On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:06:38 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

"Whole provinces"? Seems unlikely, but there are certainly large
areas that don't.

No, there are three without electricity of centralized sort IRRC.
I found out about this a year or so back while doing research on solar
power, and it completely threw me.
I'll see if I can get a citation on it, as well as the names of the
provinces.

I'd appreciate that; thanks.

(By the way, I don't know where you are, but I'm reading this in
rec.arts.sf.written.)

China has a serious electrical power shortage, and is looking into all
sorts of alternative energy sources so that people in rural areas can at
least get some electrical power via wind or solar generation of it, if
even in only a mini-grid around a rural village.

Yeah, I knew that part.

And they noticed something... all the entries that were on the English
menu had the same ideogram in their names on the Chinese menu... so what
did the ideogram mean in Chinese?...they found out.
The ideogram meant "barbarian".

Well... if it was a single character, it just meant "foreigner."
"Barbarian" takes two.

Not that there's much of a distinction in Chinese.

The end result was that they soon found out what _real_ Chinese cooking
tastes like - a complete wonder of tastes from ingredients and spices
they'd never heard of, properly prepared in the same ways that they were
when they graced Kublai Khan's table...and that they were soon
completely enthralled by. :-)

There are dozens of different Chinese cuisines, and the stuff you get
in Chinese restaurants here varies hugely in authenticity. I live in
an area with a lot of Chinese immigrants, so the local restaurants
have food that's both better and more authentic than I've eaten in
most other parts of the U.S. When we ate at a Chinese restaurant in
Des Moines -- well, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't remotely like what
you'd get in China.

We found some amazing stuff to eat in China -- and some other foods we
couldn't choke down. We also discovered that the same name can mean
drastically different things from different cooks, and that the
Chinese name often doesn't really tell you what you're getting.

The Chinese name is often really vague, in fact. Like the dishes that
have the character for "meat" without specifying what kind. About 80%
of the time that means pork, but it could also be mutton, or dog, or
things you'd rather not know about.




--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The second issue of Helix is at http://www.helixsf.com
A new Ethshar novel is being serialized at http://www.ethshar.com/thevondishambassador1.html