As with any holiday in China, if you get a day off, you generally have to make it up somehow. This year we got Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off, and so we have to work Sunday through Friday this week, get a day off next Saturday, then work Sunday and Monday. Why? Because we also get October first through the seventh off to celebrate the start of communism in China. While the schedule may get kind of hairy from time to time, we enjoy the different holidays that China has.
On Wednesday night, we celebrated by going over to a fellow foreign teacher's home. We stayed up late talking with him and his wife, playing games with his four children, and sampling eight different types of mooncakes. We tried egg, beef, coconut & milk, pineapple, purple potato, red bean, corn, and concubine mooncakes. Yes, you read that right, concubine mooncakes. We think it has something to do with old legends, but your guess is as good as ours. As Shakespeare once penned, "What's in a name? That which we call a [concubine mooncake] By any other name would [taste much better]." I thought it tasted like a strange tomato soup, but it probably would have tasted much better if they would have labeled it "Minestrone" or something of the sort.
For the actual holiday, we went with my former Chinese teacher to hike a mountain here in the middle of our city. She has no family nearby, so she took us on a short trek. It was a clear, beautiful day, with very few clouds. And of course, the weather in our city is a little behind on the times- it's still getting up to the 80s during the day- so we were a bit roasty-toasty on our hike. Regardless, we had a great time and it was the perfect day for taking pictures.
The next day, I went with a friend to visit her family in a village two hours outside of our city. Leaving the city of 8 million and heading to the Indiana-like countryside was quite the pleasant change-up. The hospitality in the countryside is also quite different from the city: foreigners are more and more common here in the city, but we are a rarity in the outskirts. So I was welcomed into the house and was given tea and beer to drink, along with some pre-meal snacks... grapes, mooncakes, and fried chicken (what a good combination). Mind you, everyone else was off preparing the food, and I was sitting by myself on the couch. Finally I was allowed to go pick cucumbers from the garden, and I sneaked some peaks at what they were cooking for lunch.
To honor their guests, the hosts tend to prepare a lot of meat. We had huge helpings of steamed crab, boiled fish, fried chicken, roasted chicken, and who-knows-how-it-was-prepared pig intestine. Naturally when we all started eating, the plate that was closest to me was the pig intestine, and that was the first thing I picked up with my chopsticks. As I was putting it in my mouth, my friend's husband asked if I knew what it was. I knew it was not anything I would normally eat, so when he told me it was the large intestine of a pig, I wasn't all that shocked. The taste wasn't half-bad, but when I went to swallow it, it was a lot longer/stringier than I was expecting and I started to gag because half of it was down my throat while I was still chewing on the other half. I washed it down with my tiny cups of tea and beer, and thankfully I didn't make a fool of myself. The rest of the meal was great (uneventful, really), and we finished off our time together by looking at pictures. I even got the honor of lying on a traditional northern Chinese bed (炕，kàng) that they heat underneath with a stove, even though it was 80-something degrees out. Now if only we could get one of those in our apartments this winter...
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| This is a Kang, but the one I lied on was much more modern than this. |
Today was the last day of our Mid-Autumn Festival break, and so we enjoyed it by having good conversations with friends over Skype and at a small group. We also prepared for the next six days of work. Though this was a busy break, it was an excellent one; we are so glad that we took the opportunities we did to get to know people better and to explore a little bit of our city.
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