The Summer Palace and Lunch with Ducks

Dear Blog,

Can't believe it's already Saturday! It feels like just yesterday that I was uploading all my Forbidden City pictures. Time is really starting to fly here in Beijing... haven't quite decided whether that's is a good or bad thing. This past week we learned an old Chinese saying “时间好像流水一样”, which basically translates to "time passes like running water". The older I get the more that seems to be the case, but I'll save discussing my perception of time for another post.

Today my "brother" and I spent the morning and midday hours with our Chinese family (my brother being Andrew Kang, another Yale kid here in Beijing). As part of the program, Chinese families volunteer to "adopt" two HBA kids for the summer. Andrew and I were lucky enough to have been adopted by the nicest, most giving family in all of China. I feel like I meant to

write about this in another post but I think I ended up just telling my parents when I Skyped with them. Two weekends ago I had dinner at our family's house, and in the process learned how to make Chinese dumplings and experience white liquor for the first time. There were only three of us eating but my "mom" made about nine different dishes, and by the time I had eaten my fill there was more than enough food to feed three or four more people. From what I've heard here and even back at Yale that's pretty much standard procedure when guests come for dinner.

But anyway, this morning we took a trip to the Summer Palace, which is about 15 minutes away from my dorm at Beiyu. The Summer Palace is the place where the Chinese emperors and royalty would come to hang out during the summer, both to relax and to get away from the crowds of central Beijing. It's really more park than palace, and it's set right next to a huge lake (as shown in the picture to the left).

We spent about three hours walking around but, as is the case with most of the places I've visited so far, I feel like we could have explored for an entire day without seeing everything. The scenery there was gorgeous, and we were lucky enough to be graced with blue skies. For all of you who are unfamiliar, Beijing has notoriously smoggy air, so most of the time during the summer the sky takes on a murky blue-tinged grey hue. However, rain is moderately successful in pulling smog out of the air, and since we had some pretty heavy rain a few days ago the air is still relatively clean.

After the Summer Palace, we met up with my Chinese "older brother" and his wife at a local restaurant to experience somewhat of a specialty here in Beijing: roast duck. Before coming to China, I had plenty of people tell me that the fact that I liked American Chinese food did not guarantee I would like real Chinese food. Luckily, I've yet to find a dish here that I did not like (I haven't tried dog meat yet so that's still on the to-do list). But honestly, the food here is phenomenal, I'm a huge fan of the cafeteria at Beiyu, which offers great food at a ridiculously low price - a plate of scrambled eggs and roast chicken with a bowl of rice runs you 10.50 RMB, or about $1.55 (quite a steal).

Today's lunch was phenomenal. The roast duck was very good, as were the various other pork, chicken, and vegetable dishes that we had. Here in China, the people have developed a wonderful system for eating a meal. At most restaurants, there's a huge revolving plate-type thing in the middle of each table. When you order food, everyone at the table picks a dish or two that they would like, but unlike eating in America, everyone shares with everyone else. All the dishes are placed all the revolving plate on the table and then everyone can try a little of all the different foods. This method is incredibly useful for people like me who either a) enjoy incorporating as many different flavors into one meal as possible or b) are familiar with/don't know the names of many Chinese dishes. I suppose we can thank mysophobia for keeping this procedure out of America...

Overall it was another very exciting Saturday for me. Still haven't wrapped my head around the fact that a week from now I'll be learning kung-fu at the Shaolin Temple. But before then I have to make it through another week of classes, which happens to include a midterm exam and a 10-15 minute oral presentation :-/.

Hope you guys are still enjoying this blog. Right now I'm actually working on a few videos and slideshows that I'd like to post up here, so hopefully I make some progress on that front pretty soon. I'm all out of stories for right now, so I'll sign off for now.

Until next time,

Jamey