day 2: hutongs, bats, and smoked gouda

Well I discovered yesterday how unpredictable our internet here is...it was working one minute, and the next it decided to just not work period. For the entire day. So today, get to tell you about yesterday.

The day began with another orientation meeting (blech). However, in the afternoon, we all went on a visit to the 胡同 (hutong) area of Beijing. It's an area in which about 30% of Beijing's population lives, and basically they are just alleyway after alleyway of small "houses" (usually about 2-5 rooms, with about 6-8 families living in one compound). We got a rickshaw ride to our first destination, visiting a local.

The man we visited shared 5 rooms with himself, his wife and their adorable dog (who pretty much immediately jumped up on my lap and I petted him for the remainder of the visit). By hutong standards, his residence was very spacious, seeing that most families get only 2 rooms for many people. To give you some perspective, one of their rooms, the "kitchen", was literally as wide as the stove and had only enough room for one person to be in it. It was really more of a closet, but it technically counts as a room.

This particular man was on "welfare", meaning that the government subsidized his rent to make his life there affordable. He makes his money by selling his paintings, which are brilliant. He mixes traditional Chinese painting with oil painting techniques and the result is amazing. I really wanted to buy this painting of the cranes and blossoms, but someone beat me to it! His paintings of the lotus flower (the blue and red painting) won some national award from the government or something! (I didn't completely understand...he spoke really fast). He also had an Obama Biden pin in his cabinet and a longhorn on his wall. His wife was like nowhere to be seen the entire time.

Next, we left that place and went to another place for lunch. We had an old woman and her daughter cook us a homemade meal for lunch. They served us a TON of food, plus Tsingtao, coke or jasmine tea. One thing I have discovered is that vegetarianism is a very loose concept here. We were the vegetarian group (there were only like 5 of us so we were mixed in with the meateaters), so when we told the lady that we didn't eat meat, she asked if chicken was okay. Because it is still kind of an agrarian society, meat is viewed as a sign of wealth, so not eating it is not quite comprehensible to them. Anyway, she served us a bunch of food, including ketchup-marinated cauliflower (interesting), the REAL kung pao chicken (which I heard was tasty), and my favorite of favorites: veggie dumplings. Overall, it was a very tasty meal, and it was good to see how locals would eat/live.

After we 吃了午饭 (ate lunch...I'll have you recognizing chinese characters soon!), we went to a temple. Apparently, the temple used to be used as a private music conservatory, but recently was renovated into a public area. This temple was very much into bats--there was a bat pond (pictured...it's not actually a bat pond, but the pond is shaped like a bat), and most of the carvings on the walkways were shaped like bats. This is China, so of course there is a reason why. The reason bats are so important is because the word for bat (蝙蝠 bian1fu2), sounds similar to the word for to become rich (变幅 bian4fu2).

Inside the temple area was a government-owned teahouse, where we had a mini-tea ceremony. We got to try 5 different kinds of tea, my favorite of which was probably the lychee black tea. Here's something I learned: To drink the tea (not with our coffee mugs, but the actual small tea cups they use), you hold the cup with three fingers, with the middle finger on the bottom of the glass. Men fold their ring finger and pinky in, because this symbolizes the dragon (a symbol of masculinity and power). Women leave those two fingers out because it symbolizes the phoenix (a symbol of femininity and nobility). We took our rickshaws back to our bus stop and that was the end of our visit to the hutongs.

Last night, I went walking around the area with some other girls in the program to find a restaurant. After exploring a bit, we found a restaurant that looked tasty (i.e. lots of locals were inside), so we decided to give it a whirl. We ordered way too much food and paid about 3 dollars a piece for it. My favorite was a mystery vegetable pictured here...the only bad thing was that the tofu tasted like smoked gouda. Not my fave. But it was much better than last night's meal, so I'm happy!