Happy Anniversery Zapata's

 Zapata's Tex-Mex Restaurant celebrated it's fourth anniversery a couple of weeks ago.  In the U.S., restaurants send out coupons in the Sunday paper for free appetizers or souvenier drink glasses when they have an anniversary.  In Suzhou, for its anniversery, Zapata's threw a party.  A really, really good party.

Zapata's is like no other place I've ever been in.  It's a cross between Sam Malone's bar in Cheers and Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca.  For those who live near Jinji Lake, it's the neighborhood hangout where you can go when you don't feel like cooking.  You walk in the door and everybody knows your name.  You can get a pizza or a burger or fajitas or whatever comfort food you're craving.  And as you take a bite, you close your eyes, and it feels just like you are back at home.  Then, when you open your eyes, you can look around the tables and see (and hear) a clientele that looks like a plenary session of the United Nations - Swedes, Aussies, Brits, Chinese, Russians, Americans, Finnish, Chileans, Germans, French...

 Milton is the managing owner of Zapatas - a Florida boy who knocked around Asia for several years before buying into the Suzhou restaurant business.  He is the gentleman in the DJ's booth in the photo at top.  Milton turned around a struggling, if not failing, operation by following a very simple rule - talking to his customers and working very, very hard to give them what they wanted.  To the point where his patrons actually participate in the business.  For example, every Sunday is a barbeque that is coordinated by an expat from Texas.  Every Thursday is quiz night, organized by quixotic Brit named Duncan. 

 For the anniversary party, Milton invited all the regulars for an hour of free drinks.  He also hired some traditional Chinese Lion Dancers to entertain the crowd.  The photos do not do the Lion Dancers justice.  They snaked their way through the crowd as they danced and performed acrobatics to the beat of their drum corps. 

 The photo below would be the drum corps.

The main bar at Zapata's features retractable railings - railings that can be extended so the bar can be used stage for dancing.   The original owners intended the place to be a dance club....a concept more suited to Shanghai and it's younger crowd than to Suzhou's typically middle-aged expat community.  Normally, the railing stays lowered.  But on anniversary night, the railings were extended and the bar became a stage.  The customers become performers.  The group below is just getting started in a rendition of the YMCA.  That's right...the Village People version of the YMCA from the 1970s.  It may not be "cool", but it was fun.

 Below is a photo of Theresa with two of the key characters in our story.  At right is Milton, the managing owner of Zapata's.  At left is Duncan, the host of the Thursday quiz night and the guy who is always there...part employee and part patron.

The place was rocking until the wee hours of the morning.  We left relatively early at about 1:00am (which is super late for us) with another couple that lives in our apartment building.  At 1:00 am in the morning, it was mostly quiet in Suzhou but not totally quiet.  The welders and steelworkers were still hard at work high up in  the pair-of-pants construction site.  The taxi drivers were washing their taxis with water dipped by the bucket from the fountains outside the apartment complex.  The night watchman for the apartment complex was sleeping peacefully at his chair in the guardhouse.  we were able to sneak through the open gate without waking him.

Hello Kitty

A few weeks ago, Kathy Hansen was visiting again.  Kathy, Theresa, and I went down to the PanMen area for some sightseeing.  Afterwards, Theresa and Kathy got wrapped up in some heavy-duty shopping in a shop that sold tea and porcelains.  I was left with a lot of time to kill.  While pacing up and down the street, I found this little fellow in a cage outside of a blind man massage parlor.  Take note of his eyes.

Regarding the blind man massage parlor:  In China and other Asian countries, the blind are often trained in the art of massage to provide them with a means of income.  There are lots of massage places, but the ones employing blind men proclaim it boldly on their signs.  (The blind have a reputation for being more sensitive and skilled.)

More Art

 Yet another installment of Suzhou Public Art.  These are bronze statues - all relatively nearby on XingGang Street.  The one at top is relatively serious....it shows old China and new China regarding each other through the window of time in the center.  Or at least that's how I see it.  We've seen the old man - young girl theme before.

 The other three scultptures intended to be breezy and fun...and nothing more.

The Moon Festival

September 12 was the day of the Chinese Moon Festival.  More properly, it is called the mid-Autumn Festival.  But make no mistake, it is all about the moon.

The holiday is a moveable feast.  It's based upon the lunar calendar and always comes on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month.  It's works out to be the full moon closest to the autumn equinox.   Or at least that's what Wikipedia tells me.  As the top most photo shows, the moon most certainly lived up to it's end of the bargain. 

In Suzhou there were no large celebrations, at least none that we heard of.  When I asked the locals how they traditionally celebrate, almost all answered that you go with your family out to some natural place - a lake or a hilltop -  and look at the moon.  No fireworks.  No parades.  You just look at the moon.   The photo below shows some of the folks out moonwatching along JinJi Lake.

 Oh yes, and besides looking at the moon they all eat moon cakes.

The moon cakes started appearing in the stores about mid-July.  At first, it was just a few shelves in the grocery.  By early August they took over the end-caps.  Mid-August saw them spread to promotional tables in the main aisles.  In the week before the festival, they grew explosively and took over entire sections of the store.  At the Auchan grocery, I kid you not, there must have been two semi-loads worth piled in the center section of the store.  More types and brands than you can count. 

And people were going crazy to snap them up by the cartful.  It's traditional to exchange Moon Cakes as gifts with family and friends.  Employers give out Moon Cakes to employees like U.S. business used to give out turkeys or hams at Christmas.  All shapes and sizes and prices.  You can get a single, small, humble, wax-paper-wrapped Moon Cake for 2 RMB, or about 30 cents.  Or you can get a gift package of 8 elegantly wrapped cakes with exotic fillings for 600 RMB, or about 90 dollars.

Near as I can tell, no one really eats the things.  Maybe a bite or two while looking at the moon.  The vast majority must be bulldozed into some gigantic landfill somewhere in Western China.  They're like Christmas fruitcakes.  They're traditional and historic.  But like most historic and traditional things (outhouses and bubonic plague, for example) you really wouldn't enjoy them as part of your daily life.

They come in all different shapes, styles and fillings.  Above and below is shown a very traditional style Moon Cake.  The inside is a semi-sweet mixture of bean paste, dates, figs, or similar dried fruits of Autumn.  This sweet center is wrapped in a shell of heavy cake-like pastry.  It's very similar to a fig newton in taste and texture.  But it's a fig newton on growth hormones.  This cake is probably 3 inches square and probably 1 inch thick.  Tradional recipes were developed before refrigerators....so fat and sugar are the primary preservatives.  Each one is a heart-attach waiting to happen.

 Below are Moon Cakes in the traditional Suzhou Style.  The biggest difference is the outer pastry.  The non-Suzhou styles (example above) uses a cake-like pastry that will hold the imprint of geometric patterns or Chinese characters.  The Suzhou style Moon Cake uses a flakey pastry similar to a biscuit or pie crust.  The pastry is much too dry and brittle to hold the decorative pattern.

 Historically, Moon Cakes started out as simple things.  They were filled with common-man stuff like bean paste, lotus blossom, or sugared egg-yolk.  Or they had savory fillings such as minced salt-pork or salted egg yolks.  In these days, you can get a million different fillings, many of them aiming to attract with a gourmet fillings at gourmet prices.  For a premium cake you could drop $10 to $20 apiece if you wanted to.

I'm a schmuck for tradition, so I'll defend the simple traditional recipes against the modern, gourmet abominations.  But truth told, I prefer a more modern variety - the Ice Cream Moon Cake.   The photo above shows a sampling of these.  The one at left is coated in dark chocolate and filled with green tea, strawberry, pineapple, coconut, or vanilla ice cream.  The two at right are filled with similar flavors of ice cream, but wrapped in a laywer of sweet sticky rice dough.  These I could eat all year round.

All the Tea in China

If not for Starbucks, it would be impossible to find a good cup of coffee in China.  But though purgatory for coffee drinkers, China is heaven for tea lovers.  The Chinese passion and obsession for tea is identical in almost every way to the French for their wine.  The language of tea and wine lovers is also the same....it is all about the bouquet and the flavor profile and the terroir upon which the tea plants grow and the age of the tea plants and the timing of the harvest and the secret methods used by the different tea makers to elaborate their products.  Every person has their own personal favorite type and brand.

By the way, loose leaf tea is the real deal.  Tea bags are the equivalent of Boone's Farm strawberry wine in a screw cap bottle.

Everyone drinks tea all the time.  In the morning, you see businessmen and construction workers on their way to work carrying their thermoses of tea.  (What is the plural of thermos?  Is it thermi?)  Every taxi driver has a quart jar of steeping tea leaves on the floor between his feet.  The water dispensers in the office have two taps - one for hot water for making tea and the other for room temperature water to rinse the leaves out of your tea jug.  There are probably as many public hot water stations as there are public bathrooms.

While in Hangzhou, a few of us got the chance to do an afternoon tea break at a proper tea house .  For a set fee, you get tea and some light snacks and fruit.  You also get a person to prepare the tea for you.  At a proper tea house, the person you get should really know a lot about the tea and really really be a master of the exacting process for preparation of the tea - a mixture of sommelier and chef.  At a proper tea house, the preparer will most likely be young, female and attractive.   So it goes.

 The topmost photo shows our tea being prepared.  The process involved warming the tea bowl and warming the cups and rinsing the tea leaves and warming the water to the exact optimal brewing temperature (which is different for different types of tea) and then pouring the water around the tea rather than on them so as not to scorch the sensitive leaves.   When it came to the actual brewing part, I was surprised to learn that you're not supposed to just let the tea steep in the water for 20 minutes and then discard.  You brew, then decant the tea, and then use the same leaves over and over for multiple extractions.  For the first batch, she let the tea steep in the water for 2 minutes.  The tea would be served, fresh water added to the leaves, and then the batch would be allowed to steep for 45 seconds longer than the previous one.  The times are approximate, though, as the preparer ultimately relies on the color and smell to decide when a batch is done.

Our young lady got about 10 batches out of our tea leaves.  The whole process took about an hour and a half.  The second photo shows colleagues enjoying some of the snacks along with tea.

Since coming to Suzhou, we've accumulated an fairly impressive stash of tea. (see photo above.)  We have green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong tea, pu'er tea, jasmine tea, chrysanthemum tea, and i-have-no-idea-what-it-is tea.  About half of it was given to us as gifts. Tea is considered to be a very safe gift.  Much like bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party.

One last bit of trivia.  The hills around Hangzhou's West Lake are covered with tea plants in whatever you call the tea-growing equivalent of a vineyard.   Hangzhou is famous for LongJingCha, or Dragon Well Tea.  The top shelf stuff - the equivalent to grand cru - is outrageously expensive if you could find it at all.  Of course, there's always a Starbucks in town if that's not your cup of tea.

Hangzhou

I went to the city of Hangzhou a couple of weeks ago on a business trip.

Hangzhou is a city about 100 miles to the Southwest of Suzhou.  With Shanghai to the South East, it forms a triangle of tourism in the Yangtze river delta.  Suzhou is about 2 hours from Shanghai.  Hangzhou is about 2 hours form Suzhou.  Shanghai is about two hours from Hanghzou. 

There is an old Chinese saying that "Heaven is above and Suzhou and Hangzhou are just below".  Or so I am told by the boards of tourism for Suzhou and Hangzhou.  These are the two most historic cities in East-South-Central China.  They both date back thousands of years.  They are both major ports-of-call on the Grand Canal from Beijing.  Shanghai, in the grand scheme of things, is a relatively new upstart.  Suzhou and Hangzhou take the historical cheese.

Though, truth be told, in relation to Hangzhou, I think that Suzhou has an inferiority complex. Suzhou is like the younger brother that achieves great things, but never quite measures up to the older sibling.  Suzhou could claim to be a major city on the Grand Canal, but Hangzhou was the terminus - once a traveller from Beijing arrived there it was pointless to go further.  Suzhou was a seat of provincial government but Hangzou was, for a time, the capital of all China.  In the 12th and 13th centuries Suzhou was going great guns, but at the same time Hangzhou doing even better - and was arguably the largest city in the world for a while.

Marco Polo visited both Suzhou and Hangzhou during his travels to China.  He thought that "Soochow is a very great and noble city".  But then again he thought that Hangzhou was  "beyond dispute the finest and noblest in the world."

The city of Hangzhou is built around the West Lake, or XiHu.  The elegant parts of Suzhou tend to be hidden away behind walls and only to be seen after paying price of admission.  Hangzhou has the advantage that its jewels are built on and around the lake.  Anyone can walk around the lake.   The sights are open for view by even the poorest of travellers. 

For me, though, Hangzhou was a working trip and it was nearly dark when we went walking around the West Lake.  So I saw little of Hangzhou's famed beauty and, in the waning light, could photograph even less.

The photo at top shows the famous "lingering snow on broken bridge".  The bridge is way in the background...behind the acres of lotus flowers that were blooming on the lake.  It's not that the bridge is broken...but that after a snowfall it appears to be broken in it's center.   Or maybe not.  Maybe it's one of the other legends regarding how the bridge was named.   So it goes with China....there is so much history that two or three legends contend for the history of every landmark.

More Art: The Flamingos in the Park

There is a flock of flamingos that hangs around the Western entrance to the JinJi Hu lakefront park.  Strange that they never seem to move.

Summer Flowers

I'm not sure who it is in the Suzhou City government that is responsible for landscaping.  But they deserve a lot of credit.  And they must have a pretty healthy budget.

It seems like every two or three weeks there is something new that is blooming.  It has been that way since March.  It started with the plum blossoms.  About the time they died out the magnolias started to pop.  And so on and so on.  Every time the colors start to fade on one species, another seemingly innocent tree or bush  explodes into bloom to take its place.

 In addition to the perennial stuff - the trees and shrubs - the city also plants seasonal flowers in various flower beds and especially in the medians of the roads.  These get changed out about once a month also.

One of the more exotic things they do, at least exotic to me, is plant lotus flowers.  The park across the corner has some features which, back in February, looked like open running drainage ditches.  Really big ditches.  I figured this was due to neglect or lack of funding or some other benign incompetence that comes with city management.   Then back in May, during the rainy season, they let the ditches fill up with water.  Then they planted the lotus flowers.

The lotus is one of the "big" flowers in Chinese tradition.  It is the flower of summer.  Every lake, pond, or puddle of water is likely to have lotus planted in it.  The plants started blooming in mid-July and held their blooms right up to the end of August.  They are starting to fade now.  And the vegetable markets are full of the seed pods the form when the blossoms mature.  (You don't eat the seeds....you peel the pod and eat the celery-like flesh that surrounds the seeds.)

Now for me, the thought of flowers all through the summer seems a little exotic.  After all, in Indiana things will go dry about the middle of June and then stay brown until September.  Suzhou benefits from more frequent summer rains.  (Good for the flowers, though the humidity that comes with that can be brutal.).  And if the rains get scarce, they just round up some water tankers, fill them up at the nearest canal, and then use that for watering. 

Oooops

Sorry for the quiet stretch recently.   It has been a busy month.   We'll try to do better soon.....I promise.