Chinese Train Photography

As a follow-up to my post the other day about finding timetables for Chinese trains written in English, here's a bit of great Chinese train photography to drool over. 22-year-old Beijing native Wang Wei has traveled over 200,000 (!) kilometers on Chinese trains in the past seven years to capture the pictures highlighted in the article. Here's one sample to whet your whistle and get you motivated to click on that link:

Danxia Landform, Gobi Desert, South Xinjiang Province

One of the great joys of traveling by train in China is the scenery. Especially when you get away from the East Coast, which sometimes feels like one big city extending from Hong Kong all the way up to Beijing. During the train ride from Kunming to Guizhou--one of my favorite rides in all of China--I remember a great moment when we came out of a long tunnel into a gorgeous green valley with terraced mountains flanking us on all sides. As the scenery exploded into view, there was an audible gasp throughout our train car. It was literally breathtaking.

One of the great things about Mr. Wang's photography is that he treks out to the middle of nowhere and waits for the perfect shot. Many of these railways are overlooked by Western travelers (including me) because they are way off the beaten path. His photos remind me why these places are worth visiting (or just passing through).

I'd encourage you to not only look at the CNNGo story, but also Wang Wei's personal blog. Lots more great photos there. His will be a great book when it comes out.

Biang Biang Mian

In keeping with the noodle theme I've apparently been focusing on in my street food reviews lately, here's a dish notorious not so much for its taste but for its name. Specifically, the way the name is written. Biang Biang Mian is a traditional street food in Xi'an, and it uses one of the most ridiculously complex characters in the entire Chinese language. So complex that they haven't created a unicode version of it for computers--I have to use a picture.

Be glad you don't have to sign your checks with that.

Behold the character "biang!" It has 58 separate strokes, and requires most people to use mnemonic devices to remember how to write it (if they ever bother to write it at all). This is almost certainly the most complex character you will see in modern China. Several more complex characters exist, but they are archaic and virtually never seen. Biang, on the other hand, graces the signs on Xi'an store fronts selling Biang Biang Mian.

Nobody is really sure what the origin of this word is, but there are lots of fun folk etymologies floating around out there.

All right, enough about the name, the real question is how does it taste? For a food with such a ridiculously complicated name, it's actually very simple ingredient-wise.

The noodles are long and very wide (some people liken them to belts). They are served swimming in a chili-red oily soup with some mutton and chives. Like many spicy foods in China, the chili here is considered to keep you warm in the winter and cool in the summer (due to the sweat). On a scale of 1 - 10, I would say the spice is no greater than a 6 or so, so if you don't get along with spicy foods, this might work for you.

The verdict? Simple, tasty, and filling. Great for lunch or dinner on a cold winter's day in Xi'an.

Kaifeng Pulled Noodles

One well-known hometown dish that has escaped the confines of its native city is the Lanzhou Beef Noodles (兰州牛肉拉面) (Lanzhou Niu Rou La Mian). "La Mian" means "pulled wheat noodles"; the operative word there is "la." The method used to create these pulled noodles is both unique and lots of fun to watch. Starting with a block of dough, the noodleer (pardon me for the invented word) grabs the ends and swings it up and down to stretch out the dough to arms' length. He then brings the ends together, halving the length, and again grabs the ends and bounces. As the dough stretches out longer and longer, he keeps folding and bouncing until the original block of dough is one incredibly long thread of dough. The noodleer cuts off the folded ends, leaving himself with a handful of long, round noodles. Here's a neat New York Times video demonstrating the process.

The best noodleers make this whole process look remarkably easy, tempting one to try it at home, though I have been told it actually takes years of practice to get it just right. The noodles are boiled and then served in spicy, oily soup with chili and beef. Though Lanzhou is way out west in Gansu Province, you can find this special dish in small shops in virtually all Chinese cities. Almost any Chinese person you talk to will be familiar with these spicy noodles.They are truly one of the most famous dishes in China. Which is why it came as quite a surprise to me when I learned that Kaifeng, an ancient city in Henan Province, offered their own take on pulled noodles: Kaifeng La Mian. The noodles are pulled out in just the same way in Kaifeng as they are in Lanzhou. The difference lies in the way it is served.

Where the Lanzhou noodles are known for their spicy chili flavor, Kaifeng La Mian are delightfully sour. They come with a generous pile of cubed winter melon on top, and a bit of mutton for flavor. The noodles are served in soup, but they aren't swimming in it like their Lanzhou brethren. The sour chunks of melon--kind of a rarity in Chinese street food--are really a welcome experience for the taste buds. Kaifeng is renowned for incorporating a wider variety of flavors into their street food than many other Chinese city. I enjoyed my noodles immensely and came away wondering how it was that the Lanzhou La Mian had spread so thoroughly across China, but the Kaifeng La Mian--equally delicious and very different--had barely made it past the city borders. In a way it's kind of a shame (to be honest, I liked the Kaifeng noodles better), but on the other hand, it can serve as a nice reward to the people that make their way off the beaten path and into Kaifeng. It's a small but lovely city that is well worth a visit. Especially for street food lovers.

Kaifeng La Mian shouldn't cost more than 5 or 10 RMB and are easiest to find in the fantastic night market in Kaifeng. Just look for the guys swinging noodles around like jump ropes.

Street Food Diplomacy in Pittsburgh

I recently added a new item to my admittedly very short list of things to do or see the next time I'm in Pittsburgh (most of the rest of the list can be found here. That addition? Visit the Conflict Kitchen. 

Photo courtesy of www.conflictkitchen.org

The idea behind the restaurant is simply amazing and amazingly simple: serve food from countries that the United States is in conflict with to help build bridges of understanding. Every six months, the owners select a new country that is on less-than-friendly terms with the United States and develops a menu from that country. Past national cuisines include Iranian, Venezuelan, Cuban (pictured above), and Afghan. North Korean cuisine is in the development stages. 

I think this is a brilliant idea, but my favorite part is that most of the menu is based on traditional street food. Regular readers of my blog know that I believe street food to be a great way of sharing one's culture and learning about another one. Learning what locals put into their stomachs can be a gateway to learning what they put in their hearts and minds. There is no food more local than street food. 

In addition to the menu options, Conflict Kitchen also arranges speakers, Skype conversations with locals in the countries they are focused on, and performances.

I'm a believer in citizen diplomacy--the idea that a normal citizen is the best ambassador that a country can offer--and its corollary, street food diplomacy. Dialogue is the key to lasting international peace, and I'm glad to have learned about the steps the Conflict Kitchen is taking to promote that sort of dialogue about difficult issues. 

For further reading, you might look at this recent article from the Los Angeles Times. If any readers of this blog have been to Conflict Kitchen, please feel free to comment below--I'd love to hear your impressions! In the meantime, I'll look forward to trying it myself soon.

How to Research Chinese Train Timetables in English

By my count, there are three main ways people get around China: airplane, bus, and train. You could of course rent a car, hitchhike, walk, or bike, but I suspect most people stick to those three primary options. Of these choices, my favorite by far is the train. Here are my arguments to support this opinion:

• Trains usually offer five different types of tickets (standing room only, hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper). This variety is nice. Planes might have first class and economy, but no beds. Buses come in two varieties--seats and beds--but you're basically stuck with whichever is available on the route you want to take.
• Trains are far cheaper than airplanes (most of the time anyway--ask around because sometimes they have insane sales on inter-city plane trips). Trains also tend to be cheaper than buses, assuming you get the hard seat tickets.
• Trains have bathrooms on board. Buses stop every couple hours, but in between those stops you are on your own.
• You can get up and stretch your legs on a train. If your trip is more than a couple of hours, this is a nice luxury.

For these reasons (and more), train is my preferred method of travel in China. This is not to say there aren't times where it makes sense to take a bus or a plane, usually due to constraints of time or the absence of a train station in your desired destination. 

So now that I've convinced you that you should be travelling by train, you might be asking yourself how one knows which train to take. Back in January I did a lot of searching around for English timetables with limited success, until I discovered China Travel Guide's wiki-powered train searching function. Friend, this was a lifesaver. If you enter your desired travel route into the search boxes, it will come up with the trains servicing that route, including departure times, arrival times, and cost of tickets. Let's say, for example, that you want to go from Hangzhou to Shanghai. Your search results will give you 131 different potential trains to take.

Notice a couple of things here. First, it shows you the price of hard seats and soft seats, top, middle, and bottom bunks on hard sleepers (the top bunks are always cheapest because they are considered less desirable), and top and bottom soft sleepers. This is very useful for trip planning purposes. Second, note that the train numbers and station names are active links. A click on the train number will tell you where else that train stops along the way. Click on the station name to see all of the trains that stop at that station (661 apparently come through Shanghai South every single day!).

One other nice feature of the site is this handy railway map of China. It's not 100% complete, but it does show most of the big cities and how they are connected by the major rail lines.

Map courtesy of www.chinatravelguide.com

You can see why this website very quickly became one of my most utilized resources in China. Recall that I was travelling basically every other day to more than 50 cities, so a website that let me research train travel with this amount of detail was invaluable. I would routinely decide my plan for three or four cities in advance, and it was a huge help to be able to decide which trains I wanted before I arrived at the station to buy them.

Some of you may be asking about how trustworthy this site is. In my experience, the accuracy is pretty close to dead-on. Here and there a train would be 5 or 10 RMB more than I expected, so be prepared for that. Only twice did I ever have noticeably faulty information from the site. First, the prices to and from Haikou were a good deal more expensive than this site said they would be. I think this is probably because the prices are calculated with an equation that uses the distance traveled and the type of train (fast, slow, old, etc.). The trip to Haikou includes a short ferry ride across the South China Sea, and my unverified suspicion is that they charge a bit extra because of the ferry portion of the trip and that wasn't accounted for by the normal equation. The other time this website failed me was when I was trying to go from Erlian to Datong. The search function shows a single train, K2. What it doesn't show (and what I didn't find out until I was already freezing cold in Inner Mongolia) is that the K2 train is an international train from Ulaanbaatar that only runs once a week or so, and I didn't happen to be there that day. Those were the only two times the site didn't give me accurate information, which is a fairly good track record.

In brief, I wholeheartedly, 100% encourage you to use the China Travel Guide to plan your train travel in China. It is an excellent resource.

Old Friend Noodles

You have to love a food with a good back-story. Regardless of the story's historical veracity, it adds a fun context for a dish. The signature street food in Nanning, Guangxi—Old Friend Noodles (老友粉) (lao you fen)—happens to be a food with a fun little back-story to it. The story, as told to me by my friend Tiantian, goes something like this:

A long time ago, a man named Zhou owned a tea shop. Every day for many years an old man came to drink tea and soon became friends with Zhou. One day, the old man didn't come to the tea shop. Zhou went to the man's house and found him deathly ill. Wanting to do something for his ailing friend, Zhou went back to his tea house and whipped up a dish of rice noodles, bamboo shoots, garlic, fermented beans, chili, beef, and peppers. He ran back to the old man's house and fed him the noodle dish. Miraculously, the noodles cured the man of his illness and he lived or many more years. Zhou's dish became legendary in Nanning for its healing properties and is now a staple throughout the city.

I don't know if that story has any basis in reality or not, but I don't think that matters. It's a nice origin tale for a yummy dish. These days, the dish looks like this:

The rice noodles are long and slippery, like fettuccine. The noodles are soft when the dish is served, and they slither right down your throat with ease. As you can see here, they do tend to clump together, so you'll have to do some good old fashioned Chinese noodle slurping.

The soup base is oily and moderately spicy. To my mind, the bamboo is the most distinctive feature of this dish. The bamboo slices are a bit sour and add a firmer texture to the dish.

It's worth noting that locals do believe that the old friend noodles have some salubrious properties, possibly attributable to the spicy chili opening up your pores (although there are much spicier dishes available nearby if you're trying that theory out).

This dish shouldn't cost you more than about 10 yuan. It's available all over the city, but the best is in the fantastic night market on Zhongshan Lu. The bottom line? If you are looking for a warm, hearty meal with a neat history, this will fill the bill (and you).

FAQs Part II

With my trip complete, my original FAQ list is a little bit out of date. The questions I receive most often have changed, so I figured a new FAQ page would be in order.  And here it is:

Question 1: How was your trip?
Answer 1: Good, thanks! Also exhausting.  But mostly good.

Question 2: How far did you travel / how much did you spend / how many cities did you visit/ etc.?
Answer 2: I would encourage you to check out this post I did that runs through some of the basic numbers of the trip.

Question 3: Did you ever get sick?
Answer 3: Nope! I'm proud to say that I didn't once get sick, despite eating almost nothing but street food for three straight months.

Question 4: Did you eat dog?
Answer 4: Yes, on three separate occasions. Once on noodles, once in a soup, and once in a sandwich. For the curious, there's a pretty grisly pile of dog bones in the picture at this link (don't click if you are sensitive to the idea of dogs as food).

Question 5: What was the weirdest thing that you ate?
Answer 5: This.

Question 6: When will your book be finished?
Answer 6: It's hard to say. I've never written a book before, and I have a couple of time-consuming commitments coming up later this year. Also, the trip was so grueling that I'm being gentle on myself now and not giving myself a firm deadline. I'm aiming roughly for the end of this year--I'll keep you updated as things progress.

Question 7: What is the book going to be like?
Answer 7: It will be a travel guide. No narrative or anything like that. I am planning for it to be structured like a traditional traditional travel guide, divided up by province and city, but instead of using it to find the local tourist attractions and hotels and whatnot, it will be used to find which street foods are local to each city.

Question 8: What was your favorite food that you tried?
Answer 8: That's a difficult question, and my answer changes all the time. There were so many great foods all around the country, I'm not sure I could narrow it to just one. If pressed, however, I might go with this one. I have a major sweet tooth, and this one really hit the spot.

Question 9: What is the best city in China for street food?
Answer 9: Another difficult question to answer. I don't think I could limit it to one city, so here are a few of my favorite spots: Lanzhou, Kaifeng, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Guiyang.

Question 10: Wait, this isn't Google...I was trying to get to Google.
Answer 10: That's not really a question, but here--try this.