Nov 9 Excursion to San He-an (3 rivers)

San He town is an old village 40 km from Hefei. It has a history of more than 2500 years. Perhaps some of the buildings are original (some of the people looked old enough, too.)

The group hired a van, driver and guide. There were 5 of us and it cost (including lunch, tolls, food for driver and guide, entrance to two museums) $25.

From the left we are: Lois, Lucille, Maria, Deena & Shu Lin.

This town had old bridges:


Narrow lanes with the doors open so that we could look into people’s houses:


Great doorways:



And adorable baby boys. The preponderance of boys was about 8 to 1. It was very noticeable in the babies. Among school age children it looked more equal.

We saw a “modern” dentist’s office. Both the husband and wife are dentists and invited us in to take pictures.



Looks hygienic right!!

This was an unelectrified drill. She said that they didn’t use it now – but it was still sitting there in the same room.

Along the way there were shops selling sweets:

Fireworks:

And liquor.

We were just as interesting to the people of this town as they were to us. Although this was a tourist town, I don't think that they got many westerners. We seemed to be surrounded whenever we paused. The pedicab drivers were almost aggressive. A herd of them surrounded us at one point.

This was sort of a Potemkin village. Behind the really old buildings were newer apartments. It was hard to tell where the people really lived.

The museum on the oldest street had been owned by 2 brothers. One had a cloth shop, the other sold rice and grains. They conducted their businesses on the first floor and lived on the second.


The Japanese do plastic food – the Chinese do plastic people really well.

This was the study.

Do you recognize a ring toss “booth”?

Our guide ordered lunch at a local restaurant. She recommended it as being “very clean”. We had our own room (which seems to be typical). The best dishes were a shredded pumpkin stir-fry and a soup with balls that were made of leeks and meat.


As usual we had way too much food.

After lunch we visited the home of the grandparents of Yang, a Chinese Nobel laureate in physics. He had stayed with his grandparents in this village as a child and was sent here for safety during WW II. The house had many pictures of him and his family and a lot of writing in Chinese.



Our husbands knew who he was – and were very surprised to find out that he was from this area.

We passed on the boat ride. The streams were low, very smelly, and had some strange floating stuff.

On the way back out of town, we saw people making a quilt. The first preparing the batting, the second compressing it inside the cover.



Tonight Chuck and some of the other husbands have the council meeting, so several of us just ate in the hotel dining room.

I went to sleep before he got home. It was a very long day for him.

Nov 8 A Dining Experience

Be prepared – if you don’t like food, don’t read this one.

We were on our own for dinner, so a Chinese colleague organized an excursion to a very interesting restaurant. I think that he checked with all of the local people to find the one that was the most different. It was only for the UCLA and Lawrence Berkeley Lab people. (Also the ones who are the most adventurous eaters – and we know that Chuck and I definitely qualify for that!)

The women (Lucille, Maria and I) were told that the van would pick us up at 5:20. Then it was changed to 5:10 and finally at 5:05 we were called and told it was here. The van took us to the university to pick up the physicists and then we all went to the restaurant. It was 25 miles through horrendous traffic to get there. We were all sure that we were lost, but the driver knew where he was going.

In the middle of nowhere, out of the dark of fields, appeared a place that looked like a Las Vegas Casino. We were greeted at the door by young women in long blue evening dresses with white rabbit shrugs. When I first saw them, I thought that our group might be sadly underdressed. Inside it was a huge, huge area with trees and bushes and streams and pools with fish.



The food and drink servers had on roller skates.

Every table was surrounded with bushes so that everyone had their own private eating bower. We had a private room (with bathroom attached.)


First we were invited to go look at the food choices. This meant a hike through the “woods” to a large area with many tanks of live fish, shrimp, crabs, lobsters, shell fish, and wall displays of all of the kinds of dishes that were available. Chuck estimated that there were 300 dishes. Each party had a personal order taker, who took the notes on a palm pilot. There was much discussion between Nu and our waiter. We had to wait until they were finished, because we were not sure that we could find our way back to our room.

Nu explained that this restaurant had food styles from 5 different areas – but he had narrowed it down to 3. We were going to have delicacies of the season and the area.

We started with duck tongues.


We were having 4 cold dishes – so after the tongues we had green salad,


Venison tendons with carrots and scallions They were a little gelatinous.


Spicy tofu


And a cucumber salad.

Then we moved on to the hot dishes.

A soup with with mushrooms and dried dates cooked inside a papaya, (my personal favorite)

Hairy crabs – I got the impression that these were really special and seasonal – but were a lot of trouble to eat.


After the crabs we all were given fresh towels and plates. (We really were a mess after these.)

A whole steamed fish with bones that were to be eaten.


Bacon on baby bamboo

A hot pot fish


Shrimp 3 ways – steamed, fried and live in a soy sauce that killed them (known as “drunken shrimp”. These were still wriggling when they came to the table – but stopped after awhile. Chuck did get one that revived on his plate and he ended up with soy sauce all over.




Mushrooms and goose with baby bok choy


A noodle dish with an incredible number of chilies in it (all those red things are chili peppers.


Then we moved on to the desserts. A fruit plate with watermelon, tomatoes, grapes and fresh dates,


Pancakes stuffed with bean paste


Sweet noodle bird’s nests and dumplings.


All of this (and lots of beer and tea) cost us $28 each!!!

Chuck is planning to return when we are living in Hefei. He thinks that now that he knows the routine, he could manage to order an interesting group of dishes.

We took taxis back to the hotel. We took a more direct route back which only took 20 minutes.

We read a little while so that we could digest a bit before going to sleep.

Nov. 8 Wed. Exploring Hefei

Somehow I lost a day in my calculations. This is caused by both the International Date Line and leaving a day later that we planned. This is the right date and day for me.

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.

Nov 6 Shanghai to Hefei

Since we went to bed about 8:30, we were up with the birds. We walked around the neighborhood. Just in front of the hotel is a small stream with a park on both sides.


We took a long walk and discovered a wholesale flower market. Except for the fact that I couldn’t understand anyone, I could have been in the one in L. A.

Back to the hotel for breakfast (omelet, bacon, potatoes, juice & coffee) and then out for another walk. After being cooped up in airports and airplanes for 2 days we really needed to be outside. We saw the employees of a local business being led in their daily exercises.



Douglas came and posed in front of the hotel.




We didn’t take his advice and left for the airport much too early. (We do this all the time – we will never miss a plane. But since it takes us much longer in an airport where we are not sure of the language, we like to play it safe.)

At the airport we had time to have some dumplings and won ton soup. Hefei is about 1 hour west of Shanghai. Students from the university met us at the airport and escorted us to a cab. They told the taxi driver the name of the hotel. We manage quite well by ourselves, but it is lovely to be cosseted.

We just had time to unpack and change before leaving for the reception at the university. Reception is an upscale word for what it was. Imagine lots of strange food cooked and served in your elementary school cafeteria. I have had many of these dished before – these weren’t the best. The reception did give me the opportunity to hook up with the other wives. I have toured with 2 of them before. Two others were new to me. We made plans to meet after breakfast to plan our excursions.

By then we were fading again. Home to bed.

Nov 5 Really leaving for China

Northwest did better today. Everyone kept apologizing and they were all very helpful. They did keep telling us that we would get more information about our connections when we arrived in Tokyo.

After an uneventful flight, with slightly better than normal airline food, we hit the chaos that was Narita. We were told to go to gates 28, 26 and 22. Since we had hours until our flight, we wandered through the duty-free shops before checking to see which gate we were really supposed to go to. Uh oh, they had moved us to another airline and moved up the flight.

Quick, quick, get on this bus to go to another terminal. When we got to the new terminal, we discovered that we had to take a train to get to the gate. When we got to the gate, we were told that we had to go “downstairs” to check in. By this time there was a little herd of us that had grouped together that were all wandering around trying to find out where to go.

We had to go out of the secured area, check in and then go back through security to get to the gate. I think that we went through 3 checkpoints before we were finally back at the gate. We all made it! It did mean that we arrived in Shanghai several hours earlier than scheduled, which was a good thing, since we were dragging by this time.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express. This hotel has only be open a month. Douglas Wang is heading up the front desk and operations. He had bought our tickets to Hefei, and we had lots of presents for him so it was wonderful to be greeted like old friends as we pulled up.

The bathroom had a really interesting and very novel arrangement. The bathroom door and shower door were one and the same. It was opaque glass and opened 90 degrees. It saved many doors in the construction of a hotel and also conserved space.

We had a bowl of beef udon soup and fell into bed.

Nov 4 Leaving for China

Well, we tried to leave for China. Northwest Airlines had something else to say about it. We arrived at the airport early (as usual) and waited until boarding time. Then they said that there was a “slight” problem and there would be more news in an hour.

After an hour – the problem was still a problem and there would be another wait for an hour.

Then the s*** hit the fan. There would not be a flight today – but tomorrow at 8 am. The man making the announcement was the bilingual speaker, and tended to speak very softly and swallow most of what he was saying. So, not only were people irate because of the delay, but also because he wasn’t really explaining what was going to happen. We all were sent to the Hilton hotel for the night.

We also went to the hotel, because Alec, Jef and the kinder had moved into our house so that they could redo their bathroom while we were gone. We did go home so that we could go out for dinner with the group and so that we could pick up clean underwear (the airline still had everyone’s luggage.

Halloween

The munchkins dressed up and had lots of fun Trick or Treating. Calder wanted to be an elephant – so Jef and Alec created a costume. They started with a grey hooded sweatsuit and went from there.

His friend Kai was a lion.

Branwen was a Penguin. This costume came from Japan and was worn by Calder first.


They both scored a lot of candy and shared it with Pop-pop.