Shen me?

This past week has been similar to the first; we’ve been seeing a lot of Beijing in a very short period of time. I’ve noticed some pretty strange things on the menus here, like stewed bees, and squirrel shaped crab, so I decided to branch out and try some new things. My first food adventure involved eating fermented egg that had been buried in cement dust for a while. It turned out being black and slimy, still slightly resembling an egg, and tasted like a combination of egg and intense fish. It wasn't as bad as I though it would be, but I don't ever want to eat it again.

I also ate meat at dinner on Friday. We went out for Peking Duck, which is a huge part of the culture in Beijing, so I figured I'd have to try some. It was pretty good but after I had a couple bites the waiter gave us a card with personal information about our duck including its name and brief life history. On top of that we discovered the duck’s head, still intact. The combination made me feel bad for eating the duck, so that was the end of my duck experience.

After dinner that night we went out to the Peking Opera, which is also a pretty big tradition in Beijing. We were seated in the front at tables where we were served endless tea and given lots of food. I'm glad I got the chance to see what Chinese opera is like, it was a lot of tambourine type instruments banging around with high pitched voices, painted faces, and some acrobatics thrown in. It seemed a bit strange at first, but in the end I really enjoyed it.

We had been told that karaoke is huge in China, so Liu Nian took us out for our first Chinese Karaoke experience. If you go out to karaoke here, separate rooms are provided for each group of friends; much less embarrassing than karaoke in the US where you are forced to stand up in front of a crowd of people and attempt to sing to them. At first everyone seemed a little apprehensive about taking the microphone, but that didn’t last two long. The only strange thing about the whole experience was that the videos that played had absolutely nothing to do with the songs that were playing. It almost seemed like someone had videotaped random people on vacation in the early 90s, and then given the videos to KTV. I’m pretty sure we’ll be making another trip to karaoke while we’re here.

This weekend five students went to Xian, I was not one of them. The weekend was still action packed for those of us who decided not to go on the trip. Since it was Kelly’s birthday a few of us snuck out Saturday morning to find her a birthday cake. We tried to have “Happy 21^st Kelly!” put on the cake, but instead we ended up with “Kelly (21^st) Happy!” I actually really liked that touch.

For lunch we went out for hot pots, where we were given two huge pots of boiling broth, and then raw vegetables, fish and meat, which could be cooked in the broth, and then dipped in sesame sauce. The hot pots were amazing, probably one of my favorite meals so far on this trip. Even though we were all pretty full, we had brought Kelly’s cake along. The cake was huge, and there were only eight of us, but we had no place to store leftovers, so we split the cake into eight gigantic pieces and finished the whole thing.

We managed to visit both the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace this weekend, and still have time to explore the Pearl Market. I’ve realized that the reason I buy things at the Pearl Market is not because the merchandise is incredible, but because I love seeing how low a price I can get the merchants to sell me things. The bargain that I am most proud of was a little figurine that originally had a price tag of 280 kuai. After threatening to walk away a bunch of times, I ended up getting two of them for 36 kuai.