Let's Talk About the Weather...and some other stuff too

Sorry about the long gap between updates! I have two excuses: I’ve been pretty busy, and it’s been too cold to update. The latter excuse is no joke...all of a sudden, it’s become super cold here (think low 40s-30s, and raining), and my house doesn’t have heat, so typing is no fun. I keep doing typos because my fingers are so stiff and then I have to go back and fix them…yuck. So I kept waiting for the cold to go away, and then it didn’t, and it got worse, so now I’m just going to go for it, frostbite be damned.

So, what has been going on in my life since I last wrote on this fine blog of mine? Well, lots. First of all, last week my dad was here! It was so great to see him, however briefly. I took him to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, which I think was cool for him to see (amazing model of the whole of Shanghai which takes up an entire floor, plus a whole floor on the famous Shanghai Expo, May-October 2010, Better City, Better Life). We also went for a lovely dinner in Xintiandi, this Quincy Market type area filled with super swanky restaurants and shops…not a place I could eat on my own, but since Dad was here…just had to try it. Then, last Wednesday, was the big day: dinner with my host family. Well, first I took Dad to see ECNU in all it’s glory (giant Mao statue, the CIEE building, meet our program director, etc, etc), and then we took my host family out to dinner. My original idea was to take them to a non-Chinese restaurant from a cuisine that would be sort of familiar, like Thai or Vietnamese food, where there would hopefully be an English menu and my dad and I would know what was good. When I floated this idea to my host family, however, they looked at me like I had ten heads. So I told them to pick their favorite restaurant (and insisted, about a gazillion times, that WE were hosting THEM, even though they did not seem to like that idea one bit). We ended up going to this really nice Chinese restaurant close by…my host dad ordered (and did a great job, too, successfully avoiding anything too weird). My host mom was feeling ill so she didn’t come, but afterwards we all went back to the apartment and looked at Judy’s baby pictures and she and my dad got to talk which was nice. How did we come to be looking at Judy’s baby pictures? Well, my host dad was convinced that my dad was the spitting image of his former boss at Nestle, and instructed Judy to go find a picture from his Nestle days in the family photo boxes. Judy, being Judy, instead picked out all of the cute pictures of herself, dumped them on me (we were picking through the pictures together) and told me to bring them out to the living room so she could keep looking for more cute pictures. So my host mom and my dad looked at Judy’s baby pictures while I acted as ferry, and Judy stood in my room singing to herself (in English) “This is me, this is me, this is me, this is me” as she sorted through pictures…oh, Judy. The cutest, most low-maintenance spoiled child I know haha.

And then my dad went back to Boston, and it became COLD. SO COLD. And RAINY. Luckily he had brought me some of my winter gear (essentials, such as a fleece, a pair of sweatpants and my slippers...such a good call), so I’ve survived, but there have been some close calls, I swear. Besides the weather, other news is that I’ve been volunteering more with JUCCCE, which has been fun. Friday afternoon we went to this massive fabric market where they can make you ANYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE out of ANYTHING you can imagine. Am currently drooling over the prospect of getting a cashmere dress coat handmade for like $75…will probably remain fantasy, but it’s a nice fantasy. A warm, fashionable, tailored fantasy…

Sunday evening I had dinner in the ECNU cafeteria and watched “Love Actually” with my one Chinese friend, Jenny (her English name…embarrassingly enough I don’t know her Chinese name…I don’t think she’s ever told me…). This came about because we were chatting on Skype and she mentioned that she was watching “High School Musical” and she asked me what kind of movies I like to watch. I said that I like all types, but listed some of my favorites, including “Love Actually”. She wanted to know if she could find “Love Actually” in Chinese, and I said I didn’t know but I had an English version (I brought DVDs of “Love Actually” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” to watch whenever I feel down…haven’t had to do so yet, so it was nice to have a more cheerful use for the movie). And then she suggested that we watch it together. So that’s what we did! I had forgotten about some of the more raunchy parts of the movie, but we fast-forwarded through those (I felt sooo bad that I forgot about a couple scenes…it’s kind of a jump from “High School Musical” to “Love Actually”…). But all in all she seemed to really enjoy the movie! We had the English subtitles up and I stopped it every so often to explain, but I was super impressed by how much she understood. Her English is really good, and she’s really patient with my Chinese. Jenny is studying to teach Chinese to foreigners, and she’s going to be super good at it, because she’s incredibly nice and patient and chill.

Monday and Tuesday were spent on an ECNU-organized trip to Hangzhou, a city about 3 hours away from Shanghai by bus. Hangzhou is famous for its West Lake (Xihu), which is considered the most beautiful lake in China. Marco Polo said that Hangzhou was the most beautiful city in the world. I can’t really vouch for the city, but the lake was indeed very beautiful. Monday was cold and raining, and a sort of maddening day. We drove in the rain from stop to stop in Shaoxing, a small city about an hour from Hangzhou, and we kept being dropped in the rain to go look at things without any explanation really except a time when we had to be back on the bus. Hmmm. But we saw this massive Buddha that was carved out of this ginormous rock about 1300 years ago, so that was definitely worth seeing. It was probably my favorite Buddhist site I’ve visited, in terms of being incredibly simple and majestic and basic and awesome…definitely inspired a sense of the holy. The park, called Keyan, was very striking (even in the rain). Think flat landscape, with tiny hills randomly rising out of the flatness, and then in one place a massive rock cliff with a small lake in front of it. Monday night Katherine and I went on an excursion to find this restaurant mentioned in Lonely Planet for it’s clay pot chicken, a Hangzhou specialty. Oh my god. This chicken. It was unbelievable. A full spring chicken, roasted in a clay pot…the best roast chicken I’ve ever had. When we were done, all that was left was the head and a large pile of bones.

Tuesday we spent three hours at West Lake. It was COLD COLD COLD but not raining, luckily. Katherine and I walked briskly until we came to a place where we could rent bikes, and then we biked, and then we found Starbucks (by chance…it was like magic…we had talked about how cool it would be to find Starbucks since hot chocolate would be perfect on a day like Tuesday, and then, BAM, there was Starbucks, on the shore of the lake…). The lake was breathtakingly beautiful, I think even more beautiful than it would have been on a sunny day…mists and clouds shrouded the mountains that rose from one side of the lake, the water and the sky were both a beautiful light grey, the hills were dark blue, the dark green willows bent over the water, water rippled, I shivered, I marveled, it was restful to have the leisure to just glory in this natural place. PLUS it was so cold that there were very few other people there.

Today, Wednesday, back in Shanghai, we had a very enjoyable cooking class…yum. Which was good, since for dinner tonight we had dog meat stew. Yuck times a gazillion. At one point my host dad pulled the head out to show to me/offer to one of his friends who was eating with him…it had teeth. My host mom wasn’t home, and she doesn’t eat dog, and my host dad was eating with two of his friends, so I guess that’s why we had such a gross dinner. Luckily I wasn’t hungry, and there were other things to eat (like egg and tomato soup…so good), but it was still pretty traumatic. Blarrgh.
And on that note, off I go to snuggle down deep under my covers. Peace!