You have to try Xiaolongbao! - Home Is Where The Plane Lands

The Bike Shop

I’ve been running all over hell’s half acre this past week. While my E-Bike has made it very convenient to get back and forth to work each day, it can be difficult at times because it still works like… a bike. What I mean by that is, you can easily get a flat tire. Or slam into a pothole. Or bend the entire rim of your rear wheel frame.

Early last week I was riding around doing some HR work for campus. Let’s just say the hiring process has been quite the nightmare. It caused me to first miss flying with my family to China, and then wait an extra few weeks just to get there. I don’t think this is a “China” thing; I’m pretty sure its just a “my work” thing. There are a lot of hoops that you have to jump through to be hired in a foreign country, with work permit and visa requirements; then there’s the general onboarding process at your job that you’re probably familiar with as well.

So, going into month here in the PRC, I still haven’t completed my onboarding. Last week I needed to pick up a document from my building, and then take it to the HR building, which if you walk, is 30 minutes away. Taking the E-Bike, made it easier, until I ran over a nail on the way there. I doubt this is uncommon. Things happen, right? Thankfully the leak was a slow one, so I was able to ride to the HR building, then back to my building with no problem at all. I also had an air pump with me just in case something like this happened.

I needed to get the tire patched or replaced though. I can’t just be riding around on a leaky tire all the time. After checking with my colleagues, it turns out there is a bike repair shop on campus. Well, OF COURSE there is a bike repair shop on campus. You can basically throw a stone somewhere in China and it will land where there is something you need. Now FINDING the shop is a totally different story. Google, the global giant of the internet, is all but banned in China. While you can get around this issue at times with a VPN, using Google maps is a different story. You can get the maps app to work, but it’s not very accurate. The regular street view doesn’t overlap correctly with the satellite view. And forget typing in an address and getting what you want. That ain’t happening here, folks.

Thankfully, there’s Baidu – China’s version of Google. Yes, it’s a search engine and has all the other bells and whistles, including a map feature. Unfortunately, its all in Chinese. I downloaded the Baidu Map App to my phone and have been working on trying to figure it out. Thankfully it connects seamlessly with WeChat, and people can just drop a pin from chat and boom there’s a location on your map. One of my colleagues dropped a pin for the bike shop into my map app, and I was on my way. While I had no clue what the nice Chinese lady’s voice was saying for directions, the visual was more than enough to get me where I needed to go.

This was a very busy bike shop. People with bicycles, e-bikes and scooters were coming and going nonstop. I did some translating with my phone and they were able to understand I needed my back tired fixed. After throwing muddy water all over the tire, the seasoned bike repairman found the leak and plugged it… with, I kid you not, what looked like a rusty nail. Obviously, I was dubious about this patch job, but he assured me with nodding and a few thumbs up that all was well. The repair also cost about $2 in USD, so I can’t really complain. All seemed well with my bike so I hopped on and went on my way, thinking I should probably order a new tire online when I got the chance.

End of story? Nope, not in my world! I had a training session that lasted until after dark one night a few days later. Now… my wife, the smart one, has told me numerous times I shouldn’t ride my bike at night, at least not to and from work. It is hard to see, there’s construction everywhere, and I’m a careless E-Bike rider to boot. Long story short, I left work that night and slammed into a pothole. I mean a DEEP pothole. I blew the rear tire and bent the rear wheel frame. I was still a good 45 minute walk from home. I couldn’t ride the bike “bicycle style” because of the bent frame. My only option was to park it… behind some trees near the road, leave it unattended, and then call for a ride. Oh wait… I left my cell phone at home that day. I’m definitely not the smart one in the family. The bus station wasn’t too far away, so I began to hoof it in that direction. A green taxi honked his horn at me a few minutes later, so I hopped in his car and was able to say in Chinese where I live. It’s literally one of a handful of Chinese phrases I can say. He got me home and after a mild scolding from my better half, I went to bed dreaming of how to solve my bike issue the next day.

I took an Uberish car the next morning, and worked out a plan to… have a truck come pick up my bike, have a car come get me at work and take me to the truck that was picking up my bike, then ride in the (very dirty, smelly, nasty) truck to a bike repair shop near where I live. That all worked out fine, I got the bike fixed – a new tire and repairing the frame cost $20. Now I’m back on the road ridin’ dirty and trying not to bike to/from work at night anymore.

Ok, bike stories aside for now. Let’s talk about food. I love it. I’m by no means a foodie though. I’ve lived in some awesome places – Chicago Suburbs, right outside of NYC, The South, Ecuador, The Middle East, so I’ve had the unique opportunity to sample a smorgasbord of foods from all around the globe. I knew China was going to be another wonderful eating adventure and so far it has not disappointed me. If you follow my adventures on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve already seen me posting about the many odd (by U.S. standards) varieties of Lays potato chips I’ve procured and consumed.

While I’m on a pretty strict diet, I will sample pretty much anything that’s offered just to say I’ve tried it. That happened last Friday. Some co-workers ordered food for delivery during lunch and had me sample one of their dishes. The dish in particular was Xiaolongbao.

Xiaolongbao

When you say it, it sounds like “Shau Long Bowel.” To be honest, I’m still not quite sure what xiaolongbao is or isn’t, but what I had on Friday was Chinese Soup Dumplings. Basically, it’s a Chinese style dumpling, but inside of dumpling is soup, usually mixed with pork, or some other beef/chicken stock.

Let me just say – I plopped one of these delectable suckers in my mouth and I was in food heaven. The soup just bursts in your mouth and the combination with the dumpling taste is simply amazing. My co-workers tried to tell me to eat it by pinching a hole in the dumpling with your chopsticks, letting the soup drain into a spoon, then eat the dumpling and drink the soup. That sounded like a lot of extra steps, right? Why not just plop they whole thing in your mouth? They are meant to be a snacking food, they are bitesize, so that’s what did.

Of course, I wanted to go home and tell my wife all about xiaolongbao. I even told her I would go out into town that evening and pick up some. I failed. Miserably. I’d go up to different dumpling type places and ask for “Shau Long Bowel”. They’d shake their head no, look confused, or just laugh at me. I would then show them the Chinese characters for xiaolongbao on my phone. They would then say, “Ohhh… Shau Long Bowel”, saying it THE EXACT SAME WAY I SAID IT. Clearly, I suck at Chinese at this point in my adventures. In any case, I found no xiaolongbao that night, nor the next day when we ate dinner out. We had some kind of dumplings, which tasted great, but weren’t soup

dumplings.

Waiting on my dang soup dumplings.

Finished off the dumplings even though they had NO SOUP FOR YOU.

I dragged the wife and kids through town yesterday morning looking for this mysterious xiaolongbao, and thought we’d finally found some, only to find there was corn inside that dumpling, not soup. Again, the corn version tasted great, but its not what I was after. Final step yesterday – I went to the store and purchased the frozen kind of dumplings to make them myself. The picture on the bag even had a spoon under the dumpling with soup in it. So, I “steamed” them at home (a very cool cooking process btw) and, once again, they tasted lovely but weren’t the SOUP DUMPLING.

Do you have Xialongbao? No? Okay.

The corn dumpling place.

Steaming the wrong dumplings at home.

Final plan – I will make my co-workers order the exact same xiaolongbao they ordered on Friday at the end of the workday, then bring them home to let Alanna have a taste. She better fall in love with them or I will xiaolongbao her in the face, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Edit – Xiaolongbao order successful! I took them home, fed them to the wifey, and now we’re in a food coma. Have a good week.