Yakity Yak, Delicious Snack

This past week hasn’t been that interesting.* Since returning from Pingyao my life has been filled with the usual process of learning characters, retaining them long enough to get about a 97% on the next day’s quiz, and then forgetting them to make room for the next day’s 60 characters. However, some notable things have happened, including – yay! – new and exciting developments in the world of food.
On Tuesday night I went out with Max intending to go to some documentary screening he’d found out about. However, when we got there we were informed that it’d be over $20 to watch, as we were not members of the British expatriate club that was holding the screening. The room was filled with things like tapas, wine, and black-clad thirtysomethings, and I felt a little out of my element, so I suggested dinner instead.
The screening was by the Silk Market (I resisted) so I pulled out my guidebook to check and see what was in the area. It was a cold night out and I wanted something hearty, and when I discovered a Tibetan place was on the list I almost immediately started walking.
Unlike the café-style place I’d been before with Pei Rei, this restaurant, Makye Ame, was not messing around. Their menu was huge and the entire place was festooned with Tibetan masks, textiles, and the like (except the bar, which had Yellowstone-style lanterns with pine trees and moose hanging over it). I perused the menu carefully, as this was my first real foray into Tibetan food, and we selected yak meat dumplings, beef stew, and vegetable curry. I also got butter tea, a traditional Tibetan drink, to wash it down. As I found out when this beverage arrived, the Tibetans take great liberties with the word “tea” – I might as well have been drinking melted butter, and I could feel my arteries clogging with every sip. However, it was just light enough to warm me up sufficiently.
When the food got to our table, I knew I was in way over my head. Any one of the three things we’d ordered would have been enough to send us home happy and full. I pride myself on having an iron stomach, but this was way too much food. It was delicious, though – as Max said, “If I had food like this, I’d want independence too.”
While we were eating, the house band set up and started playing a mix of Tibetan and Chinese songs, while the seating hostess, who was without a doubt the most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen, gave a brief introduction in Chinese, English, and Tibetan. The band went roving around from table to table singing and dancing, and while I usually don’t like being directly serenaded while I’m eating, the music was so good that my chopsticks never left my placemat the whole time, and I only resumed once the band started its set on stage. There was a lot of variance in the musical selections; most of the Tibetan songs were upbeat and hearty and probably meant to be sung after several beers. (I caught the words for “beer” and “drinking” several times in the introductions.) However, Hottie the Hostess took the stage for a Chinese song about halfway through, backed by the Tibetan instruments. It was incredibly, heartbreakingly beautiful. Max listened to the lyrics and told me it was about writing a letter to someone you love, but for once I didn’t try and understand the Chinese,** and chose just to sit back and let this amazing music and this warm restaurant and this amazingly delicious food envelop me. I left in a ridiculously good mood. Whenever Beijing starts getting on my nerves (it’s been the air pollution lately) I always seem to find places like this that make me fall in love again. If you’re ever in town, I highly recommend Makye Ame Tibetan restaurant, a couple blocks northwest of the Silk Market. Be warned: one dish feeds two people.
I woke up on Wednesday with an awful cold and the worst episode yet of a nagging sore throat that had been bothering me for a couple weeks. At first I blamed this on Beijing’s horrible air, but while I’m sure that was a contributing factor, I think I also just got something that was going around. By the end of the day, I was sniffling constantly and going through Kleenex like Elizabeth Taylor through husbands.*** After consulting with various people, I decided I would go to the hospital**** on Saturday, the first day I had time (the hospital that IES contracts with, which provides Westerners with English-speaking doctors and incredibly high standards of care, is on the other side of town, so unless you want to spend $15 on cab fare it’s a 90-minute bus voyage each way). In the meantime, though, I was miserable and unable to fall asleep. After asking all the Anglophones and the RA on my floor if they had any decongestant/Robitussin/Nyquil/morphine and getting a resounding “no, but I have Advil” each time, I decided, in a last-ditch effort to get some sleep, to ask Zhang Ran. She came through admirably with nine pills (three each of orange, yellow, and green) and something I was supposed to mix into my coffee in the morning. All of these were to be taken three times a day, she told me sternly, and then warned me that Chinese medicine worked gradually.
I think she and I have a really different definition of “gradually.” Within ten minutes I was feeling markedly better and was finally able to get to bed. By Thursday night, I was in almost complete remission, although it’d be hard not to get better when you’ve taken 35 pills in 24 hours. I would also like to note here that Zhang Ran has severe Mom Tendencies; when I got back from class on Thursday there was a Post-It on my computer reminding me to take all my pills. Cutest thing ever. I also bought all four seasons of The OC on DVD for a whopping $3 on Thursday, and now have noticeably less free time.
Then last night was Halloween. My costume never really happened – since Halloween isn’t widely celebrated in China, even among young people, there was nowhere to get anything, and none of the clothes I had really lent themselves to dressing up as something. (I ended up telling people I was a pink dress.) I was grumbling about this when I was invited by Dan, whose parents were in town, to go out for dinner. I agreed immediately and only found out later that dinner would be Peking Duck.
Surprisingly, I hadn’t had Peking Duck since arriving in China, since it requires a decent-sized group of people and is kind of expensive. The restaurant we went to was lovely and had a large glass window in the lobby where you could watch the ducks being prepared. The setup of the kitchen was interesting: instead of the Western style, where you have someone responsible for the sauces, the pastries, etc., at this restaurant each member of the small battalion of chefs (pictured) was responsible for one duck, from roasting to cleaning to carving it in front of your table.
The duck was delicious. Peking Duck is ideally mostly skin, and the skin was delicious. Not at all stringy or greasy, it was crisp, fatty, and crunchy, with a sweet syrupy taste to it, and it was especially good dipped in the raw sugar the waitress gave us. The meat was great too, neither dry nor oily. We all ate away happily, although I think Dan’s parents got sort of freaked out when they found out that I’d eaten dog.
After that we ran back home and headed for the IES “party,” which I did not plan to attend for a long time because any party with sixty-year-old Chinese host parents and innumerable fun Language Pledge activities is no kind of party at all. I did, however, want to see the costume contest and was pleasantly surprised at how many of my peers had come through, especially the four Cool Runnings guys (“Jamaica” jackets were $8 each at the Silk Market) who snaked through the entire party in perfect unison the whole time. Other standouts included a pair of WASPs clad in sweater vests with nametags reading “Hunter” and “Tucker” who, when greeted, would say things like “I don’t remember you from Exeter!” and then harrumph, Cody and Pei Rei as “a Mac” and “a PC” (it wouldn’t have been as good if Pei Rei didn’t look exactly like the Mac guy), and Michael, who had memorized the entire “why so serious?” speech as the Joker.
After the party got out, my strict I’ll-only-go-out-if-there’s-dancing policy led me to a dance party at 798, the modern art district. A couple of the expat magazines had built this event up as one of the parties to go to, so I thought it’d be filled with beautiful older people, but it was pretty much all foreign students. The music was repetitive, but the dancing was fun, and I stayed quite late.
Today I have resolved to finally go to the Temple of Heaven. Nothing will stop me.

*Then why am I writing this? What a crappy opening line.

**I eavesdrop on people’s Mandarin conversations all the time. It’s not spying if it’s homework!

***This is me throwing a bone to the people over 25 who read this. I know it can’t possibly make up for my constant ramblings about Girl Talk, but it’s a start. It’s time to begin the healing process, you guys.

****“Going to the hospital” is not a super-serious thing in China like it is in the US. One day, my tutor told me she’d have to cancel our daily hour of conversation because she was taking her roommate to the hospital. I walked in the next day and asked what had happened, expecting gory tales of broken bones, severed arteries, or projectile vomiting. It turns out the roommate had…a nosebleed.