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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. In an attempt to avoid drinking the Nescafe sitting in my cupboard my friends and I went to the international grocery store, Carrefour, located in the Cloud 9 Mall one subway stop away from campus. I ended up buying way more than just coffee
While the Shanghai Peace Hotel (上海和平饭店) looks down right quaint now compared to the other buildings on the Bund, one of Shanghai's main drags, the Shanghai Peace Hotel still has an interesting history all its own. The Peace Hotel was built in what was then the Shanghai International Settlement, now the Bund, during the 1920s by Sir Victor Sassoon, a British supported Baghdadi Jew, as Sassoon House. With bases in Bombay, Hong Kong, and Shanghai the Sassoons were dubbed the "Rothschilds of the East" making a large part of their fortune in the then legal Opium Trade following the Opium Wars. While it may seem funny now looking a the modern skyline of Shanghai, the Peace Hotel was the largest building in the city. The Peace Hotel became a symbol of Shanghai, even though this symbolic status has been chipped away in recent years as the Peace Hotel was outclassed by larger and large buildings. Today, the Peace Hotel continues to operate as a hotel serving guests forma around China and the World, although now it is operating under the name the Fairmont Peace Hotel. I have no hard evidence for this other than my anicdotial evidence but I have found that duck is far more common in China than it is in the US. In the States, unless you hunt your own duck, duck is still somewhat hard and somewhat expensive to get; it is not imposible, but it isn't easy. In China on the other hand, duck is common and cheep. Even the ECNU canteen sells duck, and they sell if for a very reasonable price of anout 15RMB, equal to about 2USD. This is true once you get off campus too, one of my Chinese friends, Kathleen, got a duck dish for the same 15RMB somewhere in the city of Shanghai. I for one like duck so I am perfictly happy with this.
As I have mentioned before, ECNU has a lot of cats. Sometimes kittens lose their mother and the best option is adoption. Unforntually I couldn't adopt a kitten (I couldn't bring it back to the US and the Chinese government might deport me if I got bit), but talking to one of the Chinese students the three kittens were adopted quickly. |
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
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