - Israel, China, and the USA), so it's nice when we get a chance to share our roots with one another.  This is my first trip to China after Connie has been with me to Israel several times.  My perspective is quite different, but it was nice to try and experience it through the lens of its local inhabitants.  Connie's family were gracious hosts and we were spoiled rotten by the end of the trip.

First Impressions of a Foreigner

This was a very localized trip so my impressions are only or mainly of the Xinhui city district in the prefecture-level city of Jiangmen, which is in the southern province of Guangdong.  When we got off the bus from Shenzhen bus terminal (after a cab ride from HK international airport), the main thing I noticed was Xinhui's poor air quality.  I'd characterize it as dusty with a hint of burning coal, paper money, and incense.  We were met by almost all of Connie's family and, in a convoy, we drove a short distance from the bus stop to one of her cousin's recently-purchased, 8th-floor duplex penthouse apartment in the city center.  It was under slight renovation but genrally ready-to-live-in with a modern finish.  It is actually close to being placed on the market as a rental unit.  It looked like any modern apartment would in any other country - minus one bathroom that still had a squat toilet.  Most of the apartments and houses we visited were livable if not posh - on par with Brooklyn standards, at least.

Xinhui has a decent amount of traffic.  Not the clogged nightmare that is Beijing or NYC, but not Jackson Hole either.  For a relatively small city district (population: 735,000) it still felt bustling.  Motorcycles zoomed back and forth like so many mosquitoes after rain.  These were truly a nuisance.  For lack of parking space, they are stacked side-by-side on already-teeming sidewalks and motorists are not at all sensitive to pedestrians or fellow drivers.  They roll their beasts of burden straight into your walking path, take a seat, kick down the starter, blowing some of that fine exhaust in your face, and zoom off into the road often cutting off other vehicles.  They drive through closed-off promenades, and the honking never stops as they whiz by cars, buses, auto-riksaws and only the occasional bicycle, which is now very much out of fashion with the Chinese middle class.

One final thought I'll share is that at least in the swathes of Guangdong that I drove through, there was a lot of urban, commercial and industrial development but it was mixed with all sorts of agricultural plots - sugarcane fields, palm trees, fish ponds, lotus root ponds, citrus groves, etc.  Side-by-side.  It made me think of this new trend in America for eating locally-grown foods.  At least in Guangdong, this does not require any active efforts from community-supported agriculture (CSA) activism and coops.  It's just the way things are.


Sights
Xinhui boasts a fair number of tourist attractions and we didn't even explore them all but here are the highlights:

• Guifeng Mountain - I went there twice.  Once with everybody and we drove half-way up to the Yutai Temple complex.  Lizzy was in a terrible mood, so I walked down hundreds of steps with Connie's aunt after some picture-snapping.  The second time it was new year's day and the place was overrun with visitors, hawkers, beggars, etc.  I brushed past all of these all the way up to the 440-meter peak together with Connie's first cousin, Siupang.
• Yamen Battle Memorial - this is a park and observatory that may have stood on the site of a small royal palace that may have served as a temporary home of the last emperor of the Song dynasty - maybe.  The Battle of Yamen was also possibly the largest naval battle in history in terms of casualties (in the 100's of thousands).
• The Birds' Paradise is a park and in its center is a big, half-submerged, ~400-year-old Banyan tree that is home to thousands of birds.  There is a morning and evening ritual of bird migration to and from this tree that is supposedly magnificent to watch.  I think we missed the evening one by ~10-15 minutes.  So we need to come back for that some day...
• Jade Lake Park - A small urban park with a nice lake, a pagoda, pedal boats, etc.
• Bridges of Guangdong Museum - it was free...

Further Afield

• XiangJiang Safari Park - This enormous zoo just outside of Guangzhou (capital of Guangdong ~45 minutes north of Xinhui) was packed with tigers and pandas in preparation for the city's hosting of the 2010 Asian Games.  There is a strange feeding policy in this zoo.  You can buy raw meat to throw at the tigers, bananas to toss over to the elephants, and leafy branches to hand out from a platform to giraffes.  We opted to feed a giraffe and it nearly yanked Lizzy into its habitat along with the branch.  The animal shows (we saw the elephants) are spectacular and there is a tiger cub club for the lil ones, complete with baby feline nursery and claw-on playground.  The pandas were amazing, too.  They're a lazy bunch, but those eyes are haunting.  Well worth the drive and hefty highway tolls.

Food

We love Cantonese cuisine.  Our feasting started the evening we arrived at a local seafood restaurant where we had a banquet meal consisting of a herbal chicken, a sublime clam & winter melon soup, local sauteed greens, mixed veggies with mushrooms and fungi, local crayfish, eel, a steamed fish, and all sorts of pork offal cold cuts.  When we first arrived at the restaurant thee was a plate of worms set on the table that was especially prepared for us and I was asked to partake while everyone looked at my reaction.  I don't mind the idea of eating worms, but these didn't taste that good.  No one else at the table seemed to like them either.  Not sure why they were prepared for us... 


My favorite meals were steam boat affairs.  We had 3 different kinds:

• Gum Long Beef Canteen: Beef in these parts was some sort of water buffalo by default.  It is just a little leaner and gamier than your average USDA meat.  This establishment only had tables outdoors, and the kitchen seemed to be outdoors as well.  A large soup pot is brought over with the common broth and large chunks of shoulder and tail meat on the bone.  We also ordered some tripe, brisket and meatballs along with green veggies.  The sauce was a simple soy, oil, ginger, garlic concoction.  The bones that came with the broth were amazing - covered in tender meat and cartilage.
• Chengdu Hot Pot: This place was at the bottom floor of the apartment building where we were staying.  If we weren't obliged to eat ll our meals with family I'd have come back here at least once more.  For 88 renminbi (~$15) you get a the pot of clear soup and a plate each of: sliced beef, lamb and fish as well as a whole chicken cut up and some veggies.  Here you make your own sauce and, as this was a Chengdu hotpot place, the sauce tray consisted of hot chillies as well as dried, ground-up capsicum berries - tingly, yummy dip!
• No-Rice Congee Hot Pot: Here you get a big bowl of congee to serve as your hot pot, except they filter out the rice grains from the gruel - hence No-Rice Congee.  This was a very different from what we're used to and has some pros and cons with respect to traditional hot pot.  The main appeal is that you get to enjoy a flavorful congee with each bite - the clams were especially good.  The big letdown is that congee doesn't go well with all the ingredients - especially the varied greens.  This place also served some really awesome side dishes -  spicy-salty fried fish bits were amazing.  Before we started eating a mouse fell dead from the ceiling straight into my plate.  We got a private room, 2 free dishes, and %15 off the bill :)

We actually ended up trying a whole bunch of other Chinese cooking while in Guangdong (Sichuan/Chengdu, Hunanese, etc).  One amazing foodie adventure was a stroll through a visiting Xinjian/Uighur street food fair.  The food ranged from oysters grilled in the halfshell to sauteed swallows.  We ate a little bit of eveything that looked good, including lamb shish kebabs, fish cakes, stinky tofu, and loads of oysters and the little birds.