Well, not much happened for Halloween, but it was a very interesting weekend nonetheless. On Friday evening I got invited to a barbecue by my freshman English majors. They had rented a ‘campground’ on the West Lake and, despite being smack in the middle of the city, it was actually rather wooded and serene (the lake scenery was pretty ruined by extreme pollution, however). They cooked me up all sorts of meat-on-a-stick delights: beef, chicken, chicken hearts, eggplant, sweet potatoes, more chicken hearts and what I figured to be just pure pork fat. It was all rather tasty, but I was worried that I would be paying dearly for it the next day (hmmm, were they cooking it enough?)
After the food portion of events was done, they got creative: they wanted to start a bigger fire to sing and tell stories around, so they just put all the barbecue grills together and started burning lots of garbage. And what do you know…it worked. Another point for Chinese ingenuity. I was then treated to renditions of Backstreet Boys songs as well as more traditional Chinese folk tunes (it seems like the large majority of Chinese people have decent singing voices..in Chinese that is!) Of course, they harassed me to belt out a tune, but I steadfastly refused, not wanting to ruin the evening.
I just ended up telling them about summer camp and ghost stories around the fire back in Canada, how our counselors used to scare the hell out of our poor little 8 year old souls. It was a really fun way to get to know some of my students a little better. Their backgrounds are quite varied and diverse, some coming from completely across the country. It’s really interesting to hear their different points of view on life in China.
Saturday night also involved lots of meat-on-a-stick delights, but also several hundred thousand people. Hangzhou is putting on a Food Festival at the stadium grounds, and a grad student took a few of us foreigners to check it out. It was really fun, but CROWDED. A little while before the entrance we just ended up in a mass of humanity, which ebbed and flowed us towards what we figured was probably the entrance gate. By the time we had pushed/been pushed there, we realized they were collecting tickets…tickets! shit! We had been completely oblivious to any ticket requirement.
However, it seemed the crowd just kept moving and pushing…whoever had tickets gave them to the attendants, and whoever didn’t just got pushed in for free. Another point for the power of the crowd!
The food festival itself was selling all sorts of wild stuff, everything under the sun from all over China as well as Japan and Korea (and probably a few other countries). We got fried lamb, fried octopus (from Japan, delicious), tons of meat on a stick, some soy/coconut milk, bamboo rice (they cut a bamboo shoot in half and stuff it with sticky rice..DELICIOUS) Trying to buy anything was really a challenge though, as the crowds were really crunching and pushing right in front of the stalls; lines mean nothing here, as usual. At one point we thought a riot was going to break out at the Japanese octopus stall.
We also tried some famous food from Tianjin, they call it “Dog don’t Eat” or something, I loved that name. The food itself wasn’t bad either, basically just a steamed bun filled with meat (pretty much just a small bao zi to the China crowd). But perhaps the star attraction was the ‘exotic’ food: we found one stall selling scorpions, starfish, beetles and all sorts of other insects. None of us were courageous enough to try any of it, but I did get a pretty good picture, check it out at my Yahoo Photos site (link to the right, I’ll be adding new photos pretty regularly)
So after two straight nights eating all sorts of stuff, I think it was pretty much a miracle that Sunday passed without any sort of gastro-intestinal difficulties. I guess my tapeworm took the hit for me.