WETLANDS 2012 2

川菜 Sichuan Food, Best On Earth

It’s Sunday morning and I just finished doing the dishes from yesterday’s Sichuan food blowout extravaganza wonder party. Chilli oil tastes wonderful but is a bugger to get off plates and worktops. But it’s worth the pain – it’s Sichuan food! (川菜，chuen choi, River Vegetable.) River? Yes 川, Chuen, is shorthand for 四川, (Sei Chuen, four rivers).

All the cuisines of China are called Something Choi, the choi 菜, vegetable, also meaning dish or course. Normally the cuisine is named after one of the words in the name of the province, like Fai (徽） for On Fai (安徽 Anhui) and Sou （蘇） for Gong Sou （江蘇 Jiangsu）But for some cuisines they use the ancient, one syllable name of the province, from when it wasn’t a province but a kingdom like 湘 (Seung) and 粵 (Yuet) for Wu Lam (湖南 Hunan) and Gong Dong （廣東 Guangdong) respectively.

So yes, even I have to admit there are some intricacies about the Cantonese language and not all ‘learn it in five minutes without really trying’. But as soon as you know two to three hundred characters everything will reveal itself.

And talking about food and Chinese characters, this is what happens when you translate Chinese transliterations word by word:

Can you guess it? Answers to this website.

And: Take a crash course in ordering from the Chinese menu this week! You’ll thank me for it later. Around 2023.

A Delicate Piece Of Medical Advice

Hong Kong’s airport – don’t you just love it? I do. It’s so so airport-y! I had been looking forward to spending a couple of hours there before my flight to Mexico (I’m now in Mexico! Wooooooo!) but Lantau’s taxis had other plans. They have decided not to be around in the mornings; apparently they just want to drive people from Tung Chung to Cathay City from 07:00 to 09:00. Who knew? Oh, that’s right, everyone except me.

So I barely had time to dash through the airport with hardly a glance at a shop. The thought of missing planes makes me nervous and I can’t rest properly before I’m at the gate. There was also another issue. A delicate issue which caused me a lot of hand-wringing, to put it mildly. Last time I flew to the USA, I suffered three days of constipation afterwards. I tried ‘special’ teas, I tried walking, I tried drinking lots of hot water, eating fibrous stuff – nothing. It was such an awful feeling, like being poisoned from inside.

And this time I would get straight onto another flight without respite. Ahrrghhh, what to do?

I’d like to say it was this lovely lady who saved me from embarrassment with a flick of her wand, but she was too busy pushing moon cakes on unsuspecting tourists. (I can’t say for sure, but I imagine moon cakes wouldn’t exactly alleviate constipation?) No, the electric internet it was that had the answer.

Constipation is caused by dried-out intestines. Alcohol dries out the intestines. Therefore drinking lots of white wine and little water (because asleep) on a long flight is not smart. It should be the other way around.

Also, a good exercise is sitting down and lifting one knee up to your chin 20 times, then the other 20 times, etc, until you feel you don’t need to do it anymore. I followed both pieces of advice and what do you know! Great success. It was boring though, not drinking wine on the flight. Especially seeing United Airlines – gasp – don’t have individual TV screens at the back of the seats! But health is the most important thing. Good health, I mean. Not bad.

機場 (Gei cheung – machine park/airport)
羊咩屎 （Yeung mee si – goat bleat shit/constipation)
墨西哥 （Mak sai goh – Mexico)

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