Congratulations to Emmanuel!

And Lena of course.

(photo by aktivioslo on Flickr)

We spend our full morning (and part of the afternoon) watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Sadly the official site was blocked, so we had to content ourselves with the Dutch version where two commentators made juvenile fun of anyone who had a size larger than what was normally shown on tv, or people's religion, or anything else that was inappropriate.

Also, we extend our warm congratulations to Tuncay, with a rather unexpected second place, a song that was neither here nor there, neither fish nor meat, snarf nor barf, in my humble opinion. I had high hopes for Belgium (almost the Netherlands), Azerbaijan and Armenia (especially Belgium actually), but the masses have spoken and who am I to disagree.

I hope we are sane enough in a year's time to fork over about 100 euros for a ticket to the live show.

Update: I completely forgot to mention the awesome entries of Russia and the cradle of modern Europop Moldova. Check them out if you feel bored!

Best Malaysian food in Beijing*

We seem to be following some pattern of not cooking for weeks in a row, and then cooking almost every day. The home-cooking days often coincide with one of us being sick, but not this time!**



A is happy to report that she successfully prepared cuttle fish (or whatever they are called), the little squid-like things she is always irresistibly drawn to when visiting the supermarket. (Last time she tried was a disaster). One more thing to cross of our list of things-to-do-before-we-leave.

On a related note, our material possessions also seem about ready to leave. F's bicycle tire exploded last week (and the Giant store says they don't have a replacement tire) and our espresso machine is too tired to produce sufficiently high pressure to make espresso (and since we don't know any repair person around here, we now make espresso using this).

Are you guys all going to watch the Eurovision Song Contest today? We are very excited about it, and we are wondering whether or not to pull an all-nighter to watch it. Unfortunately, the official website is blocked, so it is not clear whether we would even be able to watch, even if we were awake.

Since the Dutch entry was fortunately already eliminated, we hope all of you will vote for our soon-to-be host country. We are so excited about Lena! She rules!!!

* The only Malaysian restaurant in Beijing that we know of, closed a while back.

** Upon further thought, I believe our cooking spells coincide with our having a non-spoiled wine supply (which is not so common). There is nothing like a nice glass of wine to make you feel like cooking!

Boiling an egg for dummies

As you all know, our cooking skills are not what they used to be. What with going out for dinner 8 days a week, we hardly know how to boil an egg anymore.

Fortunately, help has arrived in the form of a gift from a recent visitor:






First beep = water is at 45 centigrade.
Second beep = water is boiling.
First song ("In Holland staat een huis") = soft-boiled eggs
Second song ("Twee emmertjes water halen") = medium-boiled eggs
Third song ("Wilhelmus") = hard-boiled eggs

Quiche

Zhajiangmian

Today we went to our favorite Zhajiangmian restaurant again. And because the servers are usually extremely fast in dumping all the stuff in the noodles, which looks really awesome, I decided to take a video.



Guess what? This guy was extremely slow. Or maybe filming him made him nervous or something.



We also fed our inner carnivore.



When we got home tonight we were puzzled when seeing this:



No idea why that car is standing there facing the wrong way, how it got there or why these two guys are fearlessly standing besides it while smoking a cigarette.

Golden Tripod Attic

Anke says: "Hmmm, lekker!"

A Garden Is Nice

A garden on your balcony is nice...



especially if you have some Afrikaantjes...



that you can even call Stinkertjes...



but everyone will admit that having a shed on your roof is awesome!



Anyways, visit Emmanuel's blog!

Also, Ellen has posted many new posts about her visit to China.

Weekend

This weekend we went to the Lama Temple and 798 (yes, again).

Huaiyangchun

Another fabulous dinner with Amanda, this time in a famous restaurant: Huaiyangchun. There were eight "Chun" restaurants that were very famous, before Mao's liberation. This is one of the only two that still exist.

We had this wonderful pork liver...



some eel...



the famous lion's head meatballs (meatballs with crab roe)...



healthy fava beans...



squirrel fish, which is usually translated as mandarin fish...



and an extra large soup dumpling.



On a completely unrelated note: this week is our "connect to our European roots"-week: the Eurovision Song Contest is held this week! We would like to congratulate Emmanuel in advance with his home country's winning entry ---I can't see her not winning--- Lena. In the following link she is aptly described as "A Swedish Speech Therapist Imitating Ali G.".

Some random stuffz

I just checked and found I have not made a post for close to three weeks, and, instead, let F do all the work. The reason for this was about 99% laziness and 1% this other reason.

Remember the Oops moment when my email got forwarded to our giggling second-in-command? I bet you thought we were overreacting when we expected repercussions.

Repercussions include, but are not limited to:

• a 10% drop in our salary,


• a very small budget for our upcoming conference travel,


• extremely petty paperwork requirements for said conference,


• secretaries lying to us to protect our second-in-command.

Of course, we were given other reasons for these events. However, the timing seems too much of a coincidence.

For a long time, I was pissed off, upset and frustrated. Yesterday, I finally decided to talk to the fearless leader about this.

This did not go too well initially, and I was accused of demanding a higher salary than I was entitled to, of trying to rally up the other postdocs, and of thinking myself to be in a managerial role, whereas I am just a lowly postdoc who is about to leave. Somehow, I was able to get past these accusations, and perhaps I have planted a little seed of doubt in the fearless leader's mind, that perhaps the giggling second-in-command may be abusing her powers somewhat.

The fearless leader obviously dislikes leading in this kind of "getting your hands dirty" way, and the giggling second-in-command is entrenched in her chair for reasons I do not know, but that are beyond even the fearless leader's control. So nothing is going to change.

But I got it off my chest! And I now feel (somewhat) free to talk about this without feeling disloyal. So there you go.

For more fun things that happened in the past few weeks, have a look at Ellen's blog.

Jiankou Great Wall

When Ellen was here we rented a car and visited the Great Wall near Jiankou.



We not only took a lot of pictures, but also a lot of pictures of us were taken (especially of Ellen, I wonder whether her red hair had anything to do with this).





And then it was time for an early dinner.



This is specialty number 1: fresh trout (we had two).



Specialty number 2: wild herbs.



Trout again, in a different stage of its being. (After which it was no more.)



Some barbecued meatz.



Unspecified Chinese food.



Sweet potato slices.



A little breadz.



And the other trout grilled to perfection.

By the way, Ellen already made 5 posts about her visit: her first lunch in Beijing, zhajiangmian, duck, street food and a post on dumplings! Check them out to see some embarrassing pictures of A and F!

Ellen Cooks

Ok, actually Ellen cooking is not a very uncommon thing. Ellen and F took a Chinese cooking class with HutongCuisine! We got up early and took a cab towards the center of Beijing.



There we met up with Chunyi Zhou, the teacher, and 4 other participants of the cooking class and went shopping in the market. Chunyi explained how to distinguish between good and bad Sichuan peppers (you really only want the pods, not the seeds, and the pods should be red), what lettuce root was, that one uses pork skin to make xiaolongbao, what kind of sauce one uses for zhajiangmian, and other such trivia which made us feel that we might be able to actually make our own Chinese food.

Next we got a crash course in seasonings: what to buy and when to use what. To summarize: light soy sauce for flavor, dark soy sauce for color. Dark soy sauce only when the other foodz have strong flavors, like meat. With vegetables, fish and chicken only use light soy sauce. With stronger flavored foodz use both. I already forgot when to use vinegar, but it should be aged Shanxi vinegar, or Zhenjiang vinegar. Use yellow wine to get rid of bad flavors in meatz. Finally for cooking use peanut oil, corn oil, canola oil or sunflower oil and finish each dish with a dash of sesame oil (it seems).

We were then deemed ready to start chopping, and were then allowed inside the kitchen.



We got a demonstration of how to make dry stir fried green beans, and next could try our own hand at making them:



Our class was the "vegetarian menu", so the ground pork in every dish was optional.

Next up was tofu, of course:





Ellen made this very nice and moist jia chang doufu:



whereas F just caught abuse from the teacher for his five spices doufu when he poured on a little too much sesame oil ("it's ruined anyway, too much of everything!"):



Our teacher also demonstrated hot and sour soup and stirfry celery and lily bulb, and then it was time to call it a day. I guess we are now ready to dazzle the world with our Chinese cuisine knowledge.

Finally a picture of a beautifully sculptured arch in the courtyard where the cooking class was held.