Chinese Menu Guide: The tastiest lesson

In my time in China truely my favorite language lesson took place after school let out in the morning and I headed out with my friends to one of the many restaurants surrounding the campus. Our campus had three gates: East, South, and West. And each gate let out on to a streetscape full of vendors and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. In our world we organized each collection of gustatory choices around these three groupings. South Gate was the first to be explored as it was nearest to our dorms and classrooms and also because the South Gate was the main entrance of the old campus of HeDa.

View down the "restaurant alley" out of the West Gate

Chinese Geography: Lesson 2; China Proper

Well I had so much fun making that map and writing the last post that I think I'll continue. I think maybe I'll just start zeroing in on Kaifeng, and then see where we go from there.

So the in the last post we looked at what China isn't. So now we're going to explore what remains, which would be China proper. Cue the new map!

Click on it to make it big as well.

Well as you can see I've further narrowed down the map of China to "China Proper". I've also further divided it into various regions. A lot of this is my own interpretation as there is no standardized way of further subdividing the place.

Chinese Geography: Lesson 1; What is China?

In order to understand the geography of China one must first understand what is China and where is it. When people ask me, "Where in China were you?" "Where is Kaifeng?". I pause because this is not an easy question to answer. (Perhaps that's just what I get for studying up on it ;-)

Often I will say it is in North China or in Central China. But I don't know if it is clear what exactly that means. Probably not. So I am going to delve into one of my favorite topics: Geography. Hopefully it will be enjoyable.

What is China? A difficult question really, in my opinion. China is a country, right? Yes, but... Its more than that. I like to describe China as a sub-continent, at least geographically. Really it is just too big to be understood in the same terms as a country like say France or even the U.S. But why?

First, it is huge. Both in terms of size and population. Everybody knows that China has lots of people (and does it ever!) 1.3 billion. All though that is really an estimate. The place is too vast and varied for everybody to be counted exactly. I have heard that the margin of error in the common estimate of 1.3 billion is 300 million. That's the same as the population of the U.S.!
So it is possible that there is another United States inside China. Or, for that matter less another United States. But more on population another time.
In terms of size China is geographically about the same size as the U.S., maybe a little bit bigger, depending on whose calculations you look at.