I haven't blogged for some time due to a variety of reasons, not one of the least being that I haven't really gone out to eat much interesting stuff lately.  It has been a lot of same old same old recently due to work and financial constraints.  So I thought I might as well save the writing for something truly amazing.  And yes, something pretty interesting did turn up eventually - a nice navigational deployment to Qingdao, China to attend the PLA-Navy's 60th Anniversary Fleet Review.  And yes, that meant five of us including three of my courses-mates depicted above - Josephine, Neville and Pravin (trying to shake the salt water out of his ears) - plus MAJ Sylvan our course instructor, we piled into 1 X frigate and sailed up and up and up and up which got colder and wetter and foggier.  But finally, after enduring not so few hours of bad sea state (something like in the mural in the above picture) ... 

We suddenly found ourselves in Qingdao, No。55 Nanjing lu (南京路), drenched, stinky-socked, in this place called De Heng Roasted Duck Shop, 德恒烤鸭店.  Ok, it wasn't really a 'shop', more like a traditional Beijing kind of restaurant set in a building that had the facade of a Shaolin temple, complete with a couple of the usual stone lions guarding the entrance.  So you enter and you're instantly greeted by rows and rows upon counters of plastic food (yes, the kind you usually find outside a japanese restaurant) and tanks of fresh seafood.  And just to put things into context, we were ravenous.  We arrived in Qingdao, the supposed Marseille of the East, famed for its fine weather, seafood beaches and European architecture, in dense fog and slow, never-ending, rain.  Plus we had only six night hours to squeeze whatever touristy stuff out of the city before jetting back home the next day.  So we just hopped into a cab, rattled off a few street names recommended to us, and somehow found ourselves at Nanjing lu, which ironically, wasn't really our final destination at all.

But anyhow, let's proceed on to the food and i'll fill in the details as we go along:

The first dish was actually a rather pleasant surprise.  We had chosen a few prawns from the tanks and asked for some recommendations.  So the waitresses rattled off something incomprehensible and we just nodded in agreement.  So tada, we have here stir-fried gingko nut, papaya and prawn.  It was a nice combination I felt.  The prawns especially, was unlike any prawn I've eaten, they were pale-white when cooked and tasted somewhat exquisite, almost like crystal prawns.  And the prawns went well with the gingko and papaya for some strange reason.  Sliced onions added the familiar taste to this dish.  I think this dish is a very typical north-east China dish, or what some might know as Shandong cuisine or 鲁菜 lu cai.  It is usually characterised by light flavours and soups.  So in this dish and a few others below, you don't find the typical ginger, oyster sauce and dark soy sauce (Our Singaporean cuisine ... derived largely from Cantonese and Teochew influences) 

Next came another specimen from the tanks - octopus or what the Chinese call 八带.  Once again, very nicely stir-fried Shandong-style, with leeks, spring onions and black fungus.  Because these are live-caught, the meat was just awesome.  It had the crunch and bite you would never find in the typical Japanese restaurant in London or Singapore.  Also, I'm quite intrigued that they used orchids as garnishes which are pretty expensive and something you might expect at a more posh restaurant than this.

And then came the bomb, the Buddha Jumps Over the Wall aka 佛跳墙, fo tiao qiang.  I've never tried this dish, although so famous, before Qingdao.  I've always been regaled by accounts of the culinary treasures thrown into this veritable stew and I was about to find out!  So in it are quail eggs, white fungus, shark's fin, abalone, scallops, turtle and lots of other seafood cartilege I couldn't identify!  To be eaten with vinegar.  Beside the fo tiao qiang, is the famous Sichuan 麻辣 mala hotpot of tofu and pork slices - made from lots of oil, fried chillies and Sichuan peppercorns.

On the left was my personal special dish because the rest weren't too keen on poking around in a spiky bowl - sea urchin steamed with egg.  It was quite tasty and the texture was slightly rougher than your average steamed egg or 水蛋 you find at the chap chye peng stall.  But I enjoyed the addition of a slight bit of soya sauce and sesame oil.  On the right is the fo tiao qiang stew.

Here is something quite commendable: 翡翠虾饺 or crystal skin prawn dumplings.  It had a good bit of chinese chives inside which I quite enjoyed.  Although the skin was a little thick, there were good amounts of well-seasoned pork and prawn meat inside.  But truth be told, after all the china food scares, I was a little apprehensive about ordering stuff with blended unseen ingredients.

One of the freshest fish you can find, from the temperate waters of Qingdao, to the fish tanks, to the chopping board, guts pulled out, scales scrapped and into the steamer.  This 海铺黄鱼 came steamed in what we might know as Hong Kong style, with soya sauce, a bit of sesame oil, springs onions and ginger.  I think it is a species of grouper. By golly, once you taste the fish here, you might even turn your nose up at Ah Yat's live seafood.  This is a classic example of extremely fresh food cooked simply.

The second fish we ordered is what they called 斑加吉鱼.  I've never come across anything like this and I think its a type of flounder.  The cooking style here is what they called 清蒸 or plain steaming.  The sauce is actually thickish and has a mild flavour of fish stock.  The fish meat texture takes some getting use to though, a little bit tough but not as tough as shark's meat.  There was plenty of meat on this bugger.  But I think I enjoyed the first fish more though.

And then finally came The Duck.  We had to order this the very moment we stepped into the restaurant as the waitresses told us that it would take about an hour to prepare the duck.  So we have all heard of the famous Peking Duck.  And I was about to try it first-hand as close proximity to Beijing as I will ever be.  So this dude carves the duck most expertly - first he carves five little slivers of skin from the rear of the duck, near the bishop's nose.  You can see the five pieces of skin in the picture above.  Then from the same area, he cuts out five pieces of the tenderest meat.  So each of us was served with one piece of skin and one piece of meat each.  As explained by our waiter, you eat the skin dipped in salt and the meat dipped in plum sauce.  Certainly made for interested dining.

And then the rest of the duck is carved up and eaten with gusto with the traditional flour pancakes, spring onions, cucumbers and peking duck sauce.  I also liked picking at the duck head (I have this Anthony Bourdain-esque tendency to eat the strangest and most perky flavoured things), going especially for the tongue and eyes.

After serving us the duck proper, the waiter asked us how we wanted the bones cooked.  For those not familiar, this is the usual practice for Peking Duck.  The meat and skin are carved out and served while the remnants are taken back into the kitchen and prepared into another dish.  Once again, in vain attempt to introduce the style we wanted our duck remants prepared, the waiter rattled off some machine gun mandarin which we couldn't catch so we nodded our heads obediently and smiled in agreement.  And tada! out came this quirky mess.  It was kind of dubious at first, compounded by the fact that you could see the odd wingtip and neck sticking out here and there.  But I just took a bite and ooh! heaven - waht they did was to cook the remnant duck pieces in spiced salt and flour and deep-fried the whole batch.  It was truly amazing and ended the meal with quite a bang. 

I studied the Qing dynasty, its fall and the resulting "one hundred years of colonialism" while I was nerding around in LSE.  Reports of how the Empress Dowager Cixi and all the confucian gentry corrupted and squandered country and riches were pretty well-documented.  In culinary terms, this can be embodied in the famous 满汉全席 or the Manch-Han (Han Chinese were and still is the dominant ethnic group in China) Imperial Feast.  This gastronimic orgy usually consists of over three hundred dishes, held in six banquets over three days.  So after our Qingdao dinner, I thought I had unconsciously gone through a mini imperial banquet ... maybe incomplete due only to the absence of roasted bear paw with tiger penis tartare or braised monkey brains in superior whale semen broth.

And the best thing, you wouldn't believe the price we paid per person for all of of the above, a measly, beggarly, thievely, S$35 per person.  That wouldn't even get you a half-decent buffet at the Ritz.

Finally as an encore, as if all of that gorging was not enough, we headed to Beer Street, Pi Jiu Jie, for a drink.  Just to mximise the last hour of our remaining time.  You CANNOT go to Qingdao without having some Tsingtao beer.  On the way in to the port, we were talking to the harbour pilot who told us, at all costs, to try Tsingtao beer from No. 1 Factory.  Why? Because it is only at that factory that the beer is brewed with spring waters from Laoshan, 崂山, the Taoist-revered mountain, the birthplace of Taoism.  And then of course, for the liver-killers, there is the little business of Gaoliang, 高梁, the famous Chinese and Korean liquor, a clear distilled liquid made from Sorghum, responsible for many a drunken stupor.  This Red Star Kaoliang featured here is, quite fortunately, only 53% proof so that Pravin and Sylvan's cigarettes did not result in a catastrophic explosion.  But STILL, the 53% was burning, you could feel the warmth sliding down your oesophagus and killing your stomach cells on the way down and then the permeating stuff entering your head.  Jo, very wisely here, carries her handphone.

So that about ends our short night in China.  What a pity.  We got to see a lot more on the way to airport and on the flight though.  But probably I'll tell you guys more in due time.  Suffice to say, I was surprised that we were treated very cordially and friendly by all the locals, even with our Chinese-looking faces but screwed up Chinese vocabulary and weird Singapiorean accent.  And the streets and toilets were clean, they were almost spotless I must say.  And their buildings were neat and tidy and modern.  All of these ,no doubt, legacies of the 2008 Olympics which Qingdao hosted together with Beijing.  Oh and did I mention the *almost* SIA-like service and food on China Eastern airlines?  Make no mistake about it, Old Lee was right when he indignantly insisted we learn more mandarin - The Chinese are building up one big-ass empire of their own. 

The drive, determination and ambition are unmistakable.