Eating Scorpions and Grasshoppers Oh My!

I just finished another weekend in Beijing, time is flying by. Friday after class we went to a teahouse. It was in a hutong around Tiananmen Square. We went as a group with our program director, Chinese roommates, and a couple of our tutors. The house that we went to was very old but beautiful. It has a courtyard in the middle that opened up to four different rooms. The owner of the tea house took us on a house tour. The first room was a temple room connected to a study. Then we went to a room that looked like a family room with old photographs of families. Then there was another sitting room with old maps and pictures of Beijing. The owner of the teahouse grew up in Beijing and wanted to remember the old Beijing because he said it was changing so much. He also said that the house costs 1.5 million USD. We went into the tearoom and all sat at a large table and ordered tea off of a menu written on a fan. So the Chinese roommates taught us the technique of opening a fan (the hand gesture.) After tea and some weird snacks we went around the other rooms and collected the old toys that he had on display (during our tour he kept on telling us that we could play with the toys which made me very confused because I didn’t know when we were going to play with them during our tea drinking.) But after tea we had a lot of fun being taught how to play Chinese children games by our roommates and tutors. There were a lot of puzzle games like try to get the metal loop through the other metal objects on a chain, a board game that was like connect five, a hackysack made out of circular metal and plastic disks with feathers, and a hand-eye coordination game where you pick up bones while throwing a ball. After the teahouse we went to the Olympic grounds and walked around in the freezing cold looking at the gigantic birds nest and water cube. The architecture of the buildings are really cool. The bird’s nest glows orange and close up you can see the inner structure holding it up. The water cube is bright blue and the siding is made to look like bubbles. We really wanted to touch it but weren’t able to reach it. They had fences around the perimeter of the buildings. After seeing the buildings we ran back to the bus and drove back to beida.
On Saturday we took the subway into Qianmen (by Tiananmen) and went looking for the entrance to the Underground city, the bomb shelter that was made because of the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I read that it can even withstand a chemical attack and is 33 sq miles big with tunnels leading out of the city. It sounded pretty amazing but as we wandered through a hutong looking for the entrance, it was showcased as some kind of museum in our guidebooks, a local informed us that it was no longer open because it isn’t safe (later I read it was undergoing renovations.) This put a dent in our plans and we were in turmoil over what to do next. We ended up splitting up with some people going to a park that has a great viewpoint of the city (that I hope to go to later when it is warmer) and the rest of us, Sean, Ben, Abi, and I went searching for silk stores. Using the guidebook as a map we wound up on Qianamen street, a bewildering tourist street that almost looked like it was out of an LA movie set. There these older fashioned Chinese buildings but there was nothing in them. There were a lot of people on the street too. (I later looked it up online and found that the street is currently being redeveloped to represent the architecture of the street in the 1920s and 1930s.) Two Chinese men clung onto Ben by starting a conversation with him in English and being extremely interested in getting his e-mail address. They followed us into the silk store that was on a street off of Qianmen Street. The silk was really soft and not too expensive but one of our new Chinese friends said that we were too beautiful to be shopping here and that only old women shop for silk. Eventually we got tired of the two Chinese men and we ditched them in a store. We found hidden in the back of a store and behind a shoe stand a man that was selling Chinese scroll paintings. Abi found a flower scroll that she wanted to buy so I tried to do some bargaining with the man to get a lower price. I was actually able to have a conversation with him. He kept on trying to sell multiple scrolls to us so I had a look at a few other ones he had rolled up and really liked this red blossom branch. I felt really good that I was able to convey what color flowers we wanted and that I was able to bargain down the price and get us a good deal. He was also saying something about the signature on my painting so I’m not sure but I think it might be special, like an original or by a good artist, who knows. So I felt pretty good about my speaking abilities after that shop even though I didn’t understand everything he was saying I understood a lot and was able to get my point across. It turned out that separating from the group was good for me because I was with three other people that didn’t know any Chinese so I had to step up and use what I could to communicate. For dinner we wandered around a hutong and found a family run restaurant. Here again I used a lot of my Chinese. I had to tell the waitress that we couldn’t read the menu (and it didn’t have any pictures) so we had to work with her to see if she had any of the dishes we were familiar with and knew the names of or that were in the guidebook we had. We ended up getting a stir fry tofu dish, garlic green beans, friend rice, and an egg dish. It was good and I felt good again at being able to communicate! After dinner we met up with the rest of the group at Wangfujing Street, a street with international stores, bright lights and a side street where you can buy anything you want and they will barbecue it on a stick. They had worms, lizards, starfish, seahorse, octopus, cockroaches, scorpions, grasshoppers, and more. Louisa, Anastasia, and I were brave enough to try the scorpions. They were very crunchy but pretty tasty. We decided to be more adventurous and try the grasshopper. They were big and juicy. Overall I enjoyed our exotic food on a stick. Exhausted we took the subway home and fell fast asleep. Today I slept in and had an overall relaxful day. Ben, Sean, Yasi, and I went to Wudaokou where we got full body massages. It was quite an experience. If I didn’t go to a rolfer before I would have been really surprised. But it was like a rolfing session but more intense. They really did beat us up. Three minutes into the hour-long massage my masseur stuck his fingers into my ears. That really worried me on the direction the massage was going in. We were also sketched out by the place because it was a 24 hour place. But it was pretty nice inside and nothing inappropriate happened just a lot of pounding on the head. Then we went to a nice little Indian restaurant and had some delicious Indian food and then took a cab back to our dorm and now I am writing this and doing some homework. I better focus my whole attention on memorizing this essay for Chinese class. ttyl miss and love everyone. kearney