Fuzzy Slippers

The past few days have been a little slow, which is nice. I spent the weekend doing homework. However, on Saturday Matt and Ben and I ate left-over turkey sandwiches and went bowling to carry on the after-Thanksgiving tradition. It was pretty fun, but the bowling ally had a weird feeling. There was no loud 80's rock and people were drinking tea and it was too serious. I did pretty well too, 126 both times. Then Laura and I watched Gone with the Wind, which I had never seen before. It was VERY long, but good. I am kind of on a classic kick, and I like it. Sunday I started a paper I am writing for my Chinese politics class comparing the history and structure of the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union. If anyone has any ingenious insights (Aunt Patty, I am looking in your direction) I would love some other opinions and/or advice. I took a break to go swimming. Then I was going to go running after to warm up again (it is getting so COLD! 13 degrees Celsius today) but then I saw Ben at the track and they were still playing soccer, so we went to the weight room in the giant sports complex. It is no IMA, but it was kind of nice and I had no idea it was even there, so I was happy to find it. Then we met up with Matt and a friend from SU, Violet (that's her English name of course, Chinese names are really hard to remember), to play some ping pong.
Today I went shopping before cooking class and bought the universal Chinese winter necessities, long underwear and slippers. I am not joking, EVERYONE has these things and wears them all the time when it starts getting cold. I got a pair of red long underwear that are thicker, like sweatshirt material and a thinner pair of purple ones. The slippers are all amazingly ugly. Matt likes to say that everything here is geared towards 12 year old girls and there is definitely some truth to that. So I picked the most comfortable pair I could find. They are all very comfortable and I can see why they are so popular. The slippers are especially handy because I have been wearing socks around the house and your socks get really dirty because the floors are ALWAYS covered in dirt from all the dirt that settles out of the air. In cooking class today we learned steaming. We made a yummy spiced meat and steamed pumpkin. Pumpkin might possibly be my favorite vegetable here, so I was really excited to make it.
This past weekend one of my good friends from Chinese class went to a Chinese wedding and sent me some pictures, so I thought I'd share some with you guys since I may not have the chance to go to a Chinese style wedding while I'm here. Sophie is from France and is here with her husband who is working for some computer company in Chengdu. The Chinese people who are getting married are his friends from work. Chinese weddings are HUGE deals. It is customary to invite around 1000 people for a medium sized wedding. They do this for two reasons; one is for face, it is important to invite all of the people you know so that they or you don't lose face.. The second is because every guest that comes gives a red envelope (a hongbao) which has a couple hundred kuai in it, so it is also a money making venture for the new family. Pretty much the bigger the better. They usually just have a big banquet and people sit around talking, it is not as organized as Western weddings. Sophie also said that they changed outfits like 3 or 4 times. We weren't really sure why they chose to have the Western outfits, but all the others were Chinese style dresses.
Another "only in China", I saw a rooster standing on a motorcycle today when i was riding my bike. It reminded me where I really was and made me smile. I don't know if I was smiling because I was happy or because I still haven't fully grasped that I am living in China or because there are still somethings you see or have to deal with that the only thing you can do is laugh, or all of the above. I hope everyone finds something to smile about where you are, for whatever reason.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

This week has been quiet a whirl wind getting ready for Thanksgiving in a whole new country. And of course, no Chinese event is complete without a little drama and a surprise. Thanksgiving this year had plenty of both, but of course it is still always lots of fun and a complete success. For starters, we wanted to invite all our Chinese friends to come share Thanksgiving with us, but the Ministry of Education was visiting Chuan Da this week to "check up on things", so everyone was REQUIRED to go to classes and they couldn't come. Because we wanted to invite the Chinese students, we couldn't invite Li Juan because she is their teacher and they don't like to hang out with her (it's weird, I know, but that's just the way it is). Li Juan kept dropping hints that she wanted to come though and we didn't know what to do. Then the Chinese students couldn't come, but in the end Li Juan and Pang Laoshi (our program coordinator) got invited and bought us 2 bottles of wine and some weird Chinese candy. So on Wednesday I went over to Matt's house in the afternoon and started cooking. I, with Matt's help, made pumpkin pie, french silk pie, apple pie, and challah bread. There were many things that did not go as planned. I rolled out the dough with some wooden num-chucks that Matt had, for example, but all things considered everything turned out pretty well. Then I swept Matt's floor because it was disgusting. The next day Laura and I strapped all our food (soup, veggies, deviled eggs, etc) to the back of our bike and rode over to Matt's. We watched movies while I made famous Heilman family stuffing (my Grandpa's special recipe), gravy, and green bean casserole. The gravy was made with chicken stock and red wine, so it turned out purple but tasting OK, the green bean casserole had cut up stale bread instead of onion curl things on top because they don't sell them in China, but the stuffing turned out really well and was the hit of the evening. Around 2 or 3 other people started showing up. Deborah came over and she had made some special Chinese treats for us to try. Then Andrea came with garlic mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes. Then Sunny came with plates, bowls, chopsticks, and drinks. Then Ben came with some chairs. Finally, Tabitha arrived with the turkey we had ordered. We ordered it baked and thought it would come hot, but we were mistaken. So I carved/butchered it and heated it up quickly in Matt's oven, then we started eating. It was delicious! I made everyone go around and say something they were thankful for. I was thankful to have the opportunity to come to China and to be here with such a wonderful group. We have all really come together and I feel like they are my family away from home. Sometimes I think about how close and how comfortable we have become with each other and it just makes me smile. Now here comes the surprise. About a half an hour later, a Chinese student that we have met before, but know only a little, knocks on the door. The first thing he says is "sorry I'm late" and we are all looking around at each other trying to figure out who this guy is and how he got here. No one knows. So we just tell him to have a seat and help himself and play it off like we knew all along that he was coming. Shortly after Eugene, an SU student we are friends with, shows up too, then Li Juan and Pang Laoshi. For many of them it was their first time trying turkey, which was fun. Li Juan and Pang Laoshi only stayed for about a half an hour. All in all, it was a great day and although it wasn't like home, for many reasons, it was still yummy and I still ate too much and got to hang out with people I like to be with. After helping Matt clean up, Laura and I went home. I tried to do homework, but after a while I was just too tired from all that turkey and wine and I had to go to sleep.
Today was a little cold and rainy. It is getting more like winter everyday. I went swimming today and the guy who tells me the pool temperature everyday said it was 14 degrees Celsius today. This evening we had to give another PowerPoint presentation too. This one was a little confusing because we had about 3 people telling us different things or the same thing 3 different times all the way up until today and we were never quite sure who to listen to. This lack of communication seems to be characteristic of China. Speaking of characteristically Chinese, I saw a lady walking a Dalmatian wearing Louis Vuitton today and a guy riding his bike with a plant in his front basket, 3 computers in boxes strapped to the back, talking on his cell phone. Only in China.

Winter Swimming

This Saturday morning I got up bright and early and rode my bike to campus to meet my "winter swimming team" to travel to Chongzhou to "test the water" for a swimming meet we would have there later this winter. That was really all I was told so, as usual, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I rode down with Wu Laoshi, who is from Taiwan and an Ancient Chinese History teacher at Chuan Da, a younger girl called Xiao Li who was the photographer for the trip, Chen Laoshi and the owner of the car who's name I can't remember. In the picture to the left the guy who's car we rode in is on the far left, then me, then Chen Laoshi, then Wu Laoshi, then another guy who is very nice, but who's name I can't remember. Xiao Li, the girl, was supposed to serve as my "interpreter", but we spoke Chinese the whole time so I don't know if she helped at all in that regard. A few times I asked her or Wu Laoshi, who I could understand better because he was from Taiwan, to help me understand something because I can't understand Sichuan Hua (the dialect they speak here) that well. Chen Laoshi is my favorite, I call him my swimming grandpa. He reminds me a little bit of my grandpa Heilman and is always worrying about me. He also calls me Xiao Wei, which I love. In China it is common for the older generation to call anyone under the age of 30 xiao (meaning little) their surname. It would be like calling me "little Widder". Because I was a little sick this week, I still had a lingering cough and he was constantly telling me to rest ("Xiu xi ba") or telling me not to swim too much in the cold water.
So anyways, it only took one hour to arrive in Chongzhou. We passed the time asking me about what I study and how much it costs, how my study is going in Chengdu, and if I am used to Chinese life, all very popular topics of conversation. First we stopped at our hotel, which was called Flying Dragon Hotel (fei long da jiu ba). The hotel was located across the street from the Wen Jin River and was very nice. Along side the river there were tons of wicker chairs set up where you could sit and drink tea. Then we drove along the river down to the dam. On the other side of the dam was a huge reservoir with blue and yellow concrete bleachers on either side. They told me that this is where they held the World Championship F1 motorboat race this past October. Apparently this is the home of F1 motorboat racing in China. They had pictures, like the one on the left, on all the walls around the city. Swimming Grandpa also gave me two magazines about it. I also learned that this is where we would be swimming, across the river from one side of the bleachers to the other, which is 260 meters.
After checking out the swimming locale, we went sight seeing to a lake called White Tea Lake, which was very beautiful in the lingering morning fog. Then we returned to the hotel for lunch. More and more people kept arriving. They were all coming for the winter swimming meeting that would take place tomorrow. Finally, after about two hours or sitting around talking and wasting time, Wu Laoshi, Xiao Li, and two of my other swimming friends left to go to another sight-seeing spot, a museum "cluster" not too far away. When we first arrived we asked a rickshaw bicycle driver where we should go and he said the best way, because it is so big, was to go on his bicycle and he would take us to the best places. This is what my friends wanted to do and by that time 3 or 4 other rickshaws had shown up, so we all got in and off we went. Xiao Li and I rode together, but everyone else had their own. We went all around the estate of LiuXin, who was a famous writer (I think) back before theCultural Revolution (1920's and 30's). While we were off walking around down one of the side streets, we ran into someone who worked at the museum and he took us on a personal tour of LiuXin's house, I was never really clear on why. The house was beautiful though. It had beautiful courtyard and gardens and all this wonderful antique furniture. Then our museum guy took us to the new part of the museum "cluster" where there are a bunch or actual museums. We didn't have much time and didn't want to spend too much money, so we just decided to buy a ticket to go into one. They had all these wonderful sculptures around the beautifully manicured grounds. One of the coolest sculptures was 150 six foot tall bronze sculptures they built of the 150 most important Chinese and Japanese army officials that had died during the Japanese War. They also had a really neat sculpture of Mao and Deng on the Great Wall. The museum we went in was the Guomingdong Museum and was all about the war with Japan and was really cool. It was all done in black and white with old photo graphs that turned into 3-D sculptures and maps. It also had a ton of old artifacts like metals and old plates and tea sets with war slogans on them. I thought we were also going to go swimming that afternoon, but they told me we didn't have time and we just back to the hotel and ate dinner. After dinner was the quintessential Chinese post-banquet "jiu wenhua" or toasting ceremony. Everyone gets a little tiny shot glass and every table gets a bottle or two of bai jiu and everyone goes around toasting each other. There is alot of face in this ceremony and it is very important to make sure you toast all the right people. Since my swimming grandpa knew I was sick, I thankfully did not have to partake. Xiao Li and I watched for a little while then we went back to our room and I read for a little while before falling asleep. The next day we had meetings all morning about the meet that would take place here on January 1st. I didn't understand alot of what was said, but it didn't seem to matter. I did learn that my swimming grandpa is the main guy for winter swimming in Sichuan because at the meeting he sat in the center of the podium. I also had to sit in the center of the front row so I could be introduced because I was a guest of honor. After the meetings and lunch we finally were going to go swimming. We went back down to the river and stood around for a while. During that time about a hundred different people, most of whom I had never met and some of whom I had never seen before, took turns taking pictures with me. My swimming friends thought is was hilarious and said I was like a panda. I told them it was kind of embarrassing and they said they just want to take my picture because they think I am a beautiful girl. However, they think all Western girls are beautiful, so don't be fooled. After that whole affair people started getting in the water to swim. A news team came to film and they announced different teams as they got in the water to swim. I also got to get on a boat with my swimming grandpa and watch from the boat. When we got back on the dock I put my swimsuit on and swam a little bit. My swimming grandpa said that I could only swim half way and back because I was sick, so I did. When I got out everyone was very excited that I was a good swimmer and the news guy even interviewed me. After swimming we got back in the car and drove the hour car ride back to Chengdu. It was a really fun and tiring weekend. I was really proud of myself for speaking Chinese the whole weekend, but it makes your head really tired because you have to think so hard all the time. You can never just check out because someone might start talking to you and then it takes too long for your brain to get back into Chinese mode. I was really happy to get home and actually relax a little. But, tomorrow is the start of another crazy week and Thanksgiving!

the cold has finally come

It's finally starting to feel like November here, and of course in good form I got a cold. It was been getting better pretty quickly though, so don't worry, I don't think there is any more Chinese medicine in my future. It is still only in the 50's, but it feels cold because it is still really damp so it gets in your bones.
Not much interesting has happened this week, but today was a pretty good day. I had my last midterm today, writing class. We had to write a 200 character story about this picture of a girl falling through a hole in a bridge. I thought mine was pretty good, but I'm glad tests are finally over. After that Laura and I rode bikes to Starbucks for a coffee tasting Tabitha had set up. Tabitha is doing her research project on coffee culture, so she had set this up for that and just invited us to come along. It was the first time I had actually ordered coffee at a coffee shop in China and the first time I had been in Starbucks since coming to China and sadly it felt really good. It reminded me alot of home and I ordered a Vanilla latte my special way and they got it right. Our coffee tasting was pretty good too, but I didn't really learn anything new. I did discover that most Chinese people do not own coffee machines. If they do make coffee at their house it is always in a French Press, so that is how we drank it today. Also, in the bathrooms they had these really funny signs that kind of epitomize Chinese to English translations, they are never quite right and you never quite know what they are talking about. This one was on the toilet paper dispenser and if you can't read it, it says: "Protect the Environment, Save the Bumph." The correct translation is "Protect the Environment, Use less toilet paper."
After that I went swimming in the cold pool. However, I also got a present which made every time I have to get in that freezing cold water worth it. It wasn't really a present because I had to pay about 100 kuai for them, but that was not the point. Today I got to pick up a new black swimming suit (which is still a little small in the butt, but fits much better) and a big red swimming parka that says CHINA on the back! It also says YINGFA, which is the brand.
Also, my mom said she wanted to see pictures from the ceremony, so here they are. One is of my back, receiving the award while a bunch of people take pictures of me shaking the hand of the Dean of the Overseas School, who I have never met before and one is of me sitting at our table looking through my loot. I am wearing my medal and the thing open on the table is the plaque they gave me. These are some pictures of the race that I didn't have before from the board they put up at the school about the race.

fly by the seat of your pants, the only way to do anything in China

It's been awhile since my last post so this might be a long one, I'll try to have lots of pictures too. Thursday I had my conversation test which went really well and then I went home. I did a little home work and was feeling really drained from a week of studying and not sleeping enough so I decided to take a nap. After I woke up, I was so groggy, but not tired enough to sleep anymore and that continued until about 2 am that night. I wasn't tired enough to sleep, but I was too tired to really focus on studying. I hate naps and am never taking one again.
That day they also planted a tree outside my window, which was kind of interesting to watch. They are constantly doing new projects in our complex and everywhere in China. I think it is a product of the over abundant labor. For example, also in our complex, they just tore down our perfectly good, new-looking lobby and are apparently going to build something new. Everything is in a constant state of construction.
So on Friday after taking my comprehensive midterm in the morning, I went to cooking class and we learned to make baozi (a steamed bread filled with seasoned meat), la mian (pulled noodles), and guokui (which is a kind of fried bread with a little meat and seasoning in it). La mian is really hard to make. It's an acquired art that takes alot of practice, like throwing pizza dough. The picture is me trying to make la mian, which you make by whipping it out between your hands kind of like a jump rope and then twisting it up and doing it again. Then you pull it out a bunch on a floured surface to actually make the noodles. I'm really excited to try to make it again at home.
Friday night there was a banquet in honor of the people who had done well at the sports event and these two students who had written the best undergraduate theses in the Overseas School. They made us stand up and each receive awards and take pictures. It was fun, but a little embarrassing. They gave me my medal, a little plaque, a commemorative stamp collection, a leather bound journal, and a towel. I don't know why they gave me the towel. The food was pretty good too. Then I left my camera at the banquet and when I went back to get it they had already given it to a teacher, so I don't have pictures of the rest of the weekends activities. After the banquet we went to the Bookworm to watch an Irish Band called Bro Buro, i think. All these European people have been in town the past week because of some sort of EU-China conference so they have had all sorts of activities around it and this was one of them. It was really good and gathered a crowd from the street.
On Sunday morning Laura and I rode to the bus station to meet Deborah, Matt, Tabitha, and Andrea for a trip to the Sea of Bamboo. On the Yangtze River cruise I made friends will a guy who lives right near the sea of bamboo and we had been coordinating with him to come down. He had told me that it took about 2 1/2 hours to get there and he was going to meet us at the station. However, when Andrea bought the tickets they told us it was actually more like 4 hours. We thought the bus must be longer than the car and decided we still wanted to go. We got on the bus at 9:20am. 5 hours later, we finally arrived at the Bamboo forest. The judge, the nick-name we have given the guy who was supposed to meet us (because he is studying to become a judge), had also for some reason thought we were coming to the train station in the city and was no longer going to meet us. I know that I had told him at least twice we would be arriving at the BUS station, but he also said it was about 2 1/2 hours away, so you never know. As soon as we got of the bus we had to try to figure out a way to get back so we could be sure to get to class on Monday morning. We asked our bus driver and he was pretty much just turning around right then and driving back. We obviously didn't want to do that so we asked the people that had started to gather when we got off the bus. They said there was a train back at 9pm from Yibin, a town about an hour away, and they could arrange a car to take us to Yibin, for a price of course. We decided this was a good option and told them we wanted to walk around a bit in the park and then at 7 we would come back and they could take us to Yibin. Then they started trying to sell us a driving tour of the park and all sorts of other things. When we finally just walked away because they wouldn't listen to us when we said we just wanted to walk, one of the men started to follow us. We tried to ignore him as best we could and get him to leave us alone, and finally were successful when we started to climb the mountain. I think he just wanted to make sure we didn't talk to anyone else and figure out that he was ripping us off, which was obvious because he kept changing the price of everything. The park was definitely worth it. It was beautiful! I'll try to post pictures from other people once I get them.
After a few hours we hiked back down and met the guy who got us a car and driver to Yibin. After an hour we arrived at the Yibin train station, but when we walked up to the window to buy tickets, we were informed that there was no 9pm train. There was a train at 2:50am and a train tomorrow morning at 9am. The guy who had "helped us" had either lied or was very confused. Luckily, we also gathered a crowd in Yibin and two women told us that there was a bus going back to Chengdu right now. We said OK and they made a call and minutes later a bus pulled over to the side of the road. The sign in the window said Chengdu, so we got on and bought tickets. Finally, 3 hours later, we arrived in Chengdu safe and sound. After an adventure in Chinese transportation, Laura and I finished off the day with a bowl off dandan mian at a card table set up on the side walk at 11pm before we rode home and went to sleep.
Today we were supposed to have a meeting with Susan Jeffords, the Vice Provost of foreign relations at UW who is coming to visit at 3:40pm. In usual Chinese fashion, at 3:30 we were told the meeting would be delayed an hour and about 20 minutes later we were informed that the meeting was cancelled until tomorrow morning at 9:20am. Today was also Tabitha's birthday so Laura and I had bought a chocolate Western-style cake from Grandma's Deli, a Western restaurant by the West gate. We were planning on going out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant, but Tabitha didn't want to. So we suggested that we just have the cake we bought and the wine we had won at Quiz night there at school on the patio and then we could go home; very low key. Tabitha didn't want to do that either and she went home. We didn't know what to do, so we decided we would celebrate being in China instead and sat on the patio and ate chocolate cake and drank comparatively good Australian wine. It was nice to just sit and hang out together and the cake was delicious. It wasn't even that good of cake, but I just missed chocolate and real western desserts so much that I loved it anyways. Western desserts are much richer than Chinese sweets and I wasn't used to it so I could only eat one piece. I guess my sweet tooth is going away, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. When we got home Laura and I watched "Rear Window" which is an old Hitchcock movie.
I had never seen it before and I liked it alot. Laura wanted me to watch it because it reminded her of our apartment complex, which is true. You can look in everyone's window and see what everyone is doing and you start to know people by their habits. Like, there is a little kid who practices piano every night and a woman who does tai ji on her balcony every morning. But there are no murders... ...yet.

Yangjuan calendars

Hello friends. So I am using this blog to shamelessly promote the "Cool Mountain Education Fund" which is a group Steve started to help fund the school in Yangjuan. As I said before, Yangjuan is an amazing place. The school that Steve helped build and fund has only been in operation for the past few years, but has already been making a huge difference in people's lives. In China's new market economy, education is becoming more and more necessary and Yangjuan Primary School gives about 300 village children an opportunity they might not otherwise have. The students work so hard because they know the sacrifices that their families have made in order to send them to school. The "Cool Mountain Education Fund" provides scholarships for students based on academic merit and financial need. These scholarships are applied to Yangjuan school and also to students who have graduated from Yangjuan Primary School and done well enough to get into some of the top schools in the prefecture.
Every year a previous student compiles 12 of this years best photographs from Yangjuan and makes a calendar. The calendars cost $20 and all the money goes to fund scholarships so that the students in Yangjuan can have the opportunity to learn even if their families can't afford it.

For more information about Yangjuan or the Cool Mountain Education Fund go to: http://faculty.washington.edu/stevehar/yangjuan.html

All that Trivial Pursuit finally paid off... ...

Hello everyone! I am in the middle of midterms week right now and taking a break to update you all on the goings-on. Yesterday I had my first test, Reading Comprehension, which went reasonably well. I didn't have a test today, but I have Listening tomorrow, Conversation on Thursday, and my Basic test on Friday. I'll be happy when they are all over. Interesting things have also been happening in my cooking class, this week we are learning to make 小吃 (xiao chi), or snacks/street food. Monday we made two different kinds of jiaozi (饺子). One kind was like what Westerners call potstickers, but they are boiled as opposed to fried, these are called zhong shui jiao. The other kind are like wonton soup and are called chao shou. We even learned how to make the dough and they turned out really well. I'm excited to try them again at home and put more interesting things inside. We started out with just a basic stuffing of pork with a little chive and ginger water, which was a little bland for me. However, we also learned how to make the sauces that usually accompany jioazi, which were delicious! Today we learned to make a type of noodles that are a Chengdu specialty called dandan mian. These noodles got this name because they are a common street food in Chengdu and you used to see old men all over the place selling dandan mian from their shoulder poles. They still sell lots of other things from shoulder poles, like fruit and chestnuts, but usually not noodles anymore, I'm not sure why. Anyways, this pole is colloquially called a "dandan" so that is what the noodles were named after. They are sometimes called the Chinese version of spaghetti in that they have a sauce with a little ground up meat, but that is really were the similarity ends. But they are very yummy and, as I learned, pretty easy to make. We also made a sweet snack called tang yuan fen (汤元粉), which is very uniquely Chinese. They are these dense, gummy glutenous rice balls filled with a sweet sesame paste that looks and feels like black sand. They are better than they sound, I promise, but the textures do take some getting used to. The first time I had them I didn't like them at all, but this time a liked them alot better. You can put anything inside the balls too, so a different filling might be even more tasty.
Monday night we had another meeting with Andrea. This one was a little more structured and was really interesting. First, we all had to bring a language tid-bit. I talked about a few words that were not part of the Chinese language until after the May 4th Movement, like "progress" 近不 jin bu and "freedom" 自由 zi you. Matt talked about interesting phrases the Chinese use, like the phrase for "you're fired" is [你炒鱿鱼了] which literally means "you're squid is fried". I have no idea where this phrase came from. Deborah's was about the prominent use of numbers as both good and bad things in Chinese language. Like nine is a lucky number and Jackie Chan paid alot of money to get the license plate 999. Also 3, 7, 21 is used to mean "I don't care", like "who cares 3 times 7 is 21". There are also many bad words and names that involve numbers. We also talked about an article that Andrea had given us to read, written by Peter Hessler who wrote "Rivertown" and "Oracle Bones". It was about a new Chinese car company Chery (pronounced Chee-ray) that is the first independent car company and will soon begin marketing in the United States through the same guy that brought the Subaru and the Yugo to America, so we will see what happens. It was interesting article though because it talked about alot of things that were very quintessentially Chinese. For example, he mentioned how some Americans came over to test drive the cars and no one wore seat belts and how most of Chery's cars are pretty much exact replicas of other manufacturer's cars and they were sued by the GM/Daewoo joint venture because of it. They also started to manufacture cars illegally at first because it is illegal to independently manufacture cars in China right now, it all has to be done through a joint venture. It's a really interesting article if you want to pick it up.
Tonight was Quiz Night again at the Bookworm. The questions are beginning to be more and more well rounded, like trivial pursuit. Tonight we were able to do much better than usual. We finished tied for 3rd place with the Kiwi Cubs, a team from New Zealand that had won the previous two times. The first tie-breaker question was "What country's name and capitol were changed to Malawi and Lilongwe? Name the countries previous name and capital." Neither of us knew the answer, which is Malawi used to be a British Protectorate called Nyasaland and I'm not sure what the capital was. So, we got a new tie-breaker question. With this question Brian, the "quiz master" said the team who had someone stand up and say the correct answer the fastest would win. The question was "What French artist born in 18-something (I don't remember exactly) is well known for painting pictures of ballerinas?" I stood up and said "Degas" and we won! 3rd place anyways, but our goal from the start had been to win something and for third place we got a bottle of Australian Shiraz, which is better than any of the Chinese wine and it was just fun to win something. I was very proud of us! Well, that's all from this side of the world.
In other news, on Monday the people I swim with invited me to the dong yong (winter swimming) swim meet. It appears to be some sort of relay race with 4 people back and forth across a river. It takes place in another town called Shenzhou December 31st and January 1st. I will just go down with the rest of the team and swim. There are prizes and money awards if your team places and everyone seems to think that if I swim we are going to do fairly well. I hope so. I'll let you know more as soon as I do, however that might not be until after the meet as everything is China seems to be a little bit of a surprise.

The Herb and Tea Market

Saturday morning I slept in, for me, and then met Andrea and Deborah at North Gate at 9:15am to make our way to the Chinese Herb Market. The Chinese Herb Market is located on the north side of town and it took more than an hour of navigating though crazy Chinese traffic to get there. But it was worth it. The market was huge and amazing. It is the largest Chinese Herb Market in Southwestern China, and given this is the center of herbal medicine in China, possibly the biggest Chinese herb market in the world. It was about twice the size of the Farmer's Market in St. Paul and had another "everything market" just as big right next door. Inside each stall was about 10ft by 10ft and in it people had huge burlap sacks filled with different dried plants and animals. The wares ranged from the ordinary to the extraordinary. I saw little dried berries, plums, and orange peels which I use in my tea. I also saw deer penis, scorpions, snakes, turtle shells, locus skins, ants, and worms, all also dried of course. The most common things looked like deflated potatoes or wood chips. I also got to see most of the things that were in my formula, all of which are leaves, berries, or roots of some kind. After talking to Andrea about it more, I have also decided not to continue with the medicine. I didn't really feel like I had a problem before, so I feel no need to correct it, although it was a fun experience.
After leaving the Herb Market we rode a little ways back and stopped at the biggest tea market in Chengdu. After the herb market, the tea market seemed quiet, clean, and civilized. The tea market was more a bunch of separate little shops and was much less crowded. We walked into one tea shop that Andrea had been to before with her friend and got to taste two different kinds of teas. Tea tastings are actually kind of elaborate affairs. They have a special board and all these special serving dishes and cups and there is a whole ceremony that goes along with it. First they boil the water and pour the hot water into a little cup with the tea in it and put a little tea lid on top. The first brew they pour on all the serving cups and always make an offering to a little animal, usually a frog, that sits on the board by pouring the first tea over him. After that they brew again and pour it into a little serving pot to pour it into our little cups. We got to try two kinds of tea, both of which were Pu'er. Pu'er tea is a kind of tea that is sold fresh (not dried) in compressed brick or disc form. There are two kinds of Pu'er, sheng and shou. Sheng is freshly pressed where as shou has something added to it I think to aid fermentation. We got to try both. Pu'er tea is like wine or cheese, where the older it is the better. We tried 2 year old samples of both, which were very good. There was a man and his wife who owned the shop and they both sat and chatted with us with there new little baby while we drank tea. The man said that the oldest tea he had was 19 year old. Sheng tea tastes alot like green tea, I think, but it very good. Shou tea, however, is like no other tea I have had before and had a much rounder, fuller, more savory taste. I liked it alot. It was very fun to test the teas and learn about tea culture. The discs you see in the picture are Pu'er teas from the shop. They also like to imprint them with different pictures or designs, often coins.
Today I didn't do anything special, just homework, made bread and watched Firefly. I went over to Matt's house and we made Challah, a Jewish sweet bread. Matt for some reason is obsessed with this bread and bought an oven explicitly for the purpose of making it. Now I see why, because it was delicious. Maybe I have just been having bread withdrawal, but I definitely made up for it today. The bread turned out really well, considering the circumstances. Chinese kitchens usually do not have ovens, so Matt's "oven" is like a toaster oven on steroids but worked pretty well, except for burning the outside a little bit.