Our hotel is great – large room, water filter in the bathroom, both a tub and shower stall, nice firm beds (2 large twins), lots of light. We were awakened in the middle of the night by noises that sounded like gunfire. It made me a little nervous. Then after breakfast, while working in the room, there was the sound of rapid fire. I looked out the window and saw hotel employees just calmly walking by – so figured that it wasn’t anything to be alarmed about. Discovered later that the Chinese set off fireworks for weddings and openings of shops etc. The constant barrage is not even noticed by the locals.
Lucille, Lois, Maria and I planned on exploring together. After a little dithering about what we wanted to do, I had the hotel write the names of 2 shopping centers in Chinese so that we could show them to the taxi drivers. It turned out that these were not shopping malls in our sense of the word. They were really department stores. The first one had a supermarket with all of the normal stuff and people preparing take out dumplings.
Lois wanted to buy a shirt for her husband – he had neglected to bring a collared shirt with him. (This is a very casual group and he decided he didn’t need one. She decided he did need it.) It was an adventure for the clerks as well as us. By the time she finished, she had 5 clerks actively helping her and a few more in the wings. The first shirt that she looked at had a normal shirt pattern but was lined with a fake furry stuff. (I think that it gets cold in the winter and some places are not heated too well.) It also had cuffs that buttoned on, with a spare set to replace them with when they were worn.
We looked at everything in the store, all 5 floors of it. Then we decided to go to the next place. I spotted an MacDonald’s and wanted to take the opportunity to use their bathroom – since before this they have always been western style. Micky D’s let me down. I had to use the “traditional” one aka a “squat pot” – a difficulty since I am not too agile.
The next “mall” was also a department store. We decided to walk around and find a place for lunch. There was a place quite close that looked reasonably clean (our first priority!!) We shared dumplings, green beans with garlic, (which could also be called garlic with green beans – but very yummy) and a noodle dish.
Lois was quite pleased with the day because she had wanted to see where real people shopped for food and clothing – but then we came upon the best part – a farmer’s market type street, fruits, vegetables, live fish and chickens, unrefrigerated meat, little stalls that were restaurants. This was a very large one with covered parts that looked too grungy for us to go through. We did see a part where the dumpling wrappers were being massed produced. One girl was making the translucent rice paper wrappers. Another one was creating a long sheet that she was fan folding and then was going to use a tall tube to cut out many rounds at once.
We found our way out of this warren and hailed a taxi to return to the hotel. A very successful excursion.
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