IT'S BEAUTIFUL!

Americans are already used to imitations of European architecture, lord knows we have at times specialized in such. One need not even think of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco - a prime example of mediaeval Gothic - or of the vile Danish monstrosities of Solvang.
Nope, we've got take-offs and rip-offs of old country styles all over the place.
We also do Greek and Roman.

The phenomenon is relatively new in China, however. Yet, in imitation of the Japanese, who started the trend over a hundred years ago, there are now "European" settlements in the Middle Kingdom.
Errrm, republic.
The Middle Peoples' Republic.

One of which is a village from North Brabant.

My ancestors came from North Brabant, and I myself lived there for a number of years when my family moved back to the old sod for a while after more than three centuries elsewhere.
So I'm rather tickled that the Chinese think it's a rather nice place.
Which, visually, it rather is.


WATERMILL
















The location of this mill and several other repro buildings is the ‘Van Gogh Friendship Park’ in Nanjing. There's also a windmill, a farmhouse of typical Brabantine pattern, and a chapel.


SOURCE: http://www.ed.nl/regio/eindhovenstad/9544668/Brabants-kloondorp-in-het-Verre-China.ece
[Brabants kloondorp in het Verre China]

All very picturesque.
I can imagine Chinese people happily strolling around the park, admiring the very old school ‘vernuft’ (cleverness) of country folk in distant Ouzhou (歐洲 Europe), and enjoying a pleasant afternoon in an otherwhere-otherplace.

For their sake, however, I hope that the concession stands do NOT serve the appropriate foods.

As Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’ makes abundantly clear, the local cuisine of North Brabant in olden days was nothing to write home about. Mostly tubers. A little vinegar or Apple molasses for flavouring. Once in a blue moon preserved meat and salt fish. Fresh pot greens occasionally.
Pearl barley, cooked as porridge or as a plate of grains with dried fruits and smoked meat.
The breads and baked goods were excellent, but those were for the middle classes at the time, that being approximately five percent of the village population. So not really representative.
And today’s modern snack foods, while enjoyable, are also truly frightening.

For a true simulacrum of what North Brabanders eat when they eat well, perhaps Chinese food would be best.
Every town and village in the province has at least one Chinese restaurant, and in the larger cities one can now get some stellar dim sum (點心).
I particularly remember the excellent cheung fan (腸粉) and wu gok (芋角) from that restaurant in Eindhoven on the Grote Markt, as well as the beautiful little siu mai (燒賣) at a place in Tilburg.


Chinese food, the more I think about it, is the most appropriate cuisine in an accurate facsimile of a North Brabant village in the middle of China.


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