Oh Spring, where art thou?

It's Monday, 30th March, my day off. I'm sitting at home, wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by piles of used tissues and pouring hot water into myself. Central heating was turned off last week, and our cozy apartment's temperature has dropped by an estimated 30 degrees. At least! I've gotten a bit of a cold just from sitting on the couch in the evenings. It's a farce at this stage, really- we're coming into April, and the temperature's kind of hanging in just above zero. My crazy friend and I recently went to Chaoyang Park to look for the first signs of spring. We ran around the empty park shouting, 春天，您在哪里？ (Chuntian, nin zai nali?) Spring, where art thou? And while he didn't exactly show his face then, we could feel the early signs of the season in the soft rays of sunshine and in the comparatively warm air. It must have been around ten or twelve degrees then. That was three weeks ago, and it's been progressively colder ever since.

Is it the same where you are? I've read reports on European weather behaving just as strangely- is Spring hiding from the crisis, or what?

Anyway, Friday night now-Beijing employee Himself treated me to a nice meal near his new office. We went to this lovely vegetarian place in the Holiday Inn Lido, the name of which escapes me. And, while vegetarian in Europe would probably mean something like mushroom risotto, veggie lassagna or chickpea mash, in China vegetarian restaurants serve so-called meat imitation dishes. That's right, on the menu you'll see all the familiar courses such as Beijing Roast Duck, Gung Bao Chicken and Hangzhou fish, except that none of them contain any duck, chicken or fish. Not that you'd know, anyway- these dishes recreate the smell, taste, colour, shape and texture of meat and fish with dazzling accuracy. I had this thing that looked, smelled, felt and tasted like a German Mettwurst, and our "sweet-sour-bitter-spicy fish" didn't only exuberate precisely those flavours, but looked and tasted exactly like (filleted) fish. (Of course, both were really doufu, but you sure couldn't tell the difference!) Now personally I'm not a massive fan of all the notion that vegetarians need to be given something that at least looks like meat (I never even bought any of these Quorn products when I was living in Ireland). My stance is that we (vegetarians) know what we want and get what we need, and I think that in vegetarian cooking, the vegetables should speak for themselves. That said, the food was genuinely delicious! It was so nice, in fact, that I even felt a little guilty for breaking my vegetarian vows as there were moments when I simply couldn't believe that I really wasn't eating a dead creature.

Of course, silly me didn't take any pictures, and I haven't been able to find any good pictures online. Just imagine the sliced portions of meat you get at your local Chinese, except made from Tofu.

I shall take a few photos next time though, as we're definitely going back. For now, our only souvenirs of the place remain the two wooden spoons that Himself nicked. Ah well.

Bis dann,

Nadine