house-warming and "live" fireworks

Boon Peng and Joyce invited us to their house-warming. the food prepared by Joyce, their house guest and Ayi was delicious, especially the chicken curry, thai green curry and fried bee hoon. We had chinese tea and took turns carrying the cute and adorable baby Jovine. After the shiok makan, we gathered for "black-jack" with just friendly wagers. but it was a fun game with lots of screams and laughter!
the highlight of the evening was a fireworks display right from the garden downstairs. Everyone gathered in front of the living room window to get a better view. We hastened the guys down below to reload more ammo for more pyrotechnic displays.
the more powerful shots exploded right at our eye-level at the 27th floor. I managed to capture a video clip with my Canon Ixus.

Temple Fair

one of the Spring Festival activities here in Beijing is to visit the temple fairs. this year there were more than ten temple fairs at various parks, gardens and market places in Beijing. Robina and I visited the fair at Ditan Park with Patrick and Winnie.

even before reaching the temple fair, we had an unpleasant experience with the ubiquitous Beijing a**hole driver. since everyone expected huge crowds at such fairs, the parking was understandably atrocious. all the kerbside park spaces were full and many cars were waiting by the side for some car to pull out. the usual practise was for the waiting car to wait ahead of the outgoing car and reverse inwards.
however, this dipsh*t ducked right in and stole our rightful lot. the pseudo-parking attendant did not help to evict the lot-stealer since they collect the same amount of parking fees (an inflated RMB10!) no matter who parked at the lot!
as with any public event in Beijing/China, expect hordes of humanity! after walking a short stretch, we realised that everyone was selling the same stuff, from food, toys or game stalls. like this stall selling haw candy.
we took a closer look at this interesting stall selling a Northeast province version of mua-chi (or mochi in Taiwan).
the guy was pounding on glutinous rice with a huge wooden hammer. I did basically the same thing in the aboriginal region of Taiwan some years ago.
the gooey sticky mixture was rolled in crushed peanut. Patrick bought some to try. will ask him how it tasted.
another popular snack food was "mahua" reportedly from Tianjin (Tientsin). it looked like deepfried pretzels and must be popular since every other stall was selling it!
spotted Big Bird, Ernie, Elmo and Oscar on a stick. asked about the price and discovered that it was way too expensive at RMB25! (about S$5).
for some reason, many people were happy buying and wearing Halloween paraphernalia like pointy horns, witches hat and holding scarecrows puppets. many stalls were selling the stuff. either there was a cheap clearance sell on Halloween barang-barang, or this is a Beijing custom that we don know about (celebrate Halloween during Spring Festival???).
Patrick and a trigger-happy Winnie.
Robina and me, swearing that this will be our one and only temple fair in a long, long time...

Sally's new look

Robina gave Sally a thorough combing after I bathed Sally.
plus tied a ribbon for Sally to keep her shaggy fringe from covering her eyes. now Sally is ready for her new year visiting!

Beijing barrage

since fireworks are allowed within Beijing city for the first time in 12 years, I decided to go with the flow. that's my ammo dump. one box full of fireworks all for RMB200 (about S$40). reminded me of my NS when we have to "draw" ammo and explosives for our live-firings.
I like the sound of this "blossom after thundering" firework. it's the size of a butter cookie tin.
other types in the collection. this one is thicker than a thunderflash. rest assured that all these are pipsqueaks compared to the arsenal of other Beijing residents. larger industrial size fireworks are the size of a washing machine and can produce NDP scale performances...
after dinner, we went down to Sherry's apartment garden to let off some fireworks. ostensibly it was for Ethan's benefit but I think we adults were more interested like Yee Wee here!
our fireworks were the itsy bitsy kind compared to those going off all around the city.
around midnight Beijing let it rip after being deprived for 12 years! the background noise was so loud that it was like a war zone. you can hear the rippling of fire crackers and the boom of larger fireworks. all the din was echoing around the buildings! and it went on for hours into the early morning!
as Chiam was driving us back, we saw crowds gathering on the empty streets to let off firecrackers and fireworks. it was mayhem! the roads and pavement were covered with shredded red papers from the firecrackers! well, Beijing really went all the way! and I thought Taipei was fireworks crazy!

CNY dinner

Come to think of it, this would be our first reunion and Spring Festival in Beijing. Sherry and Yee Wee invited us to their place for reunion dinner. Ci Tong and hubby Chiam joined us as well!
Sherry prepared a huge spread of steam boat dinner. plenty of meat, toufu and vegetables (quite healthy!).
Robina and I contributed a "pen cai" dish which we "tabao" (took away) from a Cantonese restaurant. this popular dish from Hong Kong, evolved from frugal habits of peasant families. They would dumped leftover festive dishes from the reunion dinner and steamed it over rice in a wooden basin to eat over the rest of CNY (those days don have frig!).
Ci Tong brought Taiwanese sausages which was estatically delicious! it's next to impossible to find good Taiwanese sausages in China. I had to bring back two packets from our last trip to Taipei.
dinner was great and we ate too fast! we went downstairs to let off some fireworks (see next post). it was a mild affair compared to the rest of Beijing...
Ethan got his ang pows! we played cards and had "tang yuan" dumplings before we welcomed the CNY at the stroke of midnight and skyline was lit up by fireworks!

food at foot massage

Robina and I went for foot massage at Taipan this evening. you can enjoy free flow of food and drinks while u enjoy the foot massage. Robina and her beef noodles.
I had egg noodles. we like Taipan bcos their deco was quite pleasant and the standards of "massagers" were generally quite good!
Robina had this ham sandwich. At first we found it quite strange that you can makan while your feet is being soaked in a hot tub and later being massaged. but later we got used to the idea, when in Rome...
Taipan's signature pork chop sandwich, a Macau specialty.
Their "teh" is also quite good! nice and strong like those from HK cafes.
They also have fruit juices like pear juice.

my croatian burger lunch

decided to "tapao" my lunch from a burger kiosk in Sanlitun. the boss is a Croat. now he has trained two Chinese girls to be the chef and helper.
the pork, chicken or beef burgers (crusty french loaves) are served with oven-grilled pakrika chillis that give the burger/sandwich a nice spicy kick.

my order sizzling on the grill! I like his spicy Croatian sausage sandwich. his deep-fried potato wedges (a bit like British chips) are delicious especially when piping hot from the fryer.
my lunch before it went down the hatch...

ammo dump

this year, Beijing residents would be allowed to let off fire-crackers and fireworks within the city limits (but within designated timing) during the CNY season. the municipal authorities also designated several hundred official stalls that can sell "officially" sanctioned (and over-priced) fireworks.these are not hampers, but nicely packaged "ammo". roman candles, ammo belts of fire-crackers and bunches of "rockets". not like the miserly individual fire-crackers that I let off during my childhood days. the bigger boxes the size of biscuit tins are packed with sequences of fireworks that are comparable to NDP style displays, just smaller in scale. It seems that in China they believe in over-kill! come CNY eve, Beijing's night sky would be like Bagdhad during Gulf War I. in Taipei, many entrepreneurs in their pick-up trucks will sell you all the ammo you need anytime and anywhere you are.

after checking out the prices at the "gahmen" stall, I concluded that it was vastly over-priced. RMB45 for just one box! I will just pass RMB200 (about S$40) to my driver to fill up the boot of the car with "ammo" from the countryside...

persian food

tried out this new Persian restaurant, "Rumi" for lunch with Robina. I believe that this is the first joint serving persian food in Beijing. the food was excellent! especially the soft fluffy steamed bismatic rice, spiced with saffron. the menu was extensive with chicken, beef and mutton. mostly grilled in the form of kebabs. we tried both lamb and chicken, which was nicely done. moist and tender, not dry like many roasted meat dish.verdict: will definitely return to makan.

Chinese sup kambing

went down to try this mutton soup place. this place was popular with both the blue-collar and office worker crowd. so much so that the last time I came during lunch time, I couldn't even find an empty seat!
the place is nothing to shout about, a typical grimy and small Beijing makan joint. what was interesting was the mutton soup simmering in a large copper cauldron about a metre across. the food was quite cheap (by S'pore standards). a bowl of mutton soup costs RMB8 (about S$1.6), the locals usually order mutton soup with "tang hoon" (transparent bean flour vermicelli). to go along with the soup, locals will order "shao bing" (bread-like oven-toasted buns) at RMB1 (about S$0.20) each. for me, I didn't fancy the shao bing.
I tried mutton soup with normal wheat noodles. reminded me of a less spicy version of our Indian muslim sup kambing, but the cumin and coriander was still discernable. actually, quite different from our chinese mutton soup with chinese herbs. northern Chinese food used more mutton than pork. probably has something to do with the nomadic culture and different lifestock common in the north.

vegetarian

visited, Pure Lotus, a vegetarian restaurant at Lido Hotel with TH for dinner.
the decor was pleasant, not obiang like many places. the food was excellent overall. they had various fruits and herbals juices concocted. there were simple and nutritous vegetable dishes like this spinach, dioscorea yam and wolfberries (above)
this one is ginko nuts, straw mushrooms and drumstick mushrooms.
I liked this mock fish steak. texture and taste exactly like the mackerel or batang steaks that we have back home.
most amazing (and quite delicious too!) was this hotplate spicy fish. they managed to replicate the texture of fish skin just by using seaweek as well as the flaky texture of fish meat. all these just by using soya bean and gluten. prices were more upmarket from the presentations and fancy tableware, but this meant that the place was not rowdy on a friday evening...