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Published: March 16th 2010
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big houseThe next morning we slept in, and woke up to Tina and Shannon on the computer. They were calling me to have a video chat, but they didn’t have a camera, they just wanted to creep on me. That’s when I knew for sure they really did have fun hanging out and talking to me, so that’s good, I also realized they don’t talk to foreigners much, so they were taking advantage of the opportunity, which is cool with me because I definitely took advantage of the opportunity to talk with Chinese kids who were very interested in what I had to say.
After running some errands we went to hang out with the cousins again, Vincent called and said he missed me, so we had no choice but to go see him. When we got there we fit all 7 people in one car, just to drive two blocks. We went to a tea house and drank some interesting tea and had some snacks. Nothing too exciting but as usual it was fun to hang out with them. After not too long me and Naomi had to go back to her house because her high school friends were coming
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another big house over that night to play games. Her friends came over and ate KFC. After eating we played some games, including one game that I was pretty good at, because it involved English. All of her friends are pretty good at English, two are very good, one being an English teacher, and one living in Singapore. The game is you have to use English to describe a Chinese word or group of Chinese words. Most of them were pretty easy for me, but a few were difficult because they were cultural things I hadn’t heard of or local places in Shantou. It was pretty fun overall.
The next morning we went to another park out an hour or so into the village. This park had more attractions than the first park we went to. We drove some go-karts, rode a kiddy rollercoaster, fed a million goldfish in a big pond, and saw an area full of old tools villagers used to make food with, such as a big rice grinder. For lunch, big auntie brought half a goose in her purse. It was smoked, so it wasn’t going to go bad or anything, but it was pretty funny to see
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at the park her pull out half a goose. They also had other snacks that were good, so no complaints there. When we got home I was very tired so I took a nap while Naomi’s mom was making dinner. Big aunt’s family ate with us, it was another delicious meal. We ate shrimp, crab, salmon sushi (the dad told me it was probably imported from the US, so that was a little funny), and of course wasabi to go with the sushi. After dinner Naomi’s dad’s friends came over to visit for a while. They brought me a little Chinese dish as a gift, it was nice of them.
The next day we went to Naomi’s Grandpa’s village. It is where they were from so it is a tradition for them to go back each year. Grandpa has a house in the village that he only uses to go back each New Year. It is a nice home, with three floors, probably the biggest in the village, and it is only used a few days of the year. When we got to the village there were constant firecrackers going off. Everyone in the village buys as many huge lines of firecrackers
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all the cousins they can afford and an old deaf man lights them off all day, I have some pictures of how big the firecrackers are, it’s crazy. A lot of people in the village stared at me, for obvious reasons. I doubt there have been many foreigners in that village lately, if ever. After walking around for a while with the cousins we went back to Grandpa's house to eat lunch.
Lunch was delicious, as usual. We basically had hot pot, but it was obviously different than in the restaurants. I have some pictures of that meal so check it out. The corn in the soup was especially delicious. After eating some of the food out of the soup you can put fish, oysters and other things in there to cook in the soup and then eat. It was all delicious and we all ate a lot. We also drank some homemade rice liquor. It was similar to the gross strong stuff that old Chinese men drink, but it was much sweeter and actually tasted pretty good. There’s no way it was as strong as the cheap stuff you can buy at the store which is 112 proof. Again, even the
14 year old cousin could drink until her cheeks turned red. After lunch we went for a pretty long walk. After walking around some fields and roads the older people went back to drink tea. We went to buy fireworks. They have similar fireworks to what I’ve seen in the US, but also a few more dangerous ones, and no rules as far as who can buy them, I saw multiple kids probably less than ten years old buying firecrackers. Everyone was playing with fireworks in the village so I felt like at any second my head was going to get blown off, and by the end of the day my ears were ringing, but really was fun.
After a while we went back, drank some tea, ate a light dinner and got ready to head back. Before heading back we lit off some bigger fireworks because it was finally dark. Overall it was a pretty fun day, but it was sad because it was the last day all the cousins would be there. That night Vincent and Yingwu would go back to Guangzhou on an overnight bus. After fireworks we said our goodbyes to Vincent and Yingwu and
drove back home.
The next morning we went out to lunch with her dad’s side again. This time we went to a Hunan restaurant, which is known for spicy food, and being the home province of Mao Zedong. The food was very good, especially some spicy shrimp that most people thought was too spicy, so I got to eat most of it, and some spicy fish which was also very good. Naomi’s uncle gave me some tea and some coffee, the tea was Oolong, which is my favorite kind of tea so I liked that. The coffee, like almost all coffee in China, was instant coffee, but it was very good, as I’m writing this quite some time after the event, I have already finished all of the coffee mix he gave me.
After lunch we didn’t have anything planned, so I did some homework. While I was doing homework Tina and Shannon were online and started talking to me. They weren’t doing anything either, so Naomi told me to invite them over, a little later Sherry came over too. I looked at their English homework, which was interesting, and they checked out my Chinese, which they also
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feeding gold fish found pretty entertaining. After an exciting afternoon of doing pretty much nothing we went to go eat dinner. Since it was just us younger people we didn’t feel the need to get anything fancy, just some average rice or noodles with some veggies.
After dinner, Sherry went home to work on homework. Naomi said she was going shopping with her mom so she told me I should go hang out with Tina and Shannon since they weren’t busy and it would probably be more fun for me. We went to Shannon and Tina's house and sat for a while on the porch listening to all the fireworks still constantly going on bringing in the New Year 6 days after it arrived. After a while their parents came home. Her dad was surprised but excited to see me, he teaches himself English so he was eager to try it out on me. He was actually surprisingly not bad, but since he teaches himself he used Chinese grammar and some interesting pronunciation, it was pretty fun.
After a while Shannon told me her friends wanted to meet me and asked if I wanted to go hang out with them. Of
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gold fish course I was interested so we headed out. We rode a rickshaw, which Naomi’s mom told me I shouldn’t ride because it was dangerous, and she was right. An old bicycle with sketchy brakes and the weight of 4 people on it is probably not easy to control, and with the craziness of a Chinese city, out of control isn’t a good thing, but we made it to our destination. We went to a big arcade area, we played some games, including them kicking my butt at a dance dance revolution type game that included hand movements. After the arcade we met another one of her friends and her friend’s older sister who spoke very good English at a tea house.
We drank some yummy fruit drinks and played JENGA at the tea house where I was the only foreigner. We talked and joked around for a while and then at about 11 we headed back. We took a rickshaw to Naomi’s family’s apartment to drop me off. It was kind of sad saying goodbye because I would be leaving the next day and wouldn’t see them again. I actually probably talked to them just as much as I
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walking across the lake talked to Naomi during the trip so it was definitely sad to say farewell. I got home and talked to Naomi and her mom for a while, ate some delicious dumplings for the last night time snack, and went to bed.
Nothing exciting happened the next day, got up, ate breakfast, and went to the airport. Everything went fine getting back to Beijing. I took the bus back home again because I had all day with nothing but time. After a couple hours on the bus I got back home and did my homework before going to bed. It was a pretty exciting Chinese New Year experience for me, I'm really glad I went to Shantou.
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Zheng
non-member comment
Hey
hey how much longer are you staying in China? -Zheng