Würzburg, Germany

Sorry for abandoning my blog for more than three months! In the past three months I was focusing on my real major - piano - and was preparing for an international piano competition focusing on the works of J S Bach. Bach's music has been closest to my heart since my early childhood, so this was a challenge that was as pleasurable as it was challenging. Since I didn't have the foresight to start preparing sooner, in the past three months I had to spend all the spare time I had practising the pieces for the competition. The actual competition took place in March in Würzburg, central Germany in mid-March:

In the event, I got to the semi-finals. I was very nervous on stage and hardly played my best. In retrospect, even if I had played my best I doubt if the judges would have chosen me as a finalist. It turned out that they had rather dogmatic tastes and my style wouldn't be what they were seeking.

The former bishops's palace, opposite the music school

I hadn't heard of Würzburg prior to this competition, but it is a very beautiful city in Bavaria. Despite the devastating bombings in the Second World War, one could feel an unmistakable link to Germany's glorious cultural heritage.

Beijing 4

While my trip was mostly about eating and more eating, I did do some obligatory sightseeing... It was mainly strolling down the alleys of traditional Beijing in the east side of the city and visiting the Imperial Palace which is right behind the Tianamen Square.

Due to its highly political past - think of the 1989 student revolution - there were many state officers and policemen patrolling the square. It was a tense atmosphere and I felt there and then that China was still very much an authoritarian regime. How long will it take for China to wake up to a more liberal society?

I really am not trying to be difficult here, but I've always felt much closer to the Greco-Roman civilisation than my own - namely Chinese. I was still taken by the grandeur of this complex of palaces that was the seat of the Ming and Qing dynasties, but I didn't have the shiver of beholding the Parthenon in Athens or the Forum in Rome. I like to persuade myself that I must have lived in that part of the world in one of my past lives haha! With that in mind, I do think that ancient Chinese cuisine must have been greater than Greco-Roman fare...

Beijing 3

I'm not really a breakfast person, but since I was blissfully jet-lagged, I could actually wake up in time for breakfast while I was in Beijing. I went to a stall specialising in 燒餅 recommended by a friend of mine. It's basically a savoury crepe with a filling of eggs, spring onions, a crispy wafer and ham or sausage if you pay extra. It is a very traditional breakfast item in Beijing and is usually sold at stalls in the street in the early mornings. The crepe batter could be made from mung beans, buckwheat or other sorts of grains, and you also get to choose what sort of sauce you want: sesame (麻醬), fermented red tofu (南乳), fermented soybean paste (黃醬).

Verdict?  was already cold by the time I went back to the hotel, and the crispy wafer had became sad and limp. I think I still prefer a sweet crepe...

Beijing 2

If there's one dish that's most inextricably linked with Beijing, it's got to be Peking duck. I'm a sucker for any roast meat with a crispy skin, so you can imagine how much I anticipated eating Peking duck in Beijing. I was taken to a local restaurant for a casual lunch one day, and I had the best Peking duck ever. The skin was dry, crisp and not excessively oily, and the flesh had a nicely earthy flavour to it (the duck fat helped obviously!). The wrapping skin that accompanied the duck was disappointing though.

There were many unusual accompaniments to the duck including pickled radish and haw jelly. I heard that this was a trend set up by the upscale peking duck restaurant Da Dong 大董烤鸭.








Da Dong restaurant also popularised dipping duck skin in sugar which was supposedly Qing dynasty concubines' favourite way of eating them. It was certainly interesting, but dare I say a judicious sprinkling of fleur de sel would have taken it to a high level altogether...

Beijing 1

Even though I have been to quite a lot of provinces in China, this is my very first visit to Beijing. First thing I saw as I stepped out of the plane was a coffee shop:

Correct me if I'm wrong - but I can't imagine coffee shops to be so ubiquitous in China ten years ago. With its increasing status quo and wealth, China has lost no time devouring Western consumer goods - including coffee.

Being the capital of the Qing dynasty, Beijing (and northern Chinese cuisines in general) food has been influenced non-Han traditions, especially Muslim. While pork is the most common meat throughout China, lamb is very common here. The most celebrated way of eating it is to blanch paper-thin slices of lamb or mutton in a hotpot. A friend of mine took me out to one of the most traditional places for Beijing-style hotpot (涮羊肉):

南來順

All sorts of snacks are sold here as well

The greenish-grey liquid on the left is worth of mention here. It's called 'bean juice' 豆汁. Remember those thin vermicelli (粉絲) made from mung beans? If you ferment the water leftover from making the vermicelli, you're left with this sour, kind of foul-tasting beverage that traditional Beijing people drink at breakfast time. You're meant to dip the crispy wafer and spicy pickle at the bottom of the photo into the drink so that you experience sweet, sour, bitter and salty flavours all at once. The challenging taste of bean juice is legendary, and I had wanted to try it for donkey's years. Verdict? It's best left for discerning locals...

The traditional kind of hotpot used in Beijing-style hotpot - a fluted copper pan. The soup base is simply water with leeks, red dates and goji berries.

There were only two of us, so a feast was out of the question. We ordered lamb and beef intestines in their natural colour - black. The white variety you see in Cantonese dim sum is actually bleached.

Sesame paste is the common dipping sauce here. As I would experience in the next few days, saltiness predominates in northern Chinese cuisine, and they hardly use much sugar in their cooking. I like my savoury food to have some sweetness to it, and if I were to make my own dipping sauce I would have added sugar to the sesame paste as well... As it is it's too salty for me.