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Published: March 15th 2010
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Beetles
The chopsticks provide a scale reference, and I think are intended to be used for picking the bugs up. There's a man in Kunming who's known, if only in legend, to all the foreigners in the city. Many have had the pleasure of making his acquaintance, but I had only heard the rumors: there's this crazy wandering peddler; he sells honey; he knows one word of English--"HONEY!" and he loves nothing more than selling jars of honey to foreigners.
I was having kind of a bummer of a time, Sunday, trying to get a bunch of errands done. I had a lot of homework, and was hoping to get to Green Lake, the big park in the center of town, to get some photos of the weekend folk life. I was also hoping to run into the honey man, who is rumored to hang out primarily around Green Lake. But first, I also had some other shopping errands to run for a few items that are harder to find.
Back story: On Saturday, we bought an oven! A smallish portable thing, about 14 inches deep and maybe 20 inches across--big enough to roast a chicken, but certainly not a turkey. We got it from a little baking shop that caters primarily to foreigners, since Chinese kitchens do not
Muslim Food
And all this time I've been feeding my Muslim kibble and table scraps. have ovens (the vast majority of Chinese culinary tradition in fact does not include pastry or bread baking of any sort, and all roasting of meats is done in specialized ovens not for home use; there is virtually no roasting of vegetables) Anyway, we are super pumped about our purchase, and the first item on our list to bake was cornbread. We had all the ingredients we needed (in China it's easy to find at least three different grinds of cornmeal, if not four) except butter. We've found butter before in this city, so we didn't think it would be too hard; I'd just have to stop by one of the "hyper-markets," like Wal-Mart.
So, after lunch I set out to get my errands done: first Wal-Mart for butter, then Green Lake for folk life, then home to assemble the cornbread and study up for Monday's classes.
I got to Wal-Mart and grabbed a few things I needed, including some yeast for future baking projects. But I couldn't find butter. I asked around, and the first salesgirl, who worked in the dairy section, didn't know what I meant when I asked for butter by name (literally, "yellow oil").
Coffee Press
This is my altar of worship. She told me that all the corn oil they sell is yellow, and that I should find that upstairs. I've bought butter often enough in China to know this was not a case of misspeaking on my part. The next woman I asked told me to look in Dairy. When I mentioned the problem I had there, she said, "Then we must be sold out." So, I needed to go somewhere else for my butter. I knew there was a Carrefour (French Wal-Mart analog) in the city, and I had a good idea of where it was located, so that was my next stop.
Well, I am not blessed with a very good sense of direction, and the layout of Chinese cities is generally pretty baffling to American sensibilities--we're mostly used to navigating Cartesian coordinates, to the extent that many of our streets are actually just given graduated numbers instead of names. Not so in Kunming. It's difficult here to reference locations by intersection, because through-streets are limited. You might be trying to get to street B, which runs parallel to street A, and have to walk nearly a kilometer before you find even an alley that breaks though.
Honey Jar
The flowers are there because it's the five-year anniversary of the Erika-Tom dating situation! But of course, street A and B would not be named in any such way to let you know that they are located near each other. And they likely wouldn't run parallel to each other, either! Oh, but non-parallel lines will intersect at some point--that should be good news, right? Not when the street you're looking for changes names at different points. And I won't even get started on the confusing nature of "East-Wind West Road."
So if you've been following the lesson, you can probably guess I got lost! I ended up wandering into an outdoor pet market selling puppies, bunnies, hamsters, chicks
dyed bright yellow and red (to represent the flag??), and big ol' beetles. I didn't get any pictures of the chicks, because there were too many excited children in the way of the cages, but nobody seemed too interested in the beetles.
Moving on from the pet market, I actually managed to wind up at Carrefour. After spending ten minutes trying to find the entrance of the sprawling store, I found my butter in about another ten minutes, and then had one of those fun experiences that reminds you, in case you'd had the chance to forget, that China has a population issue. Kunming is a city of 6.8 million, and all of them were at Carrefour this last Sunday. To buy my stick of butter, I waited in line for fifty minutes. If I were telling this story out loud, I would clarify and say "five-zero," but there's not so much risk of the written word needing clarification. But I do it anyway to make my point: I was waiting in the supermarket line for nearly an hour. There were probably twenty different cashier lines, all the same length. Do not for any reason ever go to a Chinese hypermarket on a Sunday afternoon.
By this point, I had no time to get to Green Lake, so I decided to call it a day and go home. I got out of Carrefour, and figured I could take two buses to get back to the apartment. But, silly me, I had gotten turned around on my favorite East-Wind West Road, and the second bus I caught was headed the opposite direction from my apartment, and landed me at my university. At least I knew I could take a direct bus from there. So, crossing the pedestrian bridge to the proper side of the road, I ran into none other than The Honey Man.
This is where the long-winded narrative portion of the story ends and the praises of Honey Man begin.
He seems to know he is famous among foreigners by word-of-mouth. Like the other vendors, he squats by the side of the road (or on the bridge, in this case), his wares laid out in front of him. Unlike the others who are selling things like ripoff handbags or bright phone charms, the Honey Man is pretty unassuming, with his drab old man clothes and his unmarked jars of honey. Once he spots a non-Chinese person, though, he lights up. He looks exactly as if he's been expecting you all day, and you've finally arrived. You get the eerie suspicion he can read minds. He's probably a Bodhisattva. "HONEY!" he yells and claps once, maybe adding a bit of jazz hands. That's about all it takes to make a sale.
As is my habit, I talked him down a little on the price before I bought a jar of his cloudy honey (he also sells the clear-amber variety). This stuff is unlike anything I've ever tasted. It's far more perfumey than any honey I've encountered in the West, and smells almost like baby powder, but with a distinct honey fragrance as well. The taste is very floral and slightly sour, in an entirely good way. I would compare the experience of eating this honey to the first time I tasted rose flavoring: the very satisfying--dare I say transcendent?--sensation of applying a previously elusive aroma to your taste buds. Thumbs up.
I sadly did not get a picture of the Honey Man, because my camera ran out of battery mid-journey, but I have included, for your viewing pleasure, my jar of honey, a plastic bucket of beetles, my beautiful French press, and a pack of ready-to-eat sausages that are apparently pork-free!
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mom
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Let's get some!
Oooh, I want to try some of that honey when I visit you this summer! Did you have some on your cornbread? Happy baking!