Xinjiang Trip Day 28 (16-4-2007)
I took a taxi out to Hongye Park, the site of the headquarters of the CCP and KMT governments during the latter part of the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance. There was a large and boring museum on CCP history. More interesting was the former CCP headquarters. There was little in the way of a display, but it was atmospheric to walk around Mao Tzedong’s old office, the radio room from which CCP radio broadcast to the base at Yan’an in Shaanxi, and so on. The old KMT headquarters building, located just down the hill, sat crumbling and neglected, and was not open to visitors.
I asked a few locals where to get a good hotpot and one name that kept cropping up was 秦妈火锅 so I went there for dinner. This shop was recommended for its river front location and for the fact that the hot pots are based on a fresh spice mix. Worried the food might be too spicy I ordered a ‘yuanyang’ pot (鸳鸯锅), or ‘Mandarin Duck pot’, which means a single pot divided into two separate compartments containing spicy and non-spicy soup. There is a popular Chinese belief that Mandarin Ducks remain faithful to a single mate throughout their lives, so in culinary terms yuanyang has become a kind of slang term for various popular combinations of two things. For example in a teashop a ‘yuanyang’ is a glass of milky coffee mixed with tea, while in a budget lunch canteen a ‘yuanyang rice’ is two different stir fried dishes served on rice. The food turned out to be excellent and surprisingly leaned more towards being fragrant rather than numbingly hot. Besides chili oil and Sichuan peppers there were a lot of other unidentified things floating around in the pot. The hotpot base was much better than in Shanghai.
After dinner I went looking for a bar that had been recommended online called DD’s Bar. It was a mission to find but eventually I got there and found the place deserted except for a solitary Australian guy who gave the impression of being a fixture of the place, maybe its only fixture. He seemed delighted to have some company for a change and after finishing a drink in DD’s he suggested going to the more expensive Japanese themed bar slightly further up the hill. The Japanese place had a few more customers, four to be exact, and four girls working there. The customers were all foreign, including a Japanese and a German guy in addition to the Australian an myself. It made for a nice balance, and as the only customer who could talk to the girls much beyond asking for another drink I was probably having the most fun.
A storm began after we had been sitting in the place for a while and steadily built up into a major typhoon type of thing. The girls began worrying that a branch was going to come off one of the trees outside and decided to close the electric shutters at the front of the shop. Within a minute or two of them rolling the shutters down there was a massive thunderclap somewhere nearby and the power went out. There was no other way out of the bar so we were stuck.
Once some candles were found the situation began to look quite appealing. We had unlimited booze, the male-female ratio was perfectly matched and the girls all seemed to love me, and I didn’t exactly have anything urgent I needed to do. As predicaments went this was a pretty good one. Initially it was fun, but as an hour without power stretched to two hours, then three hours, everyone began getting a little frustrated. In the end everyone scattered around the couches in the bar and slept. Finally at 5am the power came back on and we were free.
