Warning: long entry ahead!
Saturday:
Breakfast- We went to Hollywood for breakfast. No joke. Hollywood is a chain fast food joint that sells "American" food, or what they think American food is. Home fries were French fries, and they served hot dogs with eggs, not sausage.
Looking at the movie posters were fun, too. The poster for the movie The Day After Tomorrow was translated as 后天, which is a single Chinese word for "two days following today"; essentially "the day after tomorrow". It's pronounced "Houtian".
Morning (Antique Market)- After breakfast, some of us went to the antique market, which sells everything but antiques. It has calligraphy posters, pots, prints, bags, jewelry, and jadeite (low-quality jade). I bought a chopsticks set, a tea set with a leaf strainer (for whole leaf tea), and an embroidered bag. The bag looks like it has plastic handles, but I gave it to our TA, who is a local PhD student, and she checked it. It's actually real bent bamboo! It's really hard to bend bamboo into a perfect circle without it snapping.
Lunch- Lunch was insane. We had the water apples again, but this time they were water pineapples. We had a ton of vegetables and steamed ribs and real Peking duck. A bunch of us want to go to the duck restaurant further down the street and share a whole one sometime later.
Post-Lunch/Dinner- We got back at 3 PM and were not meeting again until 5:30, and I was so exhausted I went and took a nap. Not a smart idea. I set my alarm for 17:00 (they use military time) but somehow I slept through it and got up at six. I did the smart thing and walked downstairs to our dining hall, where I met the rest of my classmates. Fortunately, they had got there only ten minutes before me and were talking with their language partners. I was paired up and we all started making (well, making a little and eating a lot of) dumplings. We talked until ten or so and then I went up to the room. Mee Ka, my roommate, was unpacking. Due to a miscommunication, she had missed her flight and came by herself the next day. We talked, and went to sleep.
Sunrday:
Breakfast- We had breakfast in our restaurant this time, and had real Chinese food. The breakfast was identical to a Japanese breakfast, substituting Japanese broiled fish for pork dumplings made of rice flour. Basically, breakfast was tea, congee (rice oatmeal) with vegetable toppings, tea-boiled eggs, and the pork dumplings. I had a little of everything except the radishes. The seaweed was good.
Temple of Heaven- I wish I could just show you the photos, because the Temple is impossible to describe by any human means. The amount of gold and intricate paint-work is unbelievable. People come there to play games outdoors and congregate, so some of us got to try Chinese games like a feathered rubber and metal disc hackey-sac type thing or a paddle-ball-like game.
My roommate, Mee Ka standing at the exact "center" of China. [photo had been attached to page]
Silk Alley- After lunch (again, amazing) we went to Silk Alley, an indoor shopping bazaar. This place is not a tourist trap, believe it or not. In fact, almost everyone shopping there is a local. Yes, there were some tourists, but they were not in such great numbers as the Friendship Store (see Sunday below). This place made me edgy, because unlike the Antique Market, the shopkeepers are pushy. You couldn't stop to look at something without ten ladies fighting to sell it to you. i bought a jadeite pendant and a Chinese shirt for 270 yuan total, about $30. I paid too much for the shirt by about 50-80 ($6-10) but I got the jadeite for much cheaper than what out TA said it was worth, which was nice.
I also went to the only store that you couldn't barter at, the official Olympic store on the ground floor. All the items had price tags, and I got a receipt, which was a little more reassuring. I bought the panda mascot for the Beijing Olympic games and a set of the official collector's pins. If anyone back home wants Olympic merchandise, please let me know. The solid gold coins run for about 500, the silver ones are 300.
New Year's Eve- We had Mongolian hotpot for dinner, and they kept serving beer. Although I am of legal age in China (read: no legal age), I did not take a drink. Hotpot in China is Japanese hotpot with the spicy factor upped by at least 10x. That, and instead of beef, hotpot is lamb. There were also some interesting side dishes that get added to the stew, like congealed pig's blood. Our TA ate both squares (it's her favorite food) but I was brave enough to break off and try a piece. It had the consistency of stiff Jell-o and tasted like salt. Tried it, didn't really like it.
After dinner, I was too tired, and went back with my roommate to go to sleep. 3/4ths of the group went out to a bar and then went ice biking. Ice biking is a bike with training wheels that are actually small skates, and you go speeding down the river on one. I'd like to rent one later in the month, but I heard that someone fell in the river from our group. They went back to the dorms. :-)
New Year's Day was the best day so far, because I spent most of it away from other Americans. We get treated very differently when we all congregate, but today I got to explore with my roommate, who is Chinese.
Anyway, once again I must disappoint you with the lack of pictures, because our morning brought some of the most beautiful photos I could create.
We visited the Great Wall. It was breathtaking. Literally. The Wall was covered in ice, so traversing it was a very backbreaking endeavor.
But the view was worth every step.
On the way down, though, a Chinese girl threw a snowball at another girl who was walking down next to me, hitting me instead. The War of the Wall ensued, bringing in me, the two girls, and a boy hit by a stray 'bullet' into the fray.
Lunch was the first less-than-savory meal we ate. We stopped at "Friendship Store", a tourist-trap kind of place, because it was the only restaurant large enough nearby. The food wasn't disgusting, but it was too sweet. You could tell it was going to be Westernized the minute they handed us all forks. I looked at the store after I ate, and all the things I had already bought (except the official Olympic merch) were selling for the starting price at the places we bargained. We had gotten all the same items down by a third of the cost or more. Once the clerks realized that we had been to Silk Alley and could speak Chinese,. they were very nice to us and did not even ask if we wanted to buy anything. However, they did have some very large (six foot tall or more) jadeite statues that would have been impossible to buy elsewhere, so I guess that would have been the only thing worth buying there if I wanted it (and had that kind of money).
The afternoon was ours, so Mee Ka and I explored the district around the campus and did some 'normal' shopping- buying groceries (laundry detergent, water, etc.), and found a Chinese bookstore that sold manga translated into Chinese. I bought a One Piece doujin (fan comic) and the 25th volume of Naruto for a friend (I'm not saying names on gifts because I want people to be surprised… sorta.). Manga is ridiculously cheap here. Two of them were less than a dollar. I might buy some authentic Chinese 漫画 (manhua)- their version of manga- as well.
We visited a side street and saw people selling kebobs off hot carts, as well as grilled sweet potato- a common winter sweet treat in China and Japan. I had a piece of my TA's on Saturday when visiting the market, and it's amazing.
We also stopped to look at some clothing stores and hoped to come back later to shop around. I found a knit and crochet store and for 60 (about $6.50) bought a beautiful mixed yarn set for [name deleted], my honors colloquia teacher.
What I found most exciting was that I found an anime goods store. Any of my friends who want anime stuff- this place is cheaper than dirt and it's all official merchandise. They don't have DVD's but they do have comics and memorabilia. I bought a set of Tsubasa plushies for less than $10 to give to someone.
Dinner that night was a lot of fun. We went to a 小吃 (xiaochi), or a Chinese-style fast food restaurant. Chinese fast food is vegetables, rice, dumplings, noodles, and a little bit of meat. Most dishes are 8 yuan or less, which is a dollar or less. I was the only blonde in the restaurant, and my seat faced the door, which was really funny. Every time a customer walked in, there was a look of shock. One twenties-looking man walked in, saw me, and hid behind the partition. When I put my head down to eat, he peeked back out again and I looked up. He jumped back behind the partition, and this went on for at least five minutes.
After dinner I went back and, with the help of Professor Du, got the Chinese internet cable. We did not need any of the stuff we bought in the states, just a Chinese cable I got for 20Y ($2.50).
And then I wrote this!
再见！
