Category: Food

The unBalanced ecoLOGist: The Shenyang Shuffle

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It’s been almost a week since I’ve found any time to write a post from China. As I wrote last week, I left Beijing on Monday for Shenyang: the first four days of what has now turned into a 10-day, 9-lecture typhoon (yes indeed, a lot of hot air swirling around!) / movable feast (click on any image to view larger ones in a slide show).

Shenyang Lunch
Qingyuan Forest dinner
Qingyuan Forest station
Daqinggou Field Station
Daqinggou Lunch
Brothers at the Five Brothers Oak
Shenyang send-off dinner

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Dispatches from Abroad: At the End of the (Silk) Road

~ amellison17 ~ 1 Comment

It took me a while, but on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, it finally occurred to me, when we reached Dunhuang with its massive sand dunes and crescent-moon lake presided over by a reconstructed temple, that all of the cities we’d stopped at on our nine-day circuit from Xining to Wulan to Dulan to Ge’ermu to Dunhuang to Shangye and back to Xining tonight were oases in an otherwise parched desert. These ancient springs and watering-holes had been obvious points of layover for camel trains, traders, monks, and charlatans, and now are thriving cities living on depleted groundwater and glacial meltwater-fed rivers.

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Crescent-moon lake at the Mingshashan dunes in Dunhuang. The lake, once amply supplied by groundwater, now needs to be pump-filled from alternative water supplies.

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Dispatches from Abroad: Foraging Across the Tibetan Plateau

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The last couple of days we took a break from exploring treelines to cross the high cold desert along the Silk Road between the once-oases but now thriving cities Dulan and Ge’ermu (a.k.a. Golmud). This 500-km stretch of the Xining-to-Llhasa highway provided incredible views of geology-in-the-raw, and today’s day-trip from Ge’ermu south to the Kunlun Pass added camel trains, huge herds of sheep, a glacier field, and a railroad built atop permafrost.

I’ll get to the sights later. The really fascinating part of the last two days was the foraging for wild foods in a desert that, in the main, gets < 100 mm, and in many places, < 50 mm of rainfall a year. René Redzepi could have a lot of fun here!

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The unBalanced ecoLOGogist: Climbing onto the Roof of the World

~ amellison17 ~ 2 Comments

Early Saturday morning, Eryuan Liang and I flew from Beijing to Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, which is the province to the east of Tibet. Qinghai and Tibet together span the Tibetan Plateau, but it’s much easier to travel into and around Qinghai. Even for Chinese scientists like Eryuan, who is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Tibetan Plateau Research, which itself has a branch campus in Lhasa, it is far easier to do research in Qinghai than it is to do research in Tibet. And here be treelines, which are the focus of this nine-day field expedition.

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Panorama from the lower treeline at the Wulan site (click for a larger version)

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Dispatches from Abroad: A First Look at, and Taste of, Beijing

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Well not really a first look, but my first for this trip and this blog.1 I left Xi’an mid-morning on Tuesday on a high-speed train to Beijing. The Xi’an high-speed train station (across town from the regular train station) is its own marvel. With more than 20 platforms, the whole complex felt a lot more like an airport—complete with security checks, x-ray machines, pat-downs, and gate-checks—than a train station, and it was easily as big as a standard international airport terminal, too.

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The unBalanced ecoLOGist Abroad: In the Footsteps of the Giant Panda (I)

~ amellison17 ~ 4 Comments

After two weeks in downtown Xi’an, I, along with Professor Chen Yi-ping, graduate student Chen Dong, and an indefatigable driver Liu, set out on the morning of 29 August for a 6-day road trip through the Qinling Mountains of southern Shaanxi Province, northern Sichuan Province, and Gensu Province. The goal of this excursion is to introduce me to the two subspecies of panda (the Qinling and the Sichuan), their remaining habitat, and the challenges associated with conserving this iconic endangered species.

And of course, I am hoping to actually see a giant panda!

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Dispatches from Abroad: Green Spaces of Xi’an

~ amellison17 ~ 2 Comments

For a rapidly expanding city of 9 million people, Xi’an is fortunate to have a number of temples, parks, and gardens that provide islands of green space an places for enjoyment, exercise, and contemplation. Spending day in and day out in a hotel, in an office, and in the midst of Xi’an’s sidewalks, streets, and traffic, I longed for a bit of green and a bit of quietude. So I avidly scanned my otherwise incomprehensible city map (it’s in Chinese, of course) for green spaces and made it a point to visit four of them during my two weeks in the city: the Xing Qing gardens, the Xi’an Botanic Garden, the Green Dragon Temple, and the Ba Qiao wetland reserve.

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Dispatches from Abroad: Walking around Xi’an – literally!

~ amellison17 ~ 2 Comments

There are apparently two things that one must do when in Xi’an. One is to see the city wall. The other is to eat a bowl of yáng ròu pào mó (羊肉泡馍).1 Yesterday, post-doc Liu Wan-gang2 and I had the soup with the requisite pickled garlic and chili for lunch, (top left click for larger image) and then in late afternoon after a visit to the central tea market (top right and bottom row; click for larger image),


we walked around the city wall of Xi’an. Actually, on top of it. And if you visit and don’t want to walk, you can rent a bike or hop on an electric open-sided bus-let.

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We  walked across the drawbridge around 6pm, entered through the South Gate (above), and headed east.

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Dispatches from Abroad: The Dumpling Feast

~ amellison17 ~ 3 Comments

I knew I needed some photos of dumplings, and a dumpling extravaganza at the De Fa Chang (aka Da Fa Zheng) restaurant in between the Two Towers of Xi’an (which could be a title for an updated Tolkein novel) not only provided many photogenic opportunities but also enough food to set me on the path to becoming a dumpling myself.

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Dispatches from Abroad: Eating across Xi’an

~ amellison17 ~ 3 Comments

On August 21, 2016, I flew from Singapore to Xi’an, China, to begin a two-month research, teaching, and travel fellowship awarded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This exciting opportunity is allowing me to visit and work with colleagues and their students at the Institute of Earth Environment in Xi’an, the Institute for Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing, the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences in Beijing, and the Computational and Medical Ecology Laboratory in Kunming.

It’s also providing an incredible opportunity to eat!

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