Tianjin 天津

During the Qingming festival we went to Tianjin 天津. This is a city with a population around 16 million people just about 100 km far from Beijing and therefore also often called Beijings little sister.

As you can see in the map above Tianjin is not very close to Shenzhen, so we had to fly 3.5 hours to get there.

On our first day in Tianjin we were very lucky to have a local guide, Linda, who is a friend of my dad Felix. She showed us a traditional street in Tianjin with a lot of little shops and food stands.

Let me introduce some tasty Tianjin specialities to you.

  1. 煎饼果子 (jian bing guo zi)：The one that looks like an omlette and also tastes kind of like one. The outside is made out of dough, in the inside there is an egg and some deep fried cracker.
  2. 茶汤 (cha tang): The dish in the bowl (on the right in the top) has a flavoured powder as a base which is mixed with water to make a thick soup. On top there are some nuts and sweets.
  3. 熟梨糕 (shu li gao) : On the lower right there are small rice cakes where you put jam on it. The rice cakes are cooked with steam in a traditional way.
  4. 酸奶 (suan nai): This is a yoghurt served in a bottle because it’s quite liquid and very tasty.

For dinner we went to an area which is called Italian town with Italian style buildings and a lot of Italian, French and German restaurants.

The weather in Tianjin was really cold (4-8°C!!!) and this was the coldest I’ve ever experienced in China! But I learned from the first day and the next day I put on as much clothes as when I go skiing.

On the next day we biked a little around the city. In Tianjin there are a lot of buildings in the European style and we even found a European tourism store at one place.

In the evening we went on a boat cruise on the river which gows through the city. Usually Chinese big cities are especially beautiful at nightime and so was Tianjin.

The third day was already our last one in Tianjin. We visited the Tianjin museum which has a big and very beautiful park around it. The museum showed the interesting history of Tianjin, which was occupied by several nations in the past and you can still see in the style of architecture today which parts were occupied by what nation.

We really enjoyed these few days in Tianjin. The city is very different from other cities I’ve seen before in China. For sure we enjoyed a last 煎饼果子 before we returned back to Shenzhen.