Boiled Lamb

A bus trip of a few hours brought us to Langmusi, an interesting little village with a mix of Hui, nomadic people, Tibetan people and also some Han Chinese. Many of the little restaurants were owned by Hui, who are muslim. The main specialty: boiled lamb, pictured above. We had it twice, it is really good.



Here is A in our favorite Hui restaurant.



And this is a view of the village from the mountain.

Brussel Sprouts

And potatoes. Sadly we are out of our Belgian mayonnaise (have been for a while), so I had to settle for this muslim-y variant:

To compensate there was pork:



(I imagine that there were actually people in the US who wrapped their Thanksgiving turkeys in bacon, in light of the news that their Butterball was actually a Burkaball.)

Not Boring, but Slightly Obscene

Today we are trying to hide the boringness of this blog by posting obscene lemon chicken pictures. We did not even want to eat lemon chicken, but our muslim shop did not have cilantro. I felt like calling Wilders, but wasn't sure what good that would do me.





Tomorrow we will have offal, inshallah.

One for the new Dutch Government

And especially for the party/guy who is only supporting the new government, and confuses radicalism/fundamentalism with "islam".

Also Not Good Looking

But homemade and very tasty. Sunday offal day finally arrived again, albeit a few days early, with this chicken liver salad. The chicken livers were especially beautiful, thanks to my favorite food store in Saarbrucken: die Islamische Metzgerei.

Big Kitchen

As soon as we arrived in Saarbrücken (on Monday) and were shown our temporary apartment with a large kitchen, we quickly went out to do some grocery shopping in a hypermarché since we had to hand in the car at 9 in the morning. After that we were tired and went out for dinner, the pictures of which are so bad that I won't post them.

We thus now have our long list of things to do, things to buy, things to find etc. We are progressing faster than ever though: one of A's coworkers is moving to Australia, so we are able to buy some of his furniture, amongst which some of his kitchen furniture --- it turns out that in Germany most apartments are not equipped with a kitchen, so this is hopefully a good investment (or we find an apartment with a kitchen, in which case we are quite happy also).

Other stuff that we could cross off our list: sim cards (our new numbers are 0177-4357627 (A) and 0163-7101801 (F) --- the sim cards should be arriving tomorrow), a "Spannungswandler" (transformer) for Miss Silvia, and bikes! (Still to go: finding an apartment, a car, a job (F), registering, finding a golf club (F), a tennis club (F), ground-breaking research topic (A) etc., etc.)

Having a bike meant that we could go to the "Islamische Metzgerei". So today: olives, a nice chicken, feta and even a beautiful Turkish fig!









We may slowly be getting used to things here.

Muslim restaurant in BLCU

We managed to get out of yet-another-dinner with the distinguished guest yesterday (although today we're on again). So it was just the two of us at the muslim restaurant at the Beijing Language and Culture University.

These are the people in my neighborhood...

Sightseeing in the Muslim district today. Finally a food related picture:

Muslim restaurant

We had dinner at the Xinjiang restaurant on the campus of the Beijing Language and Culture University. We love it! Suprisingly, so does our Israeli colleague, although he seems to love muslim food more than muslim people.