This is our beautiful little kitten Charles. He is a big part of our life here in China!
We bought Charlie in September 2009, from a teahouse next to the river in downtown Luzhou. It was the best 40 Yuan we’ve spent so far, which is about $6.50 AUD. It’s uncommon to pay 40 Yuan for a kitten here. You can buy them everywhere for about 5 Yuan, or 0.80 AUD.
When we first saw him, he was a tiny little thing, with big eyes. He has one blue eye, one green eye, which made him extra special. He is the friendliest little cat and loves being around people. Usually you don’t ask the owner of a teahouse how much they want for their kitten, but when the kitten is this cute, you do things like that. At first they didn’t want to sell him. They’d bought him as a cat to hunt mice. Although in the end they agreed, and we took him home that afternoon.
He’s about six months old now. He is very inquisitive and investigates everything. Best of all, he loves muffins and cake! Ha.
Last week we had a four day weekend, because the students get a few days every month to go home. We went to Chongqing to see our friend Ya Ya and to spend New Year’s Eve in a big city.
On New Year’s Eve we had Hot Pot for dinner with Ya Ya. After dinner, Joel and I went into the city to wait for midnight. When we got into the city there were hundreds of police blocking off one big area, around a clock tower. Apparently all the Chinese people went there to hear the clock strike at twelve o’ clock – but there wasn’t even going to be any fireworks! Inside the blocked off area was Starbucks, where we wanted to be. After waiting a long time and even asking the police to let us in, we decided to leave and go somewhere else. We couldn’t find another Starbucks close by so we caught a taxi back to our hotel. When the clock turned over to twelve o’ clock, we were in the taxi only a minute away from our stop.
On Saturday, Ya Ya and a few of his friends took us to see “Chongqing Old City”. There’s a big old Palace, with a museum area inside showing many old artefacts, skeletons etc. from around Chongqing.
Before Christmas, we made cinnamon pancakes from scratch. To compliment this lovely treat, we caramelised some apples. We also added a few pieces of sliced banana to each stack.
To caramelise the apples, we boiled them in our wok with some sugar. Once the apples were nice and soft, we drained them out and kept them aside. We then returned the sugar water back to the stove, and left it there to reduce into a sticky sauce, on a low heat.
As we were cooking the last pancake, we put the apples back into the wok for a minute with the sweet sauce.
This was such a treat for us. It was absolutely delicious and so easy to make!
A bowl of the most deliciously hot and spicy beef noodles. This is seriously good stuff, some days thinking about eating this for lunch gets me through my morning classes. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend 4 kwai (4元) and when I’m back in Australia these noodles will one of the things I truly miss. Oh Niu Rou Mian! How I will miss thee!
We are spending the New Year in Chongqing. It’s larger than Luzhou and therfore affords us the opportunity to purchase some luxuries that we otherwise forego.
Carrefour the second largest retailer in the world, is successful in China and has numerous stores in the bigger cities. Their stores are massive and stock almost everything. They also have a fairly handy range of imported goods, especially from France their home country. However today, we were most impressed to find French butter in the refrigerated section, as we have looked high and low in Luzhou for butter and haven’t managed to find any, anywhere!
The next logical step was to find some nice jams to complement this creamy unsalted foil wrapped block of pure goodness. So we started on our way to the imported food section, it was tiny! Thankfully they had two imported jams from France made by St Dalfour, a Black Currant and a Golden Peach.
The hunt for some decent bread began, as almost all Chinese baked breads are sweetened with huge amounts of sugar and taste nothing like real bread. And unfortunately due to the yeast added to bread, they also taste nothing like a cake. Suffice to say, it’s terrible tasting stuff.
Success! We found a loaf of proper wholemeal bread, that went wonderfully with our French butter and jams. It was a little slice of paradise to indulge ourselves in the finer things, that one too often takes for granted.
