Nancy picked me up around 10 and we went over to the cooking school for my lesson. The description I got when I booked and what I got was WAYYYYY off. It said I would be in a hotel that specialized in dumplings, that it would be 8 hours long, and that we would go to a market. I ended up staying at the cooking school about 3 hours, and we didn’t d any dumplings. She offered to take me to a vegetable market afterwards, but I decided that I didn’t want to do that. The lesson itself was pretty good. We made sweet and sour pork, a Sichuan chicken and peanut dish, and steamed a fish with ginger and garlic. It was probably the best (non duck) meal that I’ve had here.
It was interesting to see how little actual cooking goes on. Most of the work involves the preparation and selection of the ingredients. Cooking time for the wok dishes were all under 6 minutes. Nancy showed her lack of knowledge about western cooking when she said that Chinese cooking is much more difficult than western cooking. I believe that western style cooking is a bit more complex…
After that, I went on a tube hunting expedition. I had gotten some leads on where to look in my scouring of the internet. I will now offer some more detailed directions…
Take the subway to the Xidan stop and walk north. The street eventually turns into xisi beidajie (street) and you’ll see a bunch of electronic marts on the left side. These are pretty interesting, all sorts of connectors, capacitors, mosfets, diodes, hexfreds, etc. I had been to some markets for pearls and silk, this was just like them, but for electronic stuff. A few of them had some tubes, there is zero English spoken, so be prepared to do lots of hand waving and writing of models. I found a variety of Chinese tubes, but none of the really nice ones (valve art or TJ), one guy was buying some Chinese WE 6l6 reproduction (I can’t remember the model number) and they brought over a tube tester and were matching them for him. The best selection was at 93 xisi, a good part of the shop was dedicated to tubes and they had the prices listed right on the counter.
I didn’t end up buying anything from these guys, I was really hoping to get some good prices on the really nice TJ stuff like their 45, 50, px25, or even the 205d. No such luck… There is still an outside chance that I can buy them from the factory. It’s odd, the tubes are made here, but they are all destined for Hong Kong, the US, and Japan. I bet I could get some good prices in Hong Kong, oh well….
I caught up with Anne that night. Went to a locals place to eat, and then went to bed. I’m going to try to take it easy the next couple of days because I have been visited by the blister fairy…