Chinese food and art

An article in the New York Times about Chinese food (real Chinese food, not American-Chinese food) in Flushing, Queens, gives you a good idea of the tremendous variety of food found in China. Chinese cooking is both simple and complex – the ingredients are fresh and ordinary, yet the huge variety of ingredients creates complexity (menus have several pages of main dishes), and the staples are made efficiently and quickly, yet there are many ways of turning flour and water into noodles, or countless styles of dumplings.

The restaurants in Flushing seem authentic - the article could just as well be describing mhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gify neighborhood. You find similar food courts and family-owned restaurants in Beijing, where cuisines from every province can be found. Some of the foods described in the article I eat all the time here, such as the hand-pulled “Lanzhou” noodles, the cold noodles with several sauces, cucumbers and cilantro, not to mention the bubble tea. It looks just the same as the pictures and the pull noodles are made in the same way as in the video, so be sure to check out the pictures and video clips along with the article. The prices were interesting to see, too. It’s cheap food for NYC, but it’s even cheaper here (about ¼ of the price or less).

Another recent article surveyed female artists in China. I’ve heard of a couple of the artists (and a couple of the male artists mentioned) and visited the 798 art district mentioned a couple weekends ago (see my pictures here).

With all the attention on Beijing right now, it’s fun to read the media’s perspective on all the sights, foods, and culture that I am experiencing firsthand here.