Catching Up in Xiaoshan- June 6th

Day 9 – June 6^th

Happy Duan wu day! Dragon Boat festival is today but I did not get a chance to go out to XiXi Wetlands to watch any of the races nor did I eat any Zhong Zhu..? But since I ate some the day before I think that makes up for it. 

Spent the day with Drew and Yasmina. Raining again. But at least we got to the National Tea Museum of China. It was really fascinating. Seeing all of the pottery/ceramic work really made me miss my time in the ceramics room back in high school. I need to go visit Mabes Babe when I return to Ohio. Whenver that is…

Anyway when we were in this one room we played with an interactive camera that would take pictures of you in front of a green screen (of tea fields in the spring, summer, fall, winter, or random other tea related scenery). While we were doing this one of the information/museum ladies/attendees asked if we would like to try some tea for free. Clearly there’s a catch at the end of this tasting but we figured why not. She ran us through the rest of the museum and then up some stairs. On the stair well we saw a massive tea cake (compressed tea leaves to make shapes or other such sometimes with Chinese printed onto them) it covered the wall and was probably about 8 feet long. Or the diameter may have been about 8 feet at the most 12… My sense of feet is terrible… Anyway it was huge.

After our little rush we stopped to a small room with a long dark mahogany? Table and a lot of chairs around it with a lady sitting on one side. She had a pretty fascinating set of stuff set in front of her, fairly small tea pots, glass and ceramic, little animal things that were a dark almost forest green color, and tiny tea cups. The tiny tea cups were the 3^rd best thing in this array of stuff. Oh and tea canisters duuuuh, 

We first tried green tea of the local area, then black or pu’er tea, jasmine, and finally ginseng oolong. /////watching the flower bloom in the jasmine was awesome and the sweet after taste of the ginseng oolong was amazing. I quickly learned that the latter is my favorite. The little animal things turned out to be color-changing pets when you pour hot water on em. I think they were the coolest. The second coolest was the cup/pot (served as both?) that as all white except for two animals, a dragon and a phoenix, that also changed color like the pets. They turned into these brilliant green and orange. Ah I couldn’t resist buying a set when we were shown the shop nearby. Drew also got a color changing cup. I think they might be called Don su…? Augh need to check/verify this. Yasmina bought a tiny cup set thing. One small like what we used and then long and cylindrical. They had very pretty floral designs on them.

We left the museum to check out the Green Tea Restaurant as recommended by Annika. Ended up seeing her there later on as well. We had crab and (fowl?) egg, fried cabbage and pork, drunken soybean (I think it was just slightly salted water), pumpkin and shrimp (more like krill… Shrimpy shrimp as Yasmina called it), a very dry brownie, a pretty tasty peanut butter ice the sand (….something along the lines of shaved ice with peanut butter… As we ate we saw a lot of food go by ( we sat next to a windowed wall), in particular, we saw bread boxes with ice cream on top. It turned out the boxes were completely hollow but still looked really good. Baked anything and ice cream are kind of difficult finds. I plan on stopping by a bakery to see what they have instead of living off of lame choco pies as delicious as these little bastards are.

We returned to Ling Yin kinda damp from the rain and took an hr break to figure out how I was supposed to get back to Xiaoshan that night and for a rest. Decided to try to find the night market of Nanshan road but I think we ended up at the Wushan one. I’m still unsure.

The first shop we actually walked into and checked out was something akin to Nirvana or any of the shops in Yellow Springs. Very heavy scented with incense and oil cones with tons of patchwork or brightly colored (perhaps Tinker :P) clothing. Lots of little knick knacks. We even saw a postercard? Of Chairman Mao that said Chairman Mao is a red fucker in our hearts. I have no idea what that was supposed to mean but it was kind of hilarious to see.

We stopped at a little snack stand with a guy who knew some English. He pointed to the right and said sweet and pointed to the left saying salty. They were 5 yuan and I figured why not? And grabbed a sweet disc. They were like these odd cookies we tried thanks to Travis but I can’t really describe em. They had sesame seeds on top. It was sweet and tasty. We ended up getting a crowd around us as we waited for the vendor to heat up the little baked disc. I’m not sure if they were expecting fireworks to shoot out from the disc, were fascinated by foreigners, or what… It was kind of awkward being surrounded by people with no clear reason for such a gathering. Not quite like a flash mob.

I rushed off though because I had to find my bus back to Xiaoshan. I’m not sure if it’s just me but I really have a terrible time with buses. Even the small bus routes in the PTVA. Gah. I am doomed even more so here. I’ve taken up writing down … attempting to write down the characters for the bus stops. We’ll see if that’ll do me any good. Hopefully I’ll figure it out soon before I run out of cash thanks to cabs…