Day 108: Yangshuo - Cooking & Theatre

Scene from the show
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Sunday is cooking class day, which as its the off season turns out to be a private lesson for just the two of us. Our teacher, Sally, picks us up and first takes us round the local market to primarily for us to see it, but also to grab a couple of ingredients.

The market is quite something to behold, made up of 2 distinct sections. The first is wholesale where farmers sell their wares off rugs on the floor in large quantities, the second the retail supermarket where vendors bag and prepare produce (chop up animals) for the public. Seeing the cuts of meat sold, and the carcasses / live animals being hacked apart in the ‘abattoir’ section makes you realise how far removed Tesco’s puts you from what you’re buying!

Wok a great day!

At the market - love the way its all on the floor on sheets
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Of particular note where:

• A boy walking past with a couple of live geese by the neck
• A motorbike passing with 2 whole barbequed dogs on skewers on the back rack (heads and all)
• Large fish heads still moving despite having been removed from the rest of their bodies many many minutes before

The classes themselves are in the small village of Chao Long, not far from where we’d ended up on our bikes at one point the other day. Class is in a large open plan kitchen able to accommodate 15 students each with gas stove and preparation area (when busy they have another kitchen to use and set up outside to cope with 40+ twice a day).

Ingredients
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Quick cup of green tea and then we begin, our menu today being:

• Assorted pork and vegetable dumplings
• Beer fish (not just a great name but also a local speciality)
• Chicken and cashew nut
• Yangshuo style eggplant
• Bak Choi in Garlic

Both of our attempts tasted good I’m pleased to say, especially as once cooked that was our lunch, and we left with a recipe book to try and recreate such dishes at home (after a quick trip to Leith Walk’s Chinese supermarket I presume). So be warned.

The market
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Attempt number 2 for the light & music theatre show (no idea what else to call it) and they turn up – whoo hoo. This show is incredible, truly amazing. Its set outside in front of twice nightly audiences of 2000+ (even at this time of year) with floodlight karsts as a backdrop and a lake in the foreground providing the main stage. It has something like 500 actors who perform various acts of a love story to song and music whilst all beautifully choreographed on water and land, with impressive light shows, costume changes and acrobatic displays. Very difficult to put into words, other than to say bar the Great Wall of China its the best thing in China. See it if you ever get the chance – apparently it was off the success of this show the director got the job of arranging the Olympic opening extravaganza in August.

Our mini-kitchen workstation (clean at the start)
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Final thing to mention for Yangshuo is that before the show I nailed the basketball level with 146 points at the time out – get in!

Really liked the relative peace and quiet here after the hectic cities, oh well off to Shanghai next.