Monday, May 9th. Day of Adjustment
I woke up at 8:30 AM and headed to breakfast. I sure enjoy these breakfasts: at least 25 choices of various meats, vegetables, fruits, and desserts! I went straight for the dim sum! I had both the custard and just plain dim sum, my favorite Chinese dish. I also had some rice and a brownie.Then Kathy, my roommate, and some others and I went for a walk. It was nice to just walk through the town and see all the cool little shops and buildings. Unfortunately, the museums are closed on Monday, so we pretty much just walked around and went to the supermarket.
Walking through the super market was quite enjoyable. It was a small market, only one story, but there were still lots of interesting foods. There were a bunch of ducks for people to buy.When you picked which one you wanted the owners took it, chopped its head off, and stuck it in a bag for you. There were also the usual interesting candies, cookies, cereals, drinks, and other stuff. Many of the cookie and cracker packages looked much like some of those in America, like Oreos and Pringles, but the writing was different. Of course I couldn’t understand the Chinese writing, but some had American writing. Near the supermarket was a KFC. It was a flashback of home because they were playing was country music.
We met again as a group for lunch. It was a specially served lunch at a traditional Lazy Susan type of table. One by one the dishes were brought to each table. We had plates of beef, chicken, fish, tofu, cauliflower, bok choy, shrimp, crab, bamboo, rice cakes, soup, turnips, and of course a huge bowl of sticky rice and ending with a plate of watermelon. After lunch Kathy and I took a bus to a garden downtown. But the garden actually turned out to be an apartment complex, so we didn’t end up walking through a garden, but we did go up and down some streets with shops along the side. Then we went back to the hotel and rested.
We met again in the evening and had a great dinner at the Lilly Hotel. More than a dozen dishes of many meats and vegetables. So far we haven’t had anything really odd yet, like jelly fish, squid, duck foot. But we did have pig’s feet. After dinner we drove to the West Lake and watched a performance of music and dancing on the water. The audience was on land, but the performers were on the water. I don’t know how to explain it, so I’ll just put some pictures up. The story was the Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet and is called “White Snake.”
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