Chinese Family Holiday

The first week in October is national week. In celebration of the founding of new (ie communist) China we get a week of. sounds like a great chance to travel, right? except an american airport at thanksgiving has nothing on China during golden week. Everyone travels. Affluent Chinese stream to tourist spots, so your average quiet town looks like this:

Both migrant workers and everybody but the super afluent travels by bus or train, so stations, even in tiny, out of the way towns,  look like this:

However. i you are lucky enough to have a car, or a friend whose older sister has a car, it's not bad. the roads are still pretty clear due to not everyone having a car and tolls being high (also people rich enough to have a car have probably jetted off to europe for the week). And if your friend's sister also owns a hotel--well then, you go to  Jiaxing for a few days.
Jiaxing is best known as the place with "the little red boat"--"On July 23, 1921, 13 delegates of the Chinese Communists nationwide gathered in a French concession building at 76 Xingye Road in Shanghai to hold the CPC's 1st National Congress.  Some French policemen interrupted the meeting. Under the suggestion of a delegate's wife who was from Jiaxing, the delegates, including Mao Zedong, decided to move the meeting onto the South Lake, a famous scenic area near Shanghai, in a boat reserved for visitors. Therefore, the delegates gathered on the boat and the Chinese Communist Party was founded at the end of the meeting" [So sayeth the China attractions guide]

we did walk around south lake (though we didn't pay for the erry to visit the boat--nina, our resident party member had been last year and said it wasn't really worth it). Mostly I got a chance to hang out with some Chinese families: Jane's older sister, her best friends, a family, also named Yang, who were from the same village and when they were all younger and poorer, lived in another wing of the house Jane's family lived in, Now they live in the same apartment building in Ningbo. They each have a teenage son, and the Yang 2s had a 4 year old daughter.

Now obviously, most things happened in Chinese (though I did get moments such as when the mother grabbed the soy sauce saucer from her daughter who was drinking out of it and pointed at me saying "you know why she's so white? she doesn't drink soy sauce!"--all i knew was I was being pointed at and she was saying white (i know most of my primary colors now!)), but here's what I can tell you: a Chinese family holiday seems to involve a lot of eating. We rolled into Jiaxing about  12, and went to a restaurant that specialized in food from their hometown ( a coastal region of Ningbo county): we had crab and shrimp, of course, and some small fresh fish, and a specialty from jane's hometown of a glutnous rice stuffed  sort of dumpling thing, beggar's chicken, which was fantastic and about 14 other things. oh, i was going to try duck's tongues, but the 4 year old scared them all down. we washed everything down with watermelon juice. then the ladies headed off to the leather market--a big indoor mall made up entirely of leather stores. we spent about 4 hours traipsing from store to store. Jane's sister is a fierce bargainer--she'd go down to about a 1/3 of the listed price  and keep at them until they folded--there was much dramatic gesturing, sighing and storming out.
then it was time to eat. again. a hot pot buffet this time. i've been to bargain hot pot buffets before--my students took us to one last year--but  this was a fancy one--everyone had their own individual hot pots to dip in and we sat in a big horseshoe shaped velvet booth with crystal strands hanging between  each booth. In addition to all the sliced meats, fungi, noodles, eggs, greens, that are standard at every hotpot meal, we had a huge shellfish deposited in our pot at the start of the meal, which later the waiter fished out and  ceremoniously unshelled for us--we also got skewered shrimp which the waitress came and deshelled and deviened for us.

then it was on to a variety show (more food there by the way--popcorn and fruit and drinks). it was actually really fun, though all in Chinese of course. it started with 4 hosts/esses in front of the curtain singing and playing on the saxophone--i swear--the harder they come. then they pulled back the curtain and there was a giant raffle. there was a huge pigeonholed cabinent and people bought different numbers. prizes ranged from blankets to rice steamers to cushions to towels to toothbrushes. then the shows started. first there was a grand dancing revue with girls in costumes, pictures of chinese industry on the backdrops and a guy in a monk constume riding a motorcycle. then there was a magician, singers, a singer who did flips and drank a litre of wine as we cheered violently (by the way, above are some chinese clappers: don't want to strain yourself clapping!). Then there were some vaudeville like acts: a long play with a couple who kissed up altrernately to different parents depending on who they thought was richer and got tricked out of it at the end, and a chiang kai-shek impersonator who apparently talked in modern slang and flirted with all the women, which was apparently hysterical. oh, and a female opera singer who came and sat on a guy in the audience's lap and generally flirted with him and then was revealed  to be a man. we shrieked with laughter. the final act was an acrobat who won 3rd place on china's got talent.

then to bed. the next morning a nice walk around south lake (home of the little red boat) and had another gargantuan meal: crabs and rice cakes, duck liver, stewed pork belly, an awesome chicken soup (which is actually kind of rare here--i don't love chinese soup), a soup with greens and tofu, a million other dishes i can't remember, and fried crickets. i think they were mainly for the gross out factor. only I and the teenage boys and the husband tried them (having been told americans only liked bread I felt it was my duty to eat everything). apparently we had ordered a half ox head (which came complete with eyeball, horns and teeth), but they were all out. bummer.

I didn't take pictures of the meals since ut seemed gauche when everyone else was just chilling, but here's a meal jane and i ate later in the trip on our own:

clockwise from bottom: my plate piled with bones, shrimp, which were a present because it was the restaurant's anniversary, the remains of a roasted duck, greens, shredded potatoes with hot peppers, and goose fried rice. and yes, the two of us ate it all.