Hotpot

 My husband and I did a lot of travel when we were first married. We mailed our journals back to Canada. Len's dad said, "did you do nothing but eat?"

In 2007 we went to China with our kids. It was the last big trip we took as a family. 

We started in Guangzhou where the girls said, "how is it that there is a city of ten million people and we have never heard of it?" From Guangzhou it was overland to Lijiang, Kunming and finally Chengdu. 

Len and I had been to Chengdu before in 1986. We stayed in a crappy glassed in cold room in an old hotel annex, waiting for a flight to Lhasa with the plan of going onward through Tibet to Nepal and from there to Everest base camp. Which we did. But - Chengdu. We were sick with colds and spent a lot of time in our room drinking "Very Fine Special Old Brandy" which we heated up with our daily thermos of hot water, accompanied by some waxy chocolate. When we ventured out, it was to eat street food and szechuan chicken and buy art that was pinned to string along the streets. Most people rode bicycles or walked or took the bus. Ponies still hauled carts of goods on the roads. Men still wore Mao suits. 

When we arrived with the kids some twenty years later, the city was unrecognizable. Multilane highways and towering buildings and private cars and modern clothing and shopping and crowds. We went to the panda sanctuary. And ate street food. Teased the youngest while he ate his custom made sucker. One day we decided we would compete for who could get to our Lonely Planet-recommended restaurant with one group in a taxi and the other in a tuk tuk. The tuk tuk won but the restaurant was gone. The taxi took us somewhere else. Pre cellphone, we wandered around trying to find each other. Finally we did. We saw a restaurant and went in. It was not a tourist place. Nothing was in English but the girls who worked there were very excited to see us and ran to get their one English speaker. They served nothing but hotpot. The English speaker gave us a rough idea of what to order including the various choices of broth in the two sided pot and then left us with the unsmiling waitress who sternly instructed us in hot pot etiquette. First the thinly sliced meat and fish and dumplings and fishballs, then the vegetables, then the noodles, and finally the broth. All accompanied by sauces. No joking around here. Eating was a serious business.

It was good. It was fun. It was a real Chinese experience that we never forgot.

Hotpot, Chengdu China, July 2007

Salty and Spicy broth.

Years later, after the kids were grown and gone and one was thinking of moving to Malaysia, we took a trip to the Cameron Highlands. Again staying in a budget guesthouse. Our lodging in Tanah Rata was spotless but the nights were cold and rainy. Steamboat was recommended as a way to shake off the evening chill. Darned if it wasn't the same dish as hotpot, minus the divided dish. More tourists at this restaurant but we didn't need instructions this time.

Steamboat, Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. February 2020

And now it's covid. We're going nowhere. Despite our retirement plan of travel travel travel. Not even a Lunar New Year feast. A friend of mine with an Asian son in law posted their hotpot dinner pictures. I bought a cheap pot at Canadian Tire and ordered some spice mixes from T&T and we did our own. Not quite the Chengdu experience. Not the exotic views of tea plantations like Malaysia offered. But still a fun way to stave off the evening chill. 

Hotpot, Fairmont Hot Springs, January 2022

Spicy broth and Mushroom broth

 

So yeah. We aren't roaming so much these days. 

But we can still pretend. And we can still remember.

And I am giving the Fairmont hotpot a solid five stars.