From and early 6:30AM starting time, my group of about 40 ECNU International students hit the high spead rail to Xiamen, a bit south of Shanghai by Taiwan. After one sixish hour train ride and one book (The Jewz of Kaifeng by Prof. Xu Xi ) we arrived. We really hit the ground running, visiting the campus of Xiamen University with its unique architecture that blends Chinese and Western. The university (along with a near by middle and elementry school) were all founded by a Mr. Cheng Jiagang, a Xiamen local who made a fortune doing something in Singapore, and boy did we hear alot about this guy. He did seem to have a bit of an ego, the middle school only has bathrooms on the first floor because he wants people to exercise more and he named everything after himself, the area does seem quite well off thanks to his help. We then visited his grave, a large piller covered in carvingd of stuff to help teach the young, even in death. It was kind of cool and gave us some great vieas of the sea (something I don't often see in Shanghai disipte the second character in Shanghai [海] meaning sea). We then returned to the hotel to drop our stuff off and find dinner. They took us to a mall type thing and told us to have fun finding food. My friends and I ended up finding a place that sold various forms of chicken, steak, and lobster. I would like to proudly announce that we found General Tsao's Chicken in China, for real. It was actually very different from the American verson, it had bones for instance. I then went back to my room and went to bed, since I was a coffee short of my usual and I was up for a while.
2 Comments
Dad
4/20/2017 08:24:58 am
The mixed architecture is indeed interesting but they have a thing to learn about General Tsao's. It was originally a hot and sour hunan dish, probably with bones and no broccoli. The Classic American version is very sweet and a little sour and all about the broccoli. Your current version seems a little of both
Reply
Jared Paul Miller
4/20/2017 08:44:41 am
It might be one of those weird only in China situations where a Chinese dish adapted to fit American tastes was reintroduced to China and readapted to fit Chinese tastes, but this chain of adaptations resulted in a different dish than the original.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
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
November 2021
Categories
All
|