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Published: November 24th 2008
Sorry I know many of you have not been able to read my last blogging. I am going to switch back to public blogs because it turns out doing private blogs is more complicated to access than I would have anticipated. So over the last couple weeks I have met a new girl my age from Minnesota. She just arrived in Chongqing to teach English at one of the language schools. It is so nice to have a single girlfriend again!
This past weekend, Angela (a Chinese teacher at our school) and I took my three students out for the day. We went to eat hotpot, which is extremely EXTREMELY popular in Chongqing and Chendu. I have heard about hotpot since I arrived, but had never actually eaten it because it just doesn’t sound very appetizing. I have seen many hotpot restaurants where there is a whole in the middle of the table with a fire underneath to cook the pot at your table. It was described to me as a hot soup that you put all kinds of meats and vegetables into. From seeing leftovers of hotpot brought for school lunch, I quickly realized that the Chinese idea of good meats and veggies is very different from my idea!
Anyways, we arrive at the restaurant and the first thing they do is give up a paper to fill out what we want to put in the soup. All of my students are fluent in Chinese so they all fill it out-I have no idea what is all going into it! Then they bring a huge metal pot of soup. There is actually a pot inside a pot. The inside pot has a regular broth like chicken noodle soup. But there were no noodles, just some mushrooms, carrots, sausage and small chicken wings. The outside pot has the bright red spicy soup with peppers floating in it. At many places, this red hot soup is all you get. Next they bring us all bowls of oil. We are able to put garlic, salt or msg in the oil. At this point I had no idea what the oil was for so I just put some garlic in it. A little bit later, they started bringing out the things we ordered to put in the soup. They liked pig’s blood, intestine, stomach, fish balls, sausage, cabbage, lotus, bean sprouts etc. The meat all comes raw so you have to let it cook in the soup. The pig intestine you have to hold in for forty seconds to cook. So how it works is with you chopsticks you put stuff in the soup and then pull it out, dip it/soak it in the oil and then eat it. Gross! The soup was so hot my mouth went numb after about three bites! I also had a rough time dipping everything in oil because it just felt unhealthily wrong! Not to mention I am still not an expert chopstick user so dipping everything in oil was very difficult! All of food kept slipping out of my chopsticks!
I was a good sport and tried a little bit of everything. Even the intestine and stomach ugh! After lunch we decided to go to a park nearby and go on some row boats. The park and lake were beautiful! We bought some bread that we threw in the water and tons of gold fish would come to the surface to eat the bread. Then we went on some row boats. Initially we had Angela, her husband, me and my fourteen year old student in one boat and then the three twelve year old girls in the other boat. This did not go well for the girls! Only about one of them actually paddled so they were pretty much stationary the whole time-besides turning in circles. After the boats, we went to play a very popular Chinese game called Mah Jong. It is similar to the card game Rummy, but is played with tiles. You can rent tables in the park and play. We must have played for a good two hours! I like it a lot, but then again, what game don’t I like. I will definitely have to find some tiles to bring home with me. Partway through the game two of the students went off to paint ceramics. They had little games set up in one section of the park. When we went to find them, we also played some carnival games. I was trying to win a live rabbit, but failed! It was probably for the best.
After the park, we went to get Angela’s dog. She found the giant sheep dog about a year ago and despite trying to find the owners, she is stuck with him. He is huge! But also he is very adorable and gentle. I kind of want to steal him. On the way back to Angela’s house, we walked by a restaurant that had a dead goat hanging upside down from a high hook near the front door. Its head was in a plastic bag on the ground, but the horns were sticking out. Meanwhile the restaurant, with full glass windows for the outside wall, is filled with people happily eating away! Angela said Chongqing people like to eat goat in the winter….and also dog! I’ll have to be careful!
Also this weekend we had a Halloween celebration. Every year, they have a party for students from both international schools in Chongqing. This amounts to a little over a hundred kids total from both schools. I helped run a station with Luke and Megan where students had to tie balloons to their legs and then try to pop each others’ balloons. It was a lot of fun for the kids. Afterwards, there was a pot luck and socializing. We knew very few people as the event was mainly attended by the other school so we didn’t stay too long. Afterwards, it was a nightmare trying to find a taxi. We were all dressed up-Luke as Kung Fu Panda, Megan as an Indian princess and me as a rabbit. They don’t celebrate Halloween in China so people were gawking at us as we were on the road trying to get a taxi. After thirty minutes in the rain, we finally got a ride.
Another interesting random observation I don’t think I’ve mentioned is that babies don’t wear diapers here. In fact they don’t wear anything. Their pants are crotchless so they just go whenever and wherever they want. It is common to see a little kid using the bathroom on the sidewalk or outside a store. I haven’t seen any going inside a store, but I wouldn’t doubt that it happens from time to time. It is funny because when you’re walking behind a baby, you’ll just see a little butt sticking out the back!
I think I previously mentioned the Chinese toilet that is basically just a hole in the floor. I guess my apartment had one, but they put a normal toilet over it last year. Well Kim has a Chinese toilet in her apartment and it is worse than I thought. Basically her bathroom is a tile room with a hole (the toilet) and a shower head coming out of the tile. Everything just drains through the hole. It seems so wet and unpleasant to me!
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Hotpot
I think I'll pass on the hotpot. You were very brave and courteous to try new things, no matter how gross it might be.