Chinabites

China Menu Turns One

posted: Sep. 29, 2010

China Menu celebrates its first birthday today!

In one short year, China Menu has helped travelers to China get great meals in restaurants all over China. To celebrate the one year anniversary of China Menu’s launch, Pandy is having a crazy birthday sale, slashing the price of China menu from $4.99 to just ninety-nine cents!

Thanks for a great year and all the feedback! Here’s to another year of getting amazing meals everywhere you travel in China!

Announcing Chinese Food Quiz for iPhone and iTouch

posted: Mar. 26, 2010

Six months ago, Pandy and Chinabites launched their first app, China Menu. Since then, Pandy and China Menu have helped hundreds of foreign travelers order great meals at restaurants all over China, all without needing to speak a word of Chinese.

But Pandy is always hungry: both for tender Sichuanese bamboo, and also to help foreign travelers get the most out of their meals. That’s why today we’re thrilled to announce Pandy’s second iPhone app, Chinese Food Quiz, and the best part is that it’s free!

In Chinese Food Quiz, Pandy will challenge you to learn the most fundamental characters that make up Chinese menus. After you’ve mastered the basics, Pandy will put you to the test - showing you real dish names from Chinese menus and asking you to pick out the key characters which tell you if the dish is meat or vegetable, soup or stir fry, rice or noodle, and much more.

Pandy is going to let you chew on the first couple of quizzes for a while, but he has more quizzes simmering in the kitchen that will be coming out as updates in the coming weeks and months. If you’re hungry for challenge and great Chinese food, check out Chinese Food Quiz on the iTunes App Store today!

The stories menus (unintentionally) tell

posted: Dec. 01, 2009

Shenzhen is close to the outside world, but apparently not that close. I took these today while dining at the very pleasant Zidu Sichuan Restaurant. I cross the Hong Kong border tomorrow.

Escape from Kunming, Vietnam Edition: Spring City to Sapa, pt. 2

posted: Nov. 05, 2009

This is the second post in a two post series about a quick journey Chinabites took in late 2009 from Kunming to Sapa, Vietnam. Pt. 1 here

The mini-bus made it’s way along the 38km route into the mountains between Lao Cai, Vietnam and Sapa, the mountain retreat village near Vietnam’s highest mountain range. Night was falling as we drove into town. Large bonfires dotted the hills flanking our approach. We made our way through the commercial section of town, dropping passengers off as we went. Our final destination was the tourist quarter, where I was staying. In early November there were far more vendors than tourists. Girls and women of all ages in full Black Hmong get-up roamed the street in packs, pouncing on freshly arrived tourists to hawk small handicrafts.

Restaurants and hotels packed both sides of the street in the tourist quarter. The majority of the restaurants were Italian, French, or Spanish themed with pleasant, rustic-chic interiors, candle-lit tables, and open fireplaces in the dining room. The weather was chilly, but not cold enough to see your breath. Probably between 50-60 degrees F. I asked in at the Luong Thuy Family Guesthouse, where a friend had recommended me, but they were full that night and I was referred up the street to the Tulip or the Pinocchio. I stopped at the Tulip. The owner showed me a simple room for USD 6 / night. There was hot water but no wifi. When I thanked him and said I was just going to check out the Pinocchio, he told me, confidentially, that sometimes the staff at the Pinocchio promised one price and charged you another at checkout. OK, I thought, I’d come back if I saw their noses growing after they gave me a price. I walked over to the Pinocchio and the room they showed me was cleaner and larger than at the Tulip, and they quoted me USD 6 as well. I payed up front and got a receipt. They took my passport, apparently standard procedure at hotels here.

I asked another tourist where a good place to have dinner in town was. She said there was a Vietnamese place right up the street. I stopped in and had my first meal in Vietnam, fried noodles, chicken curry, and a beer. As I was tearing into the noodles, I realized that I actually hadn’t eaten anything since the breakfast of over the bridge noodles I’d had in Mengzi that morning. Perhaps my hunger contributed, but in any case, the fried noodles, flat, translucent, tender, and stir fried with scallions were definitely the highlight of the meal.

The chicken curry was similar to curries I’ve had in Kunming, neither a spicy Indian, nor a savory Thai, but something very bland and middling. I don’t recommend it particularly.

After dinner, I walked around the the tourist quarter a bit. It was dark and slightly hazy, but the full moon had broken through - bright as it was in the sky, it did not particularly illuminate the surrounding landscape. That pleasant surprise would wait for the following morning. Heading away from the tourist quarter and into the town proper, I spotted a French-Vietnamese café that I singled out for breakfast the following day. I walked home along a row of street barbecue joints and was “hello’d” about twenty times along the way by folks eager to sell snacks.

The next morning I walked out of my room onto the sixth floor balcony of the Pinocchio hotel to a stunning view of the highest mountain range in Vietnam. I snapped an early morning panorama of the range.

I headed over to Luong Thuy, dropped my bags, and went out to Gecko, the Vietnamese-French café that I had seen the evening before. The set western breakfast was uninspiring, the omelette was just a fried egg, the toast couldn’t take a buttering, and the mango juice was weak. The coffee, however, and all of the coffee I had in Sapa, was superb.

The next meal I had was street barbecue for dinner. I paid 60k dong, most likely way too much, for two pork kebabs, two veggie kabobs, and two rice rolls - sticky rice stuffed into bamboo and roasted over hot coals.

The next morning I got up and took a walk around the fields just below Sapa and in the shadow of Fansipan mountain. I stopped in at the Royal Hotel for a breakfast of beef pho …

… and spring rolls, which sported impossibly thin, crispy, and translucent skins covering delicious spring roll goodness inside.

For lunch, I sprung for a fancy restaurant, my one splurge meal in Sapa - which set me back 120k dong. It was ground pork and shrimp in a turmeric-seasoned pancake served with a delicious light sauce reminiscent of citrus and a small side salad.

I rode out with a motorbike guide in the afternoon to see a nearby waterfall and mountain pass. On the way back, we passed an older man and a boy, walking down the road with a snake on a stick.

The fact that the stick and string contraption looked designed to keep the snake from striking its captor was a pretty good indication that this was a venomous creature. Nevertheless, I asked my guide on the bike whether or not the snake was poisonous. His English was limited and he didn’t understand the question, so I changed strategies. Pointing at the snake I said, “If it bites you, do you die?” at which point he said, yes, without a doubt, you die. I asked what they were going to do with it. He said “sell it”. My mind flashed back to seeing bottles of liquor with snakes in them (good medicine for “men’s health” issues, I hear) back in Sapa. I asked how much a snake like that would bring them. He responded 100k dong. Again, I felt grateful to be a programmer, and not a snake catcher, risking my life for about six US dollars.

I only stayed in Sapa for four short days, but I have to say that for a tourist town, it really exceeded anything I’ve experienced in China. The highlights of Sapa for me were sipping amazing Vietnamese coffee while watching the sun set from my room’s balcony at the Luong Thuy family guesthouse and taking a walking tour of a Black Hmong village in the valley below Sapa.

I always have trouble dealing with the predatory nature of tourist towns like Sapa. Everything always seems to be geared towards taking money from tourists and it’s hard not to think of some of the behavior as “cheating” or “unfair”. There is some of that going on in Sapa, but on balance, as tourist towns go, Sapa is the best one I’ve ever been to. The vendors seemed uncharacteristically interested in genuine human interaction - even if you didn’t buy they were smiling, enjoying the conversation, and seemed happy just to chat (and they had fantastic English as well). The children were adorable, even when they were trying to sell you stuff and the adults seemed relaxed and happy. I don’t think I ever saw a face that wasn’t smiling during the whole four days I was here. The scenery was top-notch, the weather was perfect, and the food was great. A budget of USD 20-30 dollars per day will get you food, lodging, and entertainment aplenty. I only wish I’d had more time to explore. Chinabites will be back to Sapa.

Escape from Kunming, Vietnam Edition: Spring City to Sapa

posted: Nov. 04, 2009

This is part one of a two part series covering Chinabites’ (only slightly involuntary) border crosing into Vietnam. We cover some of the mundane details of travel in hopes that the information may be of use to other travelers, but loyal Chinabites readers will be happy to see reports of the good eats encountered along the way. Part two here.

About the best that a ne’erdowell American can do these days in terms of a China visa is a year-long multi-entry business visa with a mandatory exit every 90 days. Being required to phsyically exit China every three months is definitely a pain, but I try and think of it as enforcing a healthy regimen of international travel.

Living in Kunming, there are quite a few interesting, affordable options for international travel within striking distance. Yunnan shares a border with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. Thailand and Cambodia are a hop, skip, and a jump beyond those. Possibly the most accessible country is Laos, where, if you are an American at least, you can show up at the border and get a visa on the spot. Good to know if you ever had to flee the country for some reason! A trip to Vietnam, on the other hand, takes about a week of lead time if you’re originating from Kunming.

I’d heard good things about Vietnam from a handful of friends in Kunming. Compared Thailand, or even Laos, however, a relatively low number of people had actually crossed the Vietnamese border. To do so, starting from Kunming, requires a trip to the Vietnam consulate in Kunming, located on the fifth floor of Hongta Tower (红塔大厦). They are open from 9am-12pm and from 2:00pm-6:00pm. You need to bring a 3cm x 4cm photo of yourself, pay RMB 350, and fill out an application. You have to leave your passport with the consulate and then pick it up from them again three working days later.

The Vietnamese consulate in Kunming issued me a month long Visa with a single entry. One tricky thing to note is that the Visa appears to have an “X” stamped on multiple entry, which would lead one to believe that it was a multi-entry visa. In fact, the “X” over “multiple entries” means that this option has been eliminated. Poor visa UI design. I digress.

Once you have your visa in hand, you can head for the border. Hekou is the border town on the Chinese side of the China-Vietnam border. The fastest way to get there from Kunming is by bus along a just-completed highway. You can do it in a straight shot on a day-long or overnight bus, but the border itself closes at 5pm every day, so it’s almost certainly going to be a two day trip from Kunming. I decided not to do the trip in one shot. I broke the bus ride up with an overnight stay in the capital city of Honghe Prefacture, Mengzi. Express buses to Mengzi’s new bus terminal (新客运站) leave from Kunming’s Nanyao Bus Station (南窑客运站) 3-4 times per day. The ticket was RMB 90 and the ride was an uneventful, barely interrupted, five hour straight shot through lightly terraced hills and fields.

Mengzi is quite large, much larger than I expected. The capital building and grounds there are far larger and grander than the provincial capital in Kunming and feature a gigantic golden bull bathed in glorious fountains and slightly less glorious Chinese pop classics, blasted over speakers on the public square.

You can make out the outline of a charging bull, glowing golden, in the center of the fountain.

I took a cab from the new bus station into town, asking the cabbie to take me to a hotel in the RMB 100 / night range. I figured that price (about USD 15) gave me a fighting chance of having wi-fi in the rooms. I was wrong, but that didn’t matter because Mengzi is one of the 285 cities in China that is covered by Unicom 3G! So I just tethered my iPhone to my computer and was emailing away as usual. The hotel, the Guan Bao, was RMB 120 / night (talked down from 150) and pleasant enough, but walking around the neighborhood later that evening I found a couple OK places that had internet in the rooms for about RMB 70 / night. The Guanbao did provide a free breakfast ticket.

Lodging secured, it was time for dinner. There was no shortage of restaurants in the 3 block radius of my hotel that I walked and many were still open at 9pm, putting Kunming to shame. I stopped in at a point-and-shoot mom and pop style “Da Pai Dang”, where I inadvertantly got one of the best meals I’ve had in Yunnan. It started with pork short ribs fried with garlic on a bed of flash fried mint leaves.

And finished with a wonderful hot and sour soup with thick slices of tender, salving taro root to balance to the spice.

All washed down with a cold beer. Pop, of “mom and pop” fame, charged me RMB 25 for the meal, quite expensive, but it really was a special meal and I didn’t want to ruin it by arguing over the seven or eight kuai they overcharged me. I returned home, popping in for about 3 seconds to the hotel bar, where I was immediately jumped upon by a crowd of Chinese men too drunk to speak their own language and all trying to speak mine. Not fancying an evening of being pawed by dudes and forced to do shots of grain alcohol, I returned to my room to do some more 3G enabled emailing. The internet to the rescue again!

The next morning, literally awoken by a rooster (seems to always be a rooster nearby in Chinese cities with populations under 2 million), I blearily stumbled down to what I imagined would be a weak “continental” breakfast of rice-porridge and pickled vegetables. I knew it was going to be a good day when I saw that instead of watery gruel there was a huge, steaming bowl of over-the-bridge noodles, with all the fixin’s, prepared for each guest who came to breakfast. Mengzi is apparently famous for this dish and the Guanbao Hotel didn’t want visitors to miss out.

Full from breakfast, I hopped in a cab back to the bus station ready to head for Hekou and the border, only to find out that the only buses to Hekou left from the old bus station. One long public bus ride around the enchanting and huge Nanhu park later, I arrived at the old bus station and purchased an RMB 40, high speed bus ticket to Hekou. The trip took exactly two hours and deposited us 1 minute from the actual border, a bridge between Hekou and Laocai, Vietnam.

Walking through on the Chinese side was a breeze. I was just a tad bit nervous because I was exiting, somewhat precariously, on the 90th day of my 90 day Visa - if anything went wrong I was facing RMB 500 / day fines. I had actually counted the days out from my last entrance on Aug. 5 to be sure. Speaking Chinese really comes in handy in these situations. Because the math is onerous to calculate, the border guards were lazy and just took my word for it, a courtesy I can barely imagine being extended to a non-Chinese speaking foreigner. One of the border guards was a very enthusiastic young man who wanted to learn English. His name was Sydney and he insisted that we exchange emails. Since he was holding my unstamped passport, I decided that this would be a great opportunity to make a new language partner friend.

Walking across the bridge into northern Vietnam was wonderful. There is no military presense on the bridge itself and no one said I couldn’t, so I took a panorama photo standing in the middle of the bridge on a gorgeous, sunny day.

I walked into the immigration building on the Vietnamese side and the officials there were friendly, but not talkative. I was the only western tourist I saw crossing in the half an hour or so I spent in the bridge area. Having done some reading and Google map work before crossing the border, I knew that aggressive locals would be waiting to offer me great deals on money exchange and rides to wherever I needed to go immediately as I stepped into Vietnam. Sure enough, not 1.5 seconds after I was an arms length away from the official who stamped my passport, Mr. Sketchy was already offering me a motorbike ride to Sapa and did I need to change money? I managed to give off enough “leave-me-alone” vibe that he drifted away after only half a block. I walked about two kilometers, into Lao Cai proper, to find the train station and buses to Sapa.

There was an ATM on the square and I pulled USD 50 in Vietnames Dong out of it with a Visa debit card. There were no mini-buses going to Sapa until the evening train came in at 5:30pm. I decided to cool my heels on the open-air, 10th floor rooftop bar of the hotel directly adjoining the train-station square. It turned out to be a great choice. I killed a 30,000 Dong (USD 2) mango juice and about 2 hours on the roof with a commanding view of Lao Cai and three very friendly Vietnamese waitresses who I peppered ceaselessly with questions about Vietnamese - mostly with the help my iPhone translator because they couldn’t speak any English at all. I learned (and remembered!) to say “You”, “Me”, “go”, “here”, “there”, and “I would like a mango juice, please”. In the process I discovered that they had never been to China, despite living on the border for their entire lives, that they did NOT like Chinese food (booooo…), and that there was a one hour time difference between Vietnam and China.

Finally, the mini-buses to Sapa were coming in and I bid farewell to my erstwhile language tutors. I hopped into a bus full of locals going to Sapa. We stopped in town and picked a few more people up. No one spoke any English. There was a dude with one arm and three members of the Hmong minority in full Black Hmong get-up. We were parked for about 10 minutes outside of an amazing knife-makers shop. Outside of the shop they had a makeshift furnace and anvil. They were heating a bar of iron or steel that was no less than least two inches in diameter almost white hot in the furnace. A man then extracted it with tongs and held it with tongs on an anvil with one hand, while placing a spike on the red hot ingot with another set of tongs. Then a barefoot man would swing a sledgehammer onto the spike while the first man rotated the ingot. The purpose was to create a slug of metal about 2 inches long and two inches around from the iron bar.

The finished knives hung in the foreground. It seemed to me that it would take about a half hour of banging and reheating to finally break a slug off - and it happened that while we were parked he did break one off. It made me glad that I am writing software for a living - beats banging on metal.

The next post in this series will cover arrival in Sapa and the good eats encountered upon arrival! I’ll leave you all for now with a little video showing how to make a knife, the hard way, straight from Lao Cai, Vietnam.