Nanning zoo

Sunday was a beautiful warm spring day, finally, and a perfect opportunity to visit the Nanning zoo, or animal park as the locals call it. It's on the western edge of town on University Road, not far from where I live, less than 20 minutes by bike. I had passed it before, but never ventured inside. This time I took Xiao An for a ride.
The zoo is laid out in a spacious landscaped park, pleasant to wander about, and offers a wide array of animals from all corners of the world. It also includes a amusement park with a rollercoaster and various sick-making swinging and spinning machines. The Caribbean Water Adventure, a large waterslide system including a giant funnel which lets you spiral down to its drain on a inflatable raft, was not yet open to the public. Xiao An persuaded me to take a ride on a giant 12m pendulum with a 4m diameter rotating disk mounted at its end, seating 30 people on its perimeter. While the disk starts spinning, the pendulum starts swinging higher and higher, until horizontal, with the combined movement of the swinging and spinning presenting a near-death experience to its passengers. It's actually quite a thrill.
After this appetizer, we headed for the dolphin show. A pair of highly trained spotted dolphins where doing synchronized jumps and water dances, followed by an equally well trained pair of sea lions balancing spinning balls on their noses while clapping their front flippers. Impressive!
While some animals, like the giraffes and other hoofed animals, have plenty of space for grazing and wandering about, others, especially the big cats, are confined to much smaller spaces. Monkeys too are kept in small cages, much too small to be able to display their natural behaviour: swinging from tree to tree.
The zoo has a large number of exotic birds in splendid colors, like hornbills, parrots, and peacocks. Hippos and elephants, crocodiles and zebras, all present. Among the more unusual displays was a series of cylindrical fish tanks, out in the open, set between the palm trees, containing some very strange fish. One species has the jaws and teeth of a crocodile, another had sucked itself to the glass like an octopus, displaying its beautiful leopard skin, and sharing the water with some grossly deformed Oranda goldfish.
Another unusual sight were the black swans, sharing the lake with Koi carp. While visitors feed the fish, the water turns into an orgy of orange, black, and white, with the gracious black swans riding atop the fish in an attempt to get their share.

Guangxi Arts Institute

I was invited to visit an exhibition of graduates from the Guangxi Arts Institute by Linda, whom I had met several weeks ago while waiting for somebody else at the main gate of Guangxi University. Linda is a student of Art Management.
I met her today at the small campus of the Arts Institute near South Lake. I was eager to visit this institute to get an idea of the local art scene. It is more or less invisible, since there are very few contemporary art galleries, if at all. Thus far I only saw traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. If contemporary art is happening in Nanning, it must be here at the Arts Institute, I figured.
We did a quick tour of the campus, passing the dance and music department, the gallery, various sculpture studios, a wood workshop, and the dormitories for students. The exhibition was however held at the Guangxi Museum. This is the only art museum in Nanning, but I never visited, as I was told it is rather boring. It contains a lot of archeological and anthropological artifacts of Guangxi's rich ethnic history.
The exhibition was held in some galleries at the back of the museum, reached from a side entrance leading into a courtyard. As we entered, a discussion was taking place between teachers and students, seated amidst the works on display on the ubiquitous small plastic stools you see everywhere in China.
The works on display all showed a great deal of craftsmanship, but most of it was not very exciting. A lot of large canvases depicting people in daily situations of both urban and village life. Sculptures in wood, iron and ceramics. Some printed work, very few drawings, no photography at all, but one animation shown on a computer display, and another as a dual screen projection.
Those two were the only works qualifying as media art. I had wondered if that would exist at all in Nanning. I know Shanghai has a big media art center, and a yearly festival in October, but I did not expect to see much of that here, and I was right. I noticed just one piece that could be called conceptual art: a pair of Ming style bedside tables, executed in tropical hardwood, with bas-reliefs of contemporary brand logos, the likes of Audi, Nike, Ferrari, Gucci, etc.
In another gallery more contemporary paintings, as well as traditional Chinese watercolours, and textile works. The latter were really horrible, but the watercolours were amazingly well done. This ancient technique is still high art in the contemporary art scene. I guess most Chinese collectors have a taste for tradition.

A visit to GXU's orchard

Guangxi University's Agricultural Department has a large research area at the Northern part of the campus where new crop varieties are being tested. It includes an orchard with many different fruit trees. One of my best friends is a student of agriculture, and he took me to the orchard Sunday morning.
Upon arrival we met another student from the nearby school of business. At the orchard we were welcomed by one of my friend's professors, who gave a brief explanation of the kind of research they are doing there. His English was excellent, as he had been working in Australia for several years.
Here at GXU they are cultivating a variety of pear trees more suitable for the sub-tropical climate of the South. Other experiments include special pruning for high-density orchards, and cultivating a variety of Longan which produces fruit year-round.
The pear trees were blossoming at the moment, with bees hovering around in search of nectar while simultaneously pollinating the flowers. The Loquat trees were already bearing fruit, and at the same time sprouting many new leaves, furry with soft hairs. A few egg fruit trees were also full of fruit, and we could eat them right from the tree. The flesh of this fruit has the texture and color of a hard-boiled egg yolk, very strange!

Rice cooker orange cake

It's already several weeks ago that I suddenly got the idea to use my rice cooker to make a cake. I was talking to some friends about cooking and our favourite food, and I recounted my many baking experiments back home. I don't have an oven here though, so I always thought it wouldn't be possible to make cakes at my Chinese home.
The rice cooker idea was not that far-fetched though. After some googling it appeared quite a popular and even proven method. There are numerous recipes to be found online for baking cakes in a rice cooker. Many of them mention the fancy micro-computer controlled rice cookers which even have a build-in menu option for making cakes, out of the box, recipes included. Mine is a cheap (99 RMB) affair, which only has a cook / keep warm switch, which automatically switches over once the rice is ready. It always produces perfectly cooked rice, provided you added the right amount of water.
To make my orange cake, I used the most simple cake recipe, and improvised a bit on it, based on my own experience back home. Beat 4 eggs and 125 g sugar until fluffy, add a tablespoon of oil (butter is hard to find and expensive in China), and the same amounts of milk, finely chopped orange rind, the juice of that same orange, and some brandy. Then fold in 200 g of flour and pour the mixture in the rice cooker pot. I greased the pot with some oil, but it has a non-stick teflon coating anyway.
I was supposed to bake the cake for about 30 minutes, but already 5 minutes after switching it on, it switched into keep warm mode. Obviously the cake wasn't done yet, so I tried to switch it on again. The build-in thermostat prevented me from doing that, so I had to force the rice cooker to stay in cook mode, by inserting some object in the gap between the switch and its surrounding recess. I had read some online trick about using an eraser for this purpose, but I found the handle of my kitchen knife perfectly suitable for the job.
My engineer's mind told me that overruling the thermal protection of a high power electrical appliance is potentially hazardous, possibly resulting in a meltdown or catching fire. So I watched it carefully for early signs of damage or overheating. When water vapour was streaming out of the steam vent I removed the jam, and let it cool off a bit, re-applying the blocker a bit later. I repeated this a few times, until I thought the cake should be about ready.
The smell emanating from the steam vent was quite pleasant, but it did have a faint hint of burn. I eagerly opened the lid, and saw a nicely golden yellow surface, dotted with small craters, not unlike the surface of the moon. This was actually a good sign, I thought, since it meant there was enough air in the mixture to make it a cake, instead of a brick.
It was impossible to remove it in one piece however. The bottom did burn, and had the whole thing firmly stuck. I had to cut it in-place, and remove the cake in four quarters, minus the bottom layer. Thus far, it did not look all too bad, and the taste was actually quite OK. A bit too dry, the steam I had seen escaping was responsible for that, but the taste was good. Thanks to the orange rind and the brandy, no doubt.
Nonetheless, I don't think I will redo this experiment. My simple rice cooker is best used for its intended purpose: cooking rice.

Playing hide and seek

The Great Firewall of China seems to be playing hide and seek. Last night I could again visit blogger.com (but not YouTube). Then while in an attempt to actually write a new post, access was denied again. Today the domain is once again accessible, at least for now.
I wonder what is going on at the Ministry of Information, or are China's security officials trapped in a complicated software upgrade process?

YouTube and Blogger unblocked (not)

Today I discovered that both YouTube and Blogger (including my blog, which you are reading now) are now accessible from within China. They have been blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall for as long as I remember. Other popular sites like Facebook and Twitter remain inaccessible though.
I wonder what prompted this policy change, and if it's permanent. Of course, it could also be honeypot tactics, to easily crack down on posters or viewers of critical media...

Update: the next morning it was back to usual. Opening YouTube or Blogger displays the message: "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading". I guess it was just a momentary lapse of security..

China post

Sending parcels by China Post is not without risk of loss or damage. I have experienced the former once when sending a parcel including a full video tape from Hong Kong to Holland, which arrived minus the tape, but with the other items in the package intact.
This week I received a parcel from Amsterdam, containing a book and a generous supply of fine chocolate, courtesy of Martine, and another from Singapore, also with chocolate, sent by Lai Yee. Thanks a million to both of you!
The parcel from Holland was in bad shape. The envelope was ripped to shreds, but the inner bubble-wrap was still mostly intact. The package was apparently damaged on its way from Amsterdam to Beijing, prior to onward shipment to Nanning (another 3 hours by plane) and repaired by the Beijing post office using tape which reads "received in such condition, repacked by Beijing Post Office".
It was moist on the outside, and with condensation trapped inside the package. The book was wet throughout its 300 pages, and the chocolate dripping with water. I guess a sudden change in environmental conditions while in transit was responsible for the damage.
I will start with the book once it is dry, which could take a while, because the weather is currently very humid. A lot of fog and drizzle. The chocolate is hard to resist, but I will try to not eat everything in one week.

Vietnamese coffee - part 2

With the Vietnamese coffee filter now in my possession, I had to go out and find some ground coffee, and a can of sweetened condensed milk, to be able to make a good coffee, Vietnamese style.
I was in a 人人乐 (Ren Ren Le) supermarket just a few days ago, and noticed they sell both, so I made a mental note without buying it, since at that time I did not have the filter, so no use for it. Today I googled the store to find the locations of all of its branches in Nanning, to locate the nearest one. The one I visited earlier was in the Eastern Langdong district, very far from where I live. The nearest one appeared to be on Beihu Beilu, not too far. I went there with Xiao An, who also lives in that area.
This supermarket is huge! By far the biggest I have seen in Nanning, covering two floors of close to 10.000 square meters each. Selling everything from baby food to large screen LCD tv's. It took us a while to find the right aisle for the coffee, but there it was. Surprisingly a different brand than in the other store.

A tin containing 340 grams of Vietnamese ground coffee (Vinicafe) for a very reasonable 27 RMB. A few aisles down we found condensed milk, by Nestlé (370 g, 12.90 RMB). I bought two of each, also for my classmate who got me the filter.
Back home it was exciting to brew the first cup, following the procedure of the Vietnamese cafe on campus: pour a layer of condensed milk in a glass, put the filter on top, load the filter with coffee, compress it with the internal perforated cover plate, and fill it up with boiling water, then close the lid, and wait. After a few seconds the first drops drip into the glass. It takes about a minute or two for all coffee to drip down. Stir, and enjoy. Nice and strong, great taste!

Vietnamese coffee

As China is a tea drinking nation, good coffee is not easy to find. There are plenty of coffee bars, and they do offer a wide selection of imported coffee varieties, but it is quite expensive (up to 25 RMB per cup) and usually disappointingly weak. Most Chinese who drink coffee use instant-coffee. The popular brands are Nescafe, Maxwell House, and a few Vietnamese brands. The latter are the best, and I always keep a good supply at home.
Nothing beats a good brewed coffee though, so I was very happy with the small Vietnamese outlet on campus which sells a very decent coffee for just 5 RMB, brewed on the spot in one of these small metal filters which are placed on top of a glass. I tried to find such a filter, but could not find a shop in Nanning which sells them. I even tried to buy one at the coffee cafe, but they refused to sell them to me. And now they closed down, so no more good coffee on campus, or anywhere near.
Today however, I met some of my (former) classmates, who had been on a trip to Vietnam during the Spring Festival, and they brought me such a stainless steel Vietnamese coffee filter. I'm very happy! Now I only have to find ground coffee, which is also very hard to find, but I know one store which sells it. I never bothered to buy it though, because I didn't have the filter. Now I have, so no more instant for me, thank you!