Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

Chinese geography is still fairly confusing to me, even after I've been to these places.  The next stop on our trip was Jiangmen, which is still part of the Guangdong province about an hour and a half away from Guangzhou by car.  My dad's older brother picked us up in a car to take us to Jiangmen.  It turns out my uncle is kind of a big deal: he is a history professor at Wuyi University, the major university in Jiangmen.  He's been involved with getting UNESCO World Heritage status for several historic villages nearby and sometimes the local TV stations interview him about local history and culture (my dad gets Chinese TV on satellite and he'll sometimes holler at me to come over to see my uncle on TV). A lot of people from Jiangmen eventually wound up in San Francisco and New York City during the main waves of immigration in the late 1800s and 1990s. We arrived at the Palace International Hotel in Jiangmen, which conveniently had several restaurants ...

There's an old Chinese adage that says a person should live in Hangzhou, marry in Suzhou, eat in Guangzhou, and die in Luzhou.  I think Suzhou girls are supposed to be pretty, and Luzhou has got forests full of trees perfect for building coffins apparently.  The rest of our trip was spent in Guangdong province, which encompasses Guangzhou, Jiangmen, and Hong Kong.  Guangdong's anglicized name is Canton: hence, Cantonese dialect and food and people - represent! We flew from Beijing down to the city of Guangzhou.  We were picked up at the airport by another of my mom's friends, who was also a classmate and current employee of the illustrious Mr. C.  We were also given a chauffeur, the company driver of Mr. C's company.  Wild! Our first dinner in Guangzhou was in a fancy restaurant near the Pearl River.  We had a lot of tasty food, which were much more familiar to us.  Whole boiled shrimp, fatty pork belly, steamed fish, roast goose,...