After dinner one night my friend wanted to buy some stuff from the little convent store on ECNU's campus. He ended up getting nothing, I ended up getting a seltzer and these cookies, so it goes. I mean after all, they are totally from Denmark and Danes seem like the kind of people who would know their way around butter cookies. When I got back to my room I discovered that the cookies aren't Danish, they are Malaysian and Chinese, this fact though actually made me more excited to try the cookies. To be honest, they weren't bad; they are not the worlds greatest butter cookies by any stretch of the imagination but they were perfectly acceptable. If you have strong memories of grandma's Christmas butter cookies then you will actually be horrifically disappointed with these cookies. My biggest issue was the cookies had a really strong artificial butter scent that makes everything small like cheap butter cookies when the box is open. They also don't preserve well at all, I had some the next day and found them getting kind of stale, and I even kept them in the box. I really don't know what I was expecting, they cost less than 2USD so as long as they were edible I guess they would have been good. I don't believe that Westerners who know what butter cookies should taste like are the target market for ZEK Denmark Style Butter Cookies though; I believe that these cookies are primarily targeted to middle class Chinese who can afford to spend 11RMB on cookies and who want to look prestigious and Western. Being that they are in the campus convent store, I believe that at least some of the wealthier students can afford to buy them, at least when they are trying to show off.
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Yes, Qingdao makes a stout, but, unlike base Qingdao, I don't believe it is exported at all. While it is a bit more expensive than base Qingdao (a whole 3RMB more) I suffered the cost just to give ya'll a good review. It should be noted that I have not really drank other stouts so I can't really comment how Qingdao's compares to another stout. What I can say is that I didn't like it at first but as I drank more it gradually grew on me. If I had to describe the taste I would say it tastes like a really good mocha, kind of chocolatey and coffeey but not overwhelmingly so. It does have significantly more taste than regular Qingdao though. I also found it felt more alcoholic then normal Qingdao, though I read that this is just a thing with stouts; still it felt more alcoholic then the 3.6% alcohol that it said on the can. To be honest I am not sure why Qingdao and only Qingdao makes a beer that is not your typical Chinese beer. While all the beers in China are good, the Chinese are remarkably unadventurous with beer, even with the Chinese's infamy for adventurous food, so most beers taste kind of like Qingdao. Qingdao stout is a refreshing simply because it does not taste like regular Qingdao. If you are in China and ether like stout, are looking for a distinctly Chinese beer, or are just sick of Qingdao I can recommend Qingdao stout. Normally I would put the Chinese name for food items I review, but I am not sure what this thing is called in Chinese; it was only introduced to me as a Shanghai egg pancake. What ever its name it is a fresh crepe with a scrambled egg and some herbs on top, folded up with a salty crunchy thing and a brown sauce added, befor finally being folded up again and served. You can also get add ons, so I normally order my egg pancake with a grilled chicken stick and cucumber.
To be perfectly honest with you, I really don’t know what good baijiu is and in what ways it differs from bad baijiu (except I know that if you go blind it is bad baijiu) so this is going to be bit less of review and more of an overview of what I feel a foreign grocery store making a distinctively Chinese drink means. TESCO is a large British grocery store chain (that for some reason now goes by Victory Market around me even though most of the products still say TESCO) with a location in the Global Harbor Mall by campus. It is important to note that TESCO is a foreign grocery store, not an international grocery store, TESCO does not specialize in international products even though they themselves are an international company. Baijiu (白酒) is Chinese “white alcohol” distilled from sorghum. Even though beer is becoming more and more popular as the everyman’s beverage in China, baijiu is still widely drunk and is the official beverage of business dealings from the strictly legal, to the Chinese legal, to the totally illegal. The version I am trying is TESCO’s generic brand Baijiu, available for around 10RMB or 1.50USD. According to Wikipedia, it has a sauce fragrance which means it has an aftertaste that tastes remarkably like soy sauce. If I had to compare it to vodka, it is a bit more alcoholic on average, the TESCO brand one is about 56% alcohol, and is also usually much sharper than vodka. Typically it is drunk straight and warm, from small glasses. While it is not the usual method of drinking, I think baijiu would work quite well in a more savory cocktail, like a Bloody Marry; I have actually read on China Today (China’s largest English language newspaper) there is a thriving ex-patriot baijiu cocktail seen in China’s larger cities. In short, while baijiu is mostly drinkable and a useful thing to know how to drink if you want to do business in China I don't think I would make it my drink of choice in the United States. While I don’t believe that TESCO produces this stuff in-house it is interesting that they are willing to put their name to this product. Baijiu is not very popular outside of China and areas with large Chinese populations. It is unlikely that TESCO could convince the British or the Irish to pick up baijiu. I believe that this is a sign that TESCO wants to avoid becoming an international grocery store and just simply be another grocery store operating in China. With such rapid growth in the Chinese market in recent years, establishing a good reputation early may pay off big in the near future as consumers in China’s second and third tier cities get enough money to start demanding large western style supermarkets which, with their early entry into the Chinese market, might be TESCOs, or Victory Markets technically.
Yesterday I finally I got a Chinese SIM card from some guy on WeChat (Chinese Facebook). Since my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge is not unlocked, WeChat SIM guy also offered to sell me a new enough Coolpad 7722 smart phone. I spent 200RMB for the SIM and 400RMB for the phone, both low prices even for China. The big question is do I like the Coolpad 7722? Well, it is a more complicated question then it first seems. Does the Coolpad 7722 do everything I want it to do? Yes. Do I feel like the Coolpad 7722 worth 400RMB? Yes. Will it replace my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge? No. The Coolpad 7722 uses a modified version of Google's Android OS. While it looks and feels like the same Android OS that is on my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, the Coolpad 7722 does not have any Google apps at all. Instead it has its own "Cool" apps that do everything a built in Google app would do on an American Android phone. So instead of Google's Play Music there is CoolMusic and instead of the Google Play Store there is the CoolStore. I do like the double SIM card slot on the Coolpad 7722 and the ease of set up. I mean, it came with WeChat (the only app you will ever really need in China) preinstalled. Any criticism I levy I have of the Coolpad 7722 can simply refuted with the fact that it is amazing that a 400RMB smart phone is a thing that exists. So when I complain that the screen on the Coolpad 7722 is usable but unresponsive, that it says "CU NO SIM CARD" even though WeChat SIM guy says it is fine, or that the camera is not great it could simply be refuted with "it is a 400RMB smart phone, be happy it works." Overall, I am keeping my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge as my primary phone, but if you need a phone for cheap and you are in China you could certainly do worse then a Coolpad 7722. Suntory is a brand of Japanese beer made by Suntory Holdings Limited that is both extremely common and very cheap in Shanghai. According to Suntory Holdings Limited's Official Website "we boosted rapidly to capture the largest maeket share in Shanghai in 1999." Suntory is not sold nationally, at the time of writing it is only sold commercially in Jiangsu Province, Shanghai, and a few cities around Shanghai. As one would expect of cheap beer, Suntory has a clean taste with little hoppyness. Suntory is not a very sweat beer ether. The taste and even the color of Suntory could almost be discribed as bread-like, especially when drunk warm like how many of the Chinese drink everything. If you get it cold on tap in a bar the bready flavor is less strong. Cold Suntory reminds me of some of the nicer cheap American beers, like Pabst Blur Ribbon. Overall, if you are looming for a cheap beer in Shanghai that isn't Tsingtao I could recomend Suntory beer. On my way to Shanghai I got to try 1Above, a drink designed to make flying easier. The way 1Above supposedly goes about actually making flying easier is with electrlytes, various B vitamins, vitamin C, grapesead, and Pycnogenol. The Pycnogenol, the trademarked name for an extract of the bark of the pinus pinaster varity of pine tree, is the big selling point though as the makers or 1Above clame it helps prevent jetlag. 1Above comes in 8oz bottles, recola esk disolovble tablets, and a concentrate. For this review I tried the 8oz bottle and the tablets. I believe 1Above is ment to have an apple taste, but it is only a very faint apple taste. What I did like is that it is far less sweet then typical sports drinks like Gatorade or Vidamin watter. However 1Above still had that slighty salty taste most sports drinks have. It is important to note that I found 1Above to be more expensive than most sports drinks being sold in airports. If you want to get your moneys worth, buy the tablets on Amazon before your flight since, for me, 10 tablets cost the same as 1 bottle. I am not sure how much help the special ingredients were in making my flight go smother. I did feel like I was retaining more water though during the first flight. |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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