Are these fish from a river or the stagnant canal?

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More random China-isms.

Eating meat and fish in China is interesting. For starters, every piece of meat has bones in it. And in true Chinese fashion, you stick the whole piece of meat in your mouth and attractively spit out any bones. Also in China fashion, you can spit the bones anywhere on the table. It’s not like there is a designated place to spit out bones. Into a bowl, on a dish, or just right on the table; all Kosher places to spit out inedibles. Fish also has bones galore. I’m actually boycotting eating fish here from now on. They eat river fish here, white, tasteless fish. It takes too much effort to de-bone every bite only to be rewarded with a tiny piece of flavorless fish. But this isn’t the main reason I’m quitting China fish. The reason is that they are called “river” fish. However, at times people refer to the canal that surrounds Yangzhou as a “river.” I would consider myself fairly open to new foods but eating anything that lives in a dirty canal is not food in my book.

China celebrated Dragon Boat Festival on Thursday. Having a rowing background a love for being on the water, I was so excited for this festival and the opportunity to see such elaborate boats. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see any because Yangzhou doesn’t have any dragon boats. So the holiday came and went with us not noticing any difference except for more people roaming the streets. I asked the staff at school months ago where I could see dragon boats and no one could tell me. Most of the people here are such home bodies that they can’t tell us where to go on holidays because they take the day off as an opportunity to stay at home.

This becomes very evident to me in my adult class. Last week I gave them a homework assignment to write me a few paragraphs based on this prompt: Tell me about your dream vacation. You can spend as much money as you’d like, go anywhere in the world, be there as long as you’d like and bring anyone in the world with you. The responses I got were astonishing. Out of 30 students, two were traveling outside of China. Almost all of them mentioned not having enough money or time to go on this vacation, even though I specified, “You have all the money in the world.” One woman was going to the water park one town over from Yangzhou. One was going to Slender West Lake for a picnic with his family. A few opted to take the train to Beijing. It seems as if the people here are perfectly fine with staying right where they are. I can’t quite tell how this became to be the case, but it is.

Some of the pictures in this entry are older but Bob has edited some that now deserve posting.

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Photos

Olympic Fever
Pretty sure it's not going to end

This statue is now gone but we have a piece!
We stumbled on the rubble after the tear-down and found a Beijing Olympics logo. Putting two and two together, we realized it's the belly of this guy!

On the canal
When I asked to see dragon boats, someone told me to look at these. Boats with dragons on the top does not make a dragon boat.

Comments

[Tom Thompson]

Hey Lauren!
I've been reading your posts from the beginning. Thanks for sharing your experiences and your great insights. Brings back VERY good memories of my summer in Japan when I was 23 years old. Can't wait for your next post!