China 2008 trip

Good day to you all,

As you have noticed before keeping my blog going during the China trip didn't really work out due to either a lack of internet or an abundance of errors in Chinese Characters so both prevented me from updating my blog. However now that I just came back yesterday night and I have decided to make a nice summary of every location that we visited illustrated by photo's as they always say so much more than words.

Below you find a list of locations that we've visited in the past 20 days:
- Shanghai,
- Suzhou,
- Huang Shan,
- Wuhan,
- Xi'An,
- Pingyao,
- Taiyuan,
- Beijing.

The coming days I will sort pics etc. and you will see the updates appear along the week.

Shanghai days

Shanghai Report

As you might have noticed, my blog didn't really take off as I wanted. Internet has been a hassle in the hostels, always busy and when it was free the blog gave a chinese error which I could not read and my posts were lost....I'll try to post a few things here and there but forgive me if it doesn't work out....otherwise I will make up for it once I'm back home.

Please enjoy a few of the Shanghai pictures.

Kindest regards,
Jody

- Food
- Foggy view on Pudong
- Circus act that we sort of got into by accident (will explain more later)
- Pudong
- Garden with Pudong on the background

Upcoming China Trip

The Excuse
There has been a silence.....a looooooong silence, but we are back again!! It is not that I have not been active or anything, on the contrary, but I just never really sat down to actually post things. There are still things that 'need' to be reported, such as the follow up of our Chile visit (already a year ago, but I cannot keep those beautiful landscapes unused on my harddisc), more cooking stories (where I've taken pictures of nearly every dish that I prepared over the past year), but first we are going to China!!

The Promise
Coming weekend we will travel to China to enjoy 3 weeks of beautiful food, landscapes, people, etc. Really looking forward to that and I have to be thankful to an old promise me and a friend made already like 6 years ago. When we visited China for the first time with a studytrip we were in Beijing that at that time was an official Candidate City. While they were painting the grass in town green (it was summer and we had a heatwave so not much green happening to impress the committee) we promised to return to Beijing if they were elected to organise the 2008 Olympics. Well now you all know the story and there we go, to Beijing again!!

The Trip
We plan to fly to Shanghai and spend a few days in that cosmopolitan city to enjoy its splendor. After that we more or less want to travel to Xi'An making a few stops along the way such as in Suzhou (many many historic gardens (UNESCO)), Huang Shan (Holy mountain and UNESCO landscape), Xi'An (Terracotta Army again UNESCO monument and some nice things in town), Pingyao (Preserved Ming time walled city where the first bank in the world was stood, guess what? it is an UNESCO site), another stop that is still open, and finally ending in Beijing where we will see what has changed over the past few years and visit some of the olympic events such as athletics, diving, synchronised swimming and BMX bikes.

The Issue
I cannot say how much I am looking forward to returning to one of my favourite Asian countries!! Of course people always remember me that it is the same country that supresses Tibet, etc. but I am not going there for the government or anything, I am going there to enjoy the people, the food, the landscape, etc. And in China, just like in the rest of the world unfortunatly, the government and the people are not the same thing. I also visited San Francisco and not because I agreed with the war in Iraq.

Well I will keep you posted and hopefully will be able to post some pics every once in a while from China.

Holidays in Chile - The first days, Santiago

Hi there to you all!!

I am back again!! Sorry for not posting anything for such a long time, but I here I am again at least for another few hopefully interesting posts. The reason why I am back is that I am on the road again. This time with my gf and my parents on our journey through big parts of Chile (her home soil) and a small part of Argentina. This is my second visit to Chile and my first to Argentina from where I am reporting now. The idea of this journey is to travel in one month from Santiago to the north and then back to Santiago over Argentinian territory with a xmas stop in Tucapel (600km south of Santiago) and perhaps Pucon (beginning of Vulcano and lake district) before we had back to Santiago and The Netherlands. So far we have already had our temperary homes in Santiago, Totoralillo (near La Serena and Coquimbo), Elqui Valley (near Pisco), San Pedro de Atacama (driest desert in the world) then we went into Argentina through the Paso de Jama (+4000mtr above sealevel) where we´d spend the night in Pumamarca. The next day we drove to La Estancía in Colomé (where we are now, a beautiful vineyard in the middle of nowhere) and had a stopover for a few hours in beautiful Salta. Our next stop will most likely be San Juan with a dinner stop in La Rioja after which we will continue our road the next day back to Chilean soil to spend one night in Santiago in order to be able to spend x'mas in Tucapel where her parents now live 600 km south of Santiago. In there we might have some time to visit for instance Pucon-Villarica (more to the south in the district of lakes and vulcanos) before we fly home again. So far we are just over half of the holiday and I must say it has been pretty amazing!! I have seen landscapes I could never have imagened before eventhough I already saw pictures of it....to really experience the landscapes is something very different. So far we drove more than 4000 km and to see the landscapes change so dramatically within sometimes just a few hours is superb and leaves you with a capacity shortage to process all the new impressions!!

However before I go into all of that I want to structure my coming blog by chronology and location. So first of all this first post will be about our days in Santiago (de Chile)!!

We had a smooth flight untill Brasil where we experienced severe turbulence for a few minutes...enough to make my mom go rather sick. On the Airport in Santiago they had an extremely amazing free service, namely she went to the airport clinic where they checked her, gave her drip as she was dehydrated, recipe for pills and observed her for an hour to see if she improved. Luckily she did and the next day she was up an running again!! A big thumbs up and thank you to Santiago Airport!! The parents of my gf came to the airport to pick us all up, supernice to see them again!!

The first real day in Santiago we used a pilot project, the bus turistik. We bought a ticked and you could get on and off the bus at like 17 stops, on the bus there were guides and a audio tour.

Bohemian Barrio Bellavista Mercado Central

Plz. de Armas Salvador Allenda near La Moneda

First impression of Santiago, wooow how green and I mean that even the balconies of buildings are very green!!) We made several stops under such as in bohemian Barrio Bellavista where we stayed for some nice drinks after which we continued our road to the old centre and the Moneda Palace (where the bombs were dropped on Allenda´s office and Pinochet took control to establish his violent dictorial reign). The nice walk lead us from the Museo de Bellas Artes, Park, Marked (where we had the most delicious meal!!) Cathedral - plz. de Armas, etc. Excellent!! In the afternoon we made a nice walk through the neighbourhood of our guesthouse hihihi, the appartement of Nata´s parents, where we see more and more offices being build in a beautiful light style. After our first dinner in a restaurant (coco loco, very nice food again!!) it was time for us to pick up the car and to leave the next day. Instead of a Toyota we got a very nice 4wd Mitsubishi that would accompany us the next month. One thing that also has to be mentioned is that the hospitality in many ways and the nice lunches and dinners at nata´s parents house was beautiful again. A big thanks to them for making our first days really welcoming and homish.

Green Balconies Office Buildings near home

End of Santiago Part.

Let's start cooking Erwtensoep/Peas soup!!

Hi there again!!

Before I thought about aiming the blog more at food and cooking as there has not been a lot of traveling going on lately, so here is the first post.....And what better way to start to adding cooking to the topics on my blog then with a truly Dutch dish!! The Dutch readers must have already recognized the picture and think 'aaaaaaaah Erwtensoep, lekker!!' ('aaaaaaah Peasoup, delicious!!). Indeed I made my first Erwtensoep, let me give you the recipe as I made it.

- Pig leg
- Pig ribs
- Celeriac
- Split green peas (dried, soaked in water overnight)
- Green peas (dried, soaked in water overnight)
- 1 Cube of vegetable broth, 1 cube of beef broth,
- the leaves of a bunch celery
- 1 big carrot
- 2 or 3 potatoes
- 1 big leek
- A couple of bay leave
- 2 smoked sausages

Side dish
- rye bread or black bread (roggebrood), with a type of bacon called Katenspek

So how do all these ingredients come together?? Well it is actually very simple, you just need to have time, as this kind of dish falls under the label sloooooooooooooooooow cooking.....

First one chops the leg of the pig in 2 (it is easiest of course to let the butcher do that), this way the bone really manages to release its flavour. Together with the ribs one puts this in a big pan and adds water so everything is covered and lets this boil/simmer for 2 hours. I then added the peas and the cubes of bouillion and left this to simmer for another hour. Already after leaving this simmer for about 30min with the occassional stir (it is recommendable to use a flame devider or a simmerplate to prevent the peas etc from burning and sticking to the bottom of the pan and to stir every 5min or so), you can see that the peas are really starting to fall apart and releasing the typical fragrance and giving the structure to the soup. Then I added the roughly chopped (cubes of 2 cm) Celariac, big cubes of carrot, bay leaves, chopped leek, and cubed potatoes. To help the soup a little bit in terms of structure I used the blender to wiz the soup up a bit, however I only used the blender on the bottom of the pan as I did not want the carrots and celeriac to be all mashed. The last things I added were the sausages (in slices) that I already heated for 20 minutes in water that was just under a boil (the water should not boil it will make the skin of the sausage crack, which is not what we want) and the celerary leaves roughly chopped. After leaving the soup simmer for a bit more and stirring it a lot the soup was ready to be served together with the bread and bacon on the side. Unfortunatly as we had guests I forgot to take pictures of the end result, but the taste was excellent and very authentic :D

So if you are ever in winterish conditions and want to make a trully rewarding filling soup, consider making Erwtensoup!! They also make this kind of soup in Germany and actually the name of the bacon, Katenspek, comes from German where the Kate part means 'keet' in Dutch, or lower social class simple small house where the bacon was kept to dry.

Erwtensoep together with hot chocolat milk (with rum) are the traditional food you can buy near or on an ice scating ring in Holland in a stand called Koek en Zopie. Koek is cake and zopie comes from 'soopje' signifying a shot of alcohol (in order to keep warm).

That was the end of Dutch culture cooking history class ;)

See you next time with some other dish, maybe asian?

Cheers
Jody

Winter Wonderland

He ho he ho.....

So the last post was already some time ago, but there has not been any traveling going on lately.....so I am thinking about moving the blog more in the direction of cooking....as I like to cook and do make some nice things frequently....So if you are into nice food and cooking, keep an eye on my blog....

But for now there is a different topic on the agenda....SNOW!! :D Finally after many months, which were too warm, winter seemed to have arrived......We had a few cold days which were crowned and also ended with a nice amount of snow!! I was so happy already when I heard the forecast (which I never trust that much....;)) but this time they were right!! As I had to be in town for an appointment I made use of the opportunity to spend my afternoon in the snow in the park that I used to cross daily on my way from home to university....I also have also seen a number of concert in there, Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Marilyn Manson, Metallica.....etc....Obviously it is one of my favourite parks in my old town and it is by far the biggest too. After missing out on snow last year due to me living in Valencia, I now finally saw snow again. In general in the last decade the days we had snow that actually stayed has been declining. Last year there was a lot of snow though, but of course I missed that one....But today was an excellent day, seeing the landscape all dressed in white, just too beautiful. I enjoyed the people walking in the park, walking their dogs, seeing school classes enjoy building snowmen, sliding off the hills, being re-connected to my old town etc...Always nice to see the influence weather has on people, a true winterday in Holland can have the effect of a perfect summer or spring day, everybody was happy.


After this nice time in the park it was time again to get back home......along the way I enjoyed sliding around with the car, playing a bit with the grip, or the lack of grip, superfun although of course also tricky. The next day there was nothing left anymore of the snow......only nice memories and cool pictures.

Untill next time, perhaps in the kitchen ;)

Jody