Soo lets talk about China

Sooo everybody I would like to talk about China, the country and statistics....and then a homey touch of my favorite food baozi

Anywho, moving on soooo China, Modern day China, that is. China is an up and coming economic superpower that rivals and surpasses even the former hegemonic power of the United States. Boasting a population of about 1,330,141,256 people.....lets take a look at the U.S.'s population at a staggering 310,232,862. Essentially China has a good BILLION plus people on us. Now that statistically we've settled that China has an enormous population, just image on 1 Billion plus people is dispersed about a region, even one as large as the landmass of China. In China, the cities are very important bustling centers of the country. When people living in rural areas were allowed to migrate to the cities after the reign of Mao, the cities began to double and triple in size. Cities could be considered small countries.

Take for instance Beijing, home of 20 million plus people (according to the Chinese -recently the census happened so this could be reliable). Try to picture living in a city that large. For me, it is still a bit un-imagineable to think that that many people live in one city. The largest city I had ever lived in was Santiago, population of around 7 million people. Beijing trumps Santiago times 3! No matter how extensive the subway system is, it still cannot compensate for how long travel will take. For me to travel from West Beijing to East Beijing, it would easily take me over an hour and a half. This is with me living a 5 minute walk from my apartment to the subway station. My old apartment was a 15-25 minute bus ride TO the subway. Driving in a taxi (chuzu qiche 出租车) during rush hour could easily take you about 2 hours to get to your destination, even if it wasn't very far away.

Now, Beijing isn't even the largest city in the country, the city that holds that title is Shanghai. Navigation in Beijing is a nightmare, so navigation in Shanghai can only be more of a nightmare. So taking this into consideration, just because there is an incident in Beijing, doesn't mean that the incident happened down the street from me. Nor does it mean that I will even hear about the incident in the news until you tell me. Ahaha. case and point, (no offense mom, I love you!) my mother sent me an article about "the world's longest traffic jam" that happened in Beijing where people were in a jam for approximately 9 days. No, I hadn't heard of anything of the sort. This just means that traffic was really really bad for about 9 days. ....Is that unusual? No. Soooo, if you see an article about Wu Dao Kou, or Wudaokou, then I might have heard about it. If not then I don't know what you are talking about. ahaha

China is  such a large country that it has very diverse cuisine, which if you've talked to me much, you would know that it's not really my favorite. There are plenty of dishes of the Northern style that I like, but equally there are plenty that I will not touch. People rave about Peking Duck in China, which is fairly good and appetizing, however this is not what floats my boat. What does is, 包子 or Baozi, essentially they are dumplings filled with meats, vegetables or egg and are the most scrumptious when eaten with soy vinegar.

 

This is a bag of baozi that I used to get at least once a day from my local baozi woman. Seriously I've never had baozi better than hers. It didn't always look like baozi but it always tasted better than baozi. They vary in size and in fillings but generally are always good. Here's a picture of how baozi normally looks... So essentially, I love my baozi (which I can find no good street baozi in Wudaokou) and I really like the strange fruit and juice selections. I've discovered pamelos, what I describe as a cross between a grapefruit and an orange. I buy them whole, peel them and eat it throughout the week. Other big fruits in China include dragonfruit, hawthorn berries and peaches (you can find many different peach juices here. Hawthorn berries are puzzling because I find the actual fruit disgusting but the juice amazingly delicious. The other type of juice that I've only seen here is Sea-Buckthorn juice....yes sea-buckthorn juice. I can't find it everywhere, some random street vendors have it but I think it's delicious. It tricks you though because it looks like orange juice. The 'sea-buckthorn berry' is found on cliff environments and must go through an intense juicing process because it is normally an oily berry. Don't let that throw you off the juice is actually pretty good.

Ok, thats all for now folks BYE!