Month: August 2020

“Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.” – Jonathan Swift

While most things are almost back to normal in China, travel remains one aspect of life that is still suffering a large Covid-induced impact. Only a handful of Asian countries have opened their borders to tourism and China’s current restrictions mean that if I do leave the country, I won’t be able to get back in for, perhaps, months. Before Covid, I had gotten used to traveling internationally every other month but now I’ve been stuck in my adopted city of Qingdao since early February. I’m really feeling that itch to travel and among all the places I’ve been, I think I miss Vietnam the most.

Vietnam is an absolutely beautiful country with tremendously friendly people and possibly the best food in all of Asia, although Malaysia could make a good argument. I’ve been to Vietnam now three different times and have spent quite a bit of time in the south, central highlands, and central coast. On my last trip, I had the great pleasure to visit a coffee farm on Langbiang Mountain in the Central Highlands and it was one of the highlights of my time in Vietnam.

The coffee tree was introduced to Vietnam by the French in the 1800s and the central highlands have proved a perfect place to cultivate them. So much so that Vietnam now ranks just behind Brazil as the second largest coffee producer in the world. While they do produce some fine Arabica coffee, the type of coffee is mostly sold in coffee shops where the drinker is able, usually, to delineate different flavor profiles, they also produce the most Robusta coffee in the world. This is the type of coffee that is often used in instant coffee mixes and typically drank by local Vietnamese, although usually with condensed milk (ca phe sua da) or, my favorite, an egg yolk (ca phe trung).

My Vietnamese friend, Chrisstyna, and I set out early one morning for the 30-minute scooter ride from Da Lat through the highland mountains of Lam Dong to the K’ho Coffee Farm. The most common mode of transportation used in Vietnam is the scooter. In cities like Saigon, they are ubiquitous, as abundant as taxis in New York traffic. Luckily, the traffic in the mountains isn’t as bad and we had a clear ride, winding through the mountains.The K’ho are an ethnic minority group in Vietnam that live in the Lam Dong mountains. Many are coffee farmers.

The K’ho Coffee Farm is run by Rolan, a fourth generation coffee farmer, and her husband, Joshua, who wasn’t there on the day we took our tour. Rolan was extremely warm and welcoming and brewed us a cup of hot coffee immediately on our arrival. She then walked us down a hill to start our tour, passing through rows of coffee trees. Coffee grows likes cherries on a tree and a few were ripe enough to pick off and taste.

From the trees, Rolan and another guide walked us through every step of the coffee process. We were even able to take our coffee through that process and eventually roast it, using a few different methods. We tasted a dozen or so coffees and were taught how to detect the flavor profiles. As a coffee snob who thought he knew all there was to know about the elixir of life, I was amazed at how much I didn’t know about it.

The tour lasted throughout the morning and at noon, we walked back to the cafe where we had begun our tour. There we were served a traditional K’ho lunch and relaxed on the veranda. Rolan even played us a tune on the t’rung, a traditional bamboo xylophone.

On the way back to Dalat, we stopped off in the mountains for one more cup of coffee. This time, it was the famous weasel coffee, Kopi Luwak. Weasel coffee is actually a bit of a misnomer, however, as in Vietnam it is the civet cat that eats the coffee cherries and defecated them back out to be roasted. Yes, some of the most delicious, and expensive, coffee in the world comes from the excrement of these adorable varmints, although I’m really curious as to who was the first person who thought it was a good idea to try it!

Two weeks ago, movie theaters opened in my city for the first time since they were closed in January in response to COVID-19. With no new films to show, as those have almost all been released in on-demand streaming services, theaters have been running previous blockbuster hits, both western and Chinese: Harry Potter, Zootopia, and what has been jokingly referred to as the start of “Christopher Nolan Season” Inception and Interstellar (His newest film, Tenet, is due to open in China on September 4.) have been the biggest hits. Today, I went to the cinema for the first time in six months to see the highly regarded Chinese animation, Ne Zha, one of last year’s biggest films that I had missed.

Cinemas were given strict guidelines in order to reopen and I noticed the difference right away. I went on my app to purchase tickets, almost no one in China buys tickets at the box office because the app is not only more convenient but cheaper, and found that for the first time it was asking to verify my phone number and passport number before I was able to purchase tickets. This is the first step in being able to track everyone that is going into the theater, in case someone does test positive, everyone that was at the theater at the same time will be tracked down, tested, and incubated until the tests come back negative.

Upon arrival at the cinema, I signed in at the front desk that sits at the lobby entrance. There they took my temperature and checked my health code – since early March, everyone has been required to keep an up-to-date health code app on their phone that will scan in real-time to show if we have been in the vicinity of anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19. Luckily, my health code was green and my temperature normal, and I was allowed into the theater.

Unfortunately, one of the precautions being taken is that masks are required at all times inside the theater. As a result, the concessions stand is closed and you must finish any food or drink before you enter the theater. Another rule, one that is much more pleasing, is that only every third seat can be sold, so you must have a buffer seat on either side of you. Once the feature starts, an usher will often watch the front to make sure you obey the mask rules and if you’ve been able to sneak in some food or drink, they will ask you to take it outside.

At this point, I’d like to give a review of the film but after jumping through all of those hoops, once the film started, I quickly realized there were no English subtitles. I tried to follow it for about fifteen minutes but couldn’t understand enough of the Chinese, unfortunately, and left. Now, I’m just hoping that none of the other half-dozen people at the screening tests positive for COVID-19. I’d hate to be tracked down and incubated for a movie I didn’t even see!

Lately, the dog days of summer are really getting to me. Each day brings ridiculous heat topped off by unbearable humidity. Days like these make me think back to cooler temps. Much cooler temps. Temps around -20 degrees. Those were the daily highs when I spent my Christmas holiday in Harbin two years ago.

Harbin is a cold but bustling city in the Dongbei (literally “east north”) region of China, close to the Russian border. From late spring to early autumn, it is mostly a farming community, having the most nutrient-rich soil in all of China, but for the majority of the year, it is a frigid but beautiful metropolis. There is a Russian influence throughout the city from the architecture to the cuisine to the toughness of the people.

Our reason for going up there in the middle of winter, where you can witness the centigrade and Fahrenheit scales meeting at a balmy -40 degrees, was to witness first-hand some of the most beautiful snow and ice sculptures in the world. For the past 57 years, the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival has attracted bundled-up tourists from all over the world to see buildings made of ice and intricate snow sculptures that often stand several stories tall. Words can’t do them justice, so I’ve included some of the best below.

While the sights are certainly breathtaking, it requires an effort to get around and see everything. Despite wearing five layers of clothing, the night is so cold that you can only stay outside for about 30-45 minutes at a time. Scattered throughout the festival grounds are warming tents where you can duck inside, have a beer, and stand next to a fire, or at least an electric heater. In one of the tents, they even had some arctic wolves there to keep you company inside of a cage made of ice.

After our days and nights of walking around in the freezing cold, we were able to find some great Russian and Chinese restaurants, both serving hearty food to warm our bones. We feasted on a Christmas Dinner of twice-cooked pork, tofu, a collection of root vegetables, pork belly, and delicious chicken soup.

It’s been called Asia’s Oktoberfest and is one of the largest beer festivals in the world. This time of year in Qingdao always means the kickoff of the 24-day beer festival, where more than 1,400 beers will be available to taste at any one of the three major venues in the city.

Qingdao has a rich beer history going back to when the city was occupied by the Germans from 1898-1914. The Germans introduced their drink to this area of China and even established the Tsingtao Brewery in 1903, which has gone on to be China’s most well-known beer export.

I’ve been to the Beer Festival in each of the three previous summers I’ve been in Qingdao and it’s always a good time. The main campus for the Festival is held out in Huangado, a district that lies across the Jiaozhou Bay and almost feels like traveling to another city. Near the famous Golden Sand Beach, a small city the size of an amusement park is erected to host the Beer Festival, which runs every day from July 31- August 23. There are dozens of tents offering up different beers, food, and entertainment.

The entertainment runs from traditional Chinese dances, to live calligraphy painting (as exciting as it sounds), to Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics, to beer-chugging contests, to drag shows, to live bands. Back in 2017, I saw Pittsburgh-originals Squonk Opera perform outside the main tent with their 50-foot-tall inflated Lady Pneumatic towering above the crowd.

Even with over 1,400 beers to chose from, the choices are unfortunately quite disappointing. While most beer festivals exist to showcase the smaller breweries, the Qingdao Beer Festival is all about the macro-beer labels. Budweiser, Becks, and Heineken are out in full force, as are many of the other massive international breweries. These breweries control the majority of the taps and you have to look long and hard to find something you wouldn’t be able to pick up any supermarket. The best place I’ve found for these is inside the German tents, which often carry many of the country’s smaller labels that are often difficult to find outside of Germany.

The strangest thing about the festival experience is that you soon realize that only a small percentage of people are actually drinking. It seems most of the Chinese just show up to people watch or take in the entertainment. Entire families will take over a table, usually bringing their own food. The children will run around close to naked in the sticky summer heat while dad might enjoy a pitcher or two by himself because, while most of the patrons aren’t drinking, the ones that do imbibe are more than making up for it.