Lianyungang

[DylanK]

Lianyungang is two hours away on the train. Sort of a budget-budget-budget Qingdao, maybe even a budget Weihai. Really cheap, lots of good food.

My friends and I used to take the train down in the winter a lot. We could stay in a hotel room that we could never afford during the summer's high tourist season and we'd drink too much at fancy seafood restaurants and take a taxi out to the ocean and stroll on the sea wall and freeze.

The first time we ever went was the first snowfall of the year, big fat flakes falling as overnight and all morning. In Lianyungang, we ate big fat red strawberries coated in hot, hard sugar and purple-black fermented tofu deepfried and covered with chili sauce and California rolls from a place on the street with actual genuine Miracle Whip.

We found a restaurant that looked old enough, full full full of aquariums. We got toasted on bai jiu and ate razor clams and black beans, skinny, spiny crabs, squid. Halfway through the meal, the door flew open and a big, almost fat man pushed his way across the restaurant, knocking over tables and chairs and people. He barged into the kitchen and came out with a massive cleaver, which he held above his head and went back outside again. Everyone in the restaurant followed. We stood on the steps of the place and watched the big man with the cleaver take off running, swinging with the knife, until he was out of sight. We went back to eating and drinking. An hour or so later, a little boy pushed open the doors of the restaurant and brought back the cleaver.

I love Lianyungang.

The city is divided into three areas, the old city, the new city and the island.

The old city is standard coastal Jiangsu, big wide streets and everything built in the last five years, etc.

The new city is resorts and conference centers and apartments being built.

The island is beaches and ruins.

Breakfast every morning. Advertised as North Korean noodles but sorta basic summery fen noodles like everywhere, cold and sweet and sour and spicy, dressed with crushed chili and vinegar and sugar and MSG and seaweed and cucumber.

Lunch is transparent potato starch noodles in a greasy, spicy, sour soup.

Or more cold, spicy noodles with bean curd sponges and a bottle of Sprite.

In the new city, we went to eat at the seafood market. It's a long, skinny barn lined with aquariums, selling everything in the ocean: crabs and oysters and scallops and prawns and squid and octopus and sea urchin and sea guts and big ugly fish. Restaurants are set up behind each bank of aquariums. Not really restaurants: a room with two chairs, perfectly tableclothed and napkined and chaired, beautiful. Hawkers stand in front of each block, yelling for you, in Mandarin, Russian, English ("Come and eat lunch! Come and eat lunch!") to eat at their joint, ready to negotiate the price on a couple scallops, calling you over to show you something special, unique.

The island off of Lianyungang is half bright shiny beach resort and half decay. Around the beaches, everything fresh and scrubbed and then, as you take the road around, smashed, destroyed fishing villages on land now owned by developers waiting to have hotels and apartments and condos built.

That island is one of my favorite places in the world.

Like the coast of Spain, when I was a kid. That kind of feel to everything. Rundown, shitty, beautiful resort, where everything, everything, everything was colored faded butterscotch. Everything set aside for a long time. The little room full of worn furniture. A dry, cracked up cement swimming pool, where every day we checked on the progress of a baby bird being devoured by big red ants in the wading pool. Vacationing British sitting on lawnchairs outside the English-style pub, translucent skin sizzling. Sun, sand, surf. The stucco painted with the same butterscotch pudding, faded and faded. The beds that smell like mildew, seafood, detergent. Bootleg satellite-fed TV with six channels, mostly in Cantonese. The only staff we meet a woman from Guangzhou with almost no voice, soft, deep inside her throat, and an oily sheen of make-up and sweat on her face. Deep grooves, softly rounded chips in most of her front teeth, from cracking sunflower seeds. She asks us when we check where we're from and tells us that she once had a Japanese boyfriend and later comes to bring us a Thermos of boiled water.

The island's small enough that you can walk around it in an hour.

There's nothing on it but strange tower of sideways, diagonally stacked rock strata, wild trees with naked roots grasping thin air, reaching down cliffs, a few faded resort hotels built forty years ago, beige, a few fishing villages, still healthy, full of dramatic stone houses built like a game of Jenga on a bare, absolute sheet of rock that runs straight into the sea, brown boats bobbing with their red People's Republic flapping.

There are a few fishing villages, abandoned, the same collections of brick and red tile roof houses between cliff and ocean, crumbling, except for the occasional holdout with its minor signs of life, some shirts drying on a line or a half-herd of skinny goats or a green fishing net laid out,

And the public beach where three million people sit under rented umbrellas, eating watermelon and grilled squid, listening to radios, putting on suntan lotion, little kids escorted by their moms to get their ankles wet,

And the private beach, where the staff sit under unrented umbrellas, half-heartedly trying to sell the oxygen bar and Jetski rides, watching a young couple in garish yellow and red tuxedo and huge white wedding gown as they're photographed running across the sand or staring out at the ocean from a big grey rock.

On the road around the island, there are simple restaurants owned by families that still make a living on the island. They have touts out on the road with signs to flag down the tourists and buses.

We chose an ugly square block that had the freshest seafood relaxing in styrofoam boxes outside. Everything is cheap, cheaper than in the seafood market, for sure, or in the old city.

A little combo seafood restaurant/guest house run by a family that said they'd lived in Lianyungang forever. Everything was covered in white tile. We were alone except for a couple families from Xuzhou, the men getting shirtless and wasted, crunching up shrimp shells and heads and collapsing in an adjoining bedroom, the kids gleefully reporting, "He threw up! It's a big mess! He threw up!"

We ate mountains of clams and oysters, all just steamed, a bowl of chili oil and a bowl of vinegar and ginger on the table beside us.

When we left, we asked for two crabs steamed to go and ate them in our hotel bed, watching Seinfeld on Phoenix TV.

[Ce'nedra]

Wow I haven't even seen any of those dishes before. Thanks for the insight!

How would you describe the cuisine in this region?