Again, apologies for the extremely long wait. I can't even give a proper excuse for why it has taken so long, but everything has been really busy.

I'll start with my trip to Suzhou with my host family two weekends ago (wow I really am behind aren't I). Suzhou is about 2 hours outside of Shanghai. It is also my host father's father's hometown, and they still have a lot of family there.

We woke up ridiculously early in the morning, and drove out to the huge lake in Suzhou. There we met up with my Host father's younger sister, her daughters, her husband, and unidentified other woman. The two daughters were 8 and 2, and the 2 year old was completely adorable.

We drove up the mountain behind the lake. The streets up were lined with locals selling different fruits, but especially tangerines and persimmons. About halfway up we stopped at one of the fruit vendors and bought a basket of persimmons. We then stood along the edge of the road and ate the persimmons. The Chinese have amazing persimmon eating technique. the peeled the top part of the skin and then sucked out the inside. They were left with only and empty skin, which they tossed over the side of the road after the seeds which they spit out. My persimmon peeling/sucking/de-seeding skills are clearly not up to scratch. However, they have some of the sweetest and best fruit that I have ever tasted and stopping on the road for a fruit break was a blast.

We reached the edge of the lake and there was a restaurant that was partially on the docks and partially on a boat where we had lunch. The food was great and they brought us these little deep fried fish that were actually from the lake. I had another round of food failure with some snails. The Chinese can magically put there mouths against the snail and suck out just the right amount. I can't get a thing to happen. They finally took pity on me and found me a toothpick, for which I was profoundly greatful. Another really entertaining part of that meal was our drinks. there were no glasses to speak of so we all ended up drinking coke from our rice bowls which they did not find in the least odd but I had to work hard not to laugh every time I took a sip.

After that we went for a boat ride on the lake. We had been seeing speed boats go by all afternoon, so I assumed that we would be taking one of those. However, my host father's brother in law went into deep negotiations with the man in charge of boats and then we waited for half an hour. At that point this really sketchy looking boat pulled up. It did have an engine, but there were also long poles for it to be pushed around with. It also looked like at some point it might have been made from oil drums. We got in and it didn't sink or anything which made me happy.

It turns out that we requested that boat for a very good reason: large parts of the lake are restricted to speedboats because of the aquatic life. We were able to go into those areas. My host family seemed to know that certain plants were special and started to pull them out. Under the water lily type leaves of certain plants there were special little green prickly looking things that were apparently edible. They picked out the plants each of which had one of these items. They peeled the green part off and gave me one. Inside was this amazingly sweet little white nut thing which was really good.

It turns out that My host father's family owns a restaurant and hotel in Suzhou so we went there after our tour of the lake. That night we had dinner at the restaurant. That was one of the most challenging thing I have done in China, including negotiating with the authorities about my passport.

Suzhou is famous for crabs. The Chinese are trained from childhood to eat them. I was not. So after maybe 10 courses this massive platter of crabs arrives at the table. They are relatively small crabs, a bit larger than a softball or something like that. One was a bit bigger than both my hands holding it. Each crab is also wrapped up in string. My host dad proceeds to lift two crabs off the platter and place one on my plate and one in my rice bowl. My protests that one crab would be fine were useless as usual.

I then sat starring at my plate, my chopsticks, and my tied up crab waiting for something to happen. I don't really know what, I was kind of hoping that a crab cracker, a hammer, or even a pair of scissors would fall from the sky and save me. Needless to say, no such luck.

My host dad looked over at me and ordered "chi" "eat." I looked at the crab and was pretty much dumbfounded. I mean, really, would you know what to do with a crab and a pair of chopsticks?

I finally looked at my host mother, and to my credit, I asked for help in Chinese. She showed me what to do, but I still had to do it myself. It took me an incredibly long time to eat the crab. I had to deconstruct the thing with hands and chopsticks and then get the meat out. Again the Chinese can just put a crab leg to their lips and suck and all the meat comes out. Me on the other hand, I have to cram my chopstick through the leg and push it out. I finally finished to first crab and I was so relieved. My hands hurt, and had been stabbed repeatedly by the crab spines. But I had successfully consumed a crab. It was messy, I did it badly, but I had done it.

AND THEN MY HOST DAD DROPPED THE SECOND ONE ON MY PLATE. I seriously considered throwing it at him. My host sister Angel completely abandoned me and went to play with the two year old, and I had to eat another crab. On the bright side, by the time I was done with the second crab I knew what was up with eating crab, and I am absolutely positive that I burned more calories eating the crab than could possibly be gained from its consumption.

After I finished my second crab, my host father leaned over and said "today we learn crab, tomorrow we practice" Again I had to restrain the urge to pick up my plate and smack him with it.

We stayed the night at the hotel, and then went and had breakfast in the relatives apartment, which was the top floor of the hotel, and really really cool.

As promised at lunch the next day the crabs arrived. However, this time I was ready. I can safely say that I am now a master of crab. I can clean and eat a whole crab with a pair of chopsticks and my hands. That has to come in handy at some point right? Also, if anyone is taking marine biology and has any questions about crab anatomy I now consider myself an expert.

Afterward we went to a beautiful Chinese rose garden by the lake for a walk.

I met a lot of my host fathers relatives, but I am not completely sure of their exact relationship. There are some interesting results from the mixture of traditional Chinese values of family and the one child policy. The Chinese really large family, which the one child policy has removed somewhat, so they call everyone closer than a second cousin sister or brother. However, they also really value familial responsibility especially of children to take care of parents and each other. That is largely based upon the age of the children for example oldest brother has most responsibility to take care of parents and younger children etc. So while I don't really have any idea who are actually sisters and who are brothers, I do know everyones age in relation to everyone else's. There are two words for brother and two for sister; one meaning younger and one meaning older. They meticulously adhere to the correct age reference. It makes for interesting introductions.

One thing that is really wonderful about the Chinese families is that they are incredibly willing to accept another member (me) which I think is another side effect of the one child policy. Whenever I am introduced to relatives of my host family they immediately tell their younger children to refer to me as some variation of jie jie (older sister). To my host mom's two sister's sons I am "wai guo jie jie" which translated directly makes me outside country sister meaning foreign sister. To my host dad's side of the family I am "mei guo jie jie" or america sister.

The differences in the generations of the families are incredibly interesting. My parents generation was born during the beginning of the communist era. The political theory on the population was at the time "one more head two more hands" and all Chinese were instructed to have as many children as possible so that China could grow strong. At this point I have met two of my host mom's sisters, I think there might be one more, and on my host father's side I have met one brother and two sisters. However each of them has only one child. It makes for an odd dynamic, because they are used to being members of large families which are now being cut back.


Just some observations...

Hey, Sorry it took me so long to get another update going.

Last week was China's national holiday (think fourth of July) and the entire country got a week off to celebrate and such. The gap year kids and I decided to take the opportunity to travel around and see a little more of China. We decided to head out to Beijing for five days. however, this precipitated a whole new visa disaster, as we were officially supposed to go pick up our visas in Shanghai two days after we arrived in Beijing.

I won't go into the details of the hoops we jumped through trying to make it happen. Suffice it to say that here in China it really is ALL about who you know. Jonas's host dad has friends in the visa office who were able to get us official receipts that we could travel with, and when our hotel decided to fuss Jonas's host dad had a friend in the Beijing police and our hotel just happened to be "under his jurisdiction." The fussing stopped.

We took a train from Shanghai. It was a 10 hour trip but it didn't feel bad. We were sitting in two sets of two seats one behind the other and then we realized that the front seats turned around, so we could all sit facing each other and we kind of had a party. We certainly played a lot of cards. There was a Chinese college student sitting across from us who had been studying English and wanted to chat. That was a lot of fun. I have met a bunch of Chinese people in both Shanghai and Beijing who want to make "foreign friends" (it is a phrase they all use) and just want to sit and talk with you. I have really enjoyed that and learned a lot about Chinese culture from doing it.

We got into Beijing around nine in the evening and our first night we grabbed dinner, went for a short walk, and went to bed.

Our second day we decided to go to the summer palace. It is outside of central Beijing so it took us some time to get there. We opted for bus rather than taxi, since taking the bus cost us 10 cents and taking a taxi would cost 20 dollars. Plus it made us feel local and capable. The summer place was amazing. It was a massive area of beautiful gardens and buildings, with some canals all overlooking a massive lake with an island in the middle.

Megan and I, being the blondies, again had fun with tourist pictures. Usually people on the streets of the cities just stare at us, and I don't even notice it at this point. However, when we are at a tourist attraction of any kind we are considered a legitimate part of the attraction and fair game for picture taking. Usually when we stand next to something to have a friend take a picture of us about ten nearby photographers jump in. Sometimes enterprising souls stop and ask us to take photos posing with them. By the end of the day, we were considering the large profit we could make standing near attractions and charging a fee.

The next day we decided to hit the Forbidden city and Tiananmen square. The forbidden city was amazing as expected, but because it was a national holiday there was a truly ridiculous amount of people there, and we eventually settled on the philosophy of "whatever throne or tapestry is in that room that requires us to push through a crowed twenty people deep to look into a tiny window cannot possible be worth life and limb" It worked pretty well for us.

The architecture is insanely beautiful and impressive, especially considering that it was built in 1406. IT is hard to imagine how it must have looked when it was first completed, especially compared to what would have surrounded it at the time. Needless to say, we all decided that we were ready to become emperors whenever the demand arose.

Next we went over to Tiananmen Square. It is incredibly impressive in its scope. Though frankly it is an intimidating place. It is filled with poles with street lights on them, but when you look closer you realize that they also have attached loud speakers and cameras. It's incredible size impressed itself on me for another reason. I have learned a little bit about the Tiananmen square riots in various history classes, and I remember pictures and different lectures saying that the square was full of student protesters. Standing in the middle of Tiananmen square I realized the truly awesome number of people that was implied in Tiananmen square being "full." There were easily a thousand people in the square with me that day, and it didn't even feel slightly crowded.

Since we were in Beijing it was, of course, absolutely necessary to eat some Beijing Duck while we were there. Since we were probably only going to get there once during our time in China, we decided to do it right, and went to the the most famous Beijing Duck Restaurant that had been specializing in the dish since 1864. When you ordered your duck, the brought you a card with some information about your specific duck and what number duck it was in the restaurant's history. It was one of the best meals I have ever had.

A brief aside, as my host sister just brought me a tangerine: China has the BEST FRUIT EVER. Kay, back to the show.

The next day we scheduled a tour of the Great wall. There are five wall sites that you can visit near Beijing, we opted to go to Mu Tian Yu. It is one of the two more restored sites, but it has less direct access than Ba Da Ling, and thus, significantly less tourists.

Our tour ended up taking in significantly more than the Great Wall. Our guide was incredibly nice and spoke very good English. His name was James Bond. I promise, I'm not joking. We decided that he strongly resembled the main guide character from a video game. He popped up from apparently nowhere at random times and offered words of wisdom before disappearing again. It was pretty awesome.

We started out the day with trip to a workshop where the famous Chinese enamel-ware is made. It was clearly in hopes that we would buy something from the shop but it was very interesting nonetheless.

Our next stop was The Ming Tombs. Which is a collection of the graves of the 13 Ming Emperors. All in all it was terribly impressive, even though we just went along the main walk and did not hike up to any of the tombs themselves.

Next was a visit to a Jade carving shop where we learned about different types of Jade and the meanings of traditional carving shapes. We also ate our lunch there and a little shopping time was provided.

After lunch it was time for our actual visit to the Great Wall. We opted to hike up the stairs after our guide informed us that Chairman Mao said that "to be a true hero you must climb up to the great wall." It was quite the walk. The Great Wall is built along the top of a series of mountains and we climbed the stairs up from the bottom. It was actually an incredibly satisfying experience and I had a real sense of accomplishment when I finally reached out and touched the wall.

I'm not sure I can actually express what the great wall is like. Suffice it to say that it is awe inspiring. The scope of it all is almost beyond my comprehension, and I cannot begin to fathom the people who first conceived it was possible to build such a thing and set out to do it. Especially on the very top of the mountains and without technology to pull the massive stones up. It also made me wonder at the scope of the threat that would lead a nation to devote that much of its efforts and resources to such a tremendous project to keep it out.

We were satisfied with our accomplishments of climbing up, and we opted to take the rope-way gondola system to get down. The view was absolutely spectacular.

While we were in Beijing we managed to stumble upon a little tea shop. We hadn't really planned on stopping and just decided to go in on a whim. I think it was one of the best decisions we made since coming to China. The shop was owned by a woman who lived upstairs and owned a teashop because she loved tea, and wanted to meet people. She also spoke excellent English and we ended up sitting and talking and drinking tea for almost three hours. We got a pot of rose black tea which was some of the best tea I have ever had, and Bought some to take home with me.

We thought that we had just wandered into a cute little tea shop that no one really knew about, but as it turned out we had wandered into the shop of the tea master. When China needed someone to serve tea to the Olympic athletes they went to the owner of this tea shop. I have to say I was pretty jealous of her picture between Micheal Phelps and Ryan Lochte.

She spent the afternoon teaching us about the different types of Chinese tea, and then read our palms. It was all in all a great experience. I only wish the shop was in Shanghai, because I would happily spend a free afternoon there.

The next day was the first day that the Olympic stadiums were open for public viewing, so of course we had to go. The one thing that we did not realize was that you needed to buy tickets in advance in order to go in, so we ended up just viewing from the perimeter. It was pretty awesome anyway. The Birds Nest still looks CG even when you are only a few hundred yards away. The water cube was huge. It always looked fairly small next to the Bird's Nest on TV
but it is pretty massive, which I guess makes sense since it houses three pools and diving equipment... But it was still a surprise, and very impressive.

We also stopped to look at the "7 star" hotel next to the stadiums, and debated whether or not we could get away with walking in a and looking around. Then we realized that we had been standing on the sidewalk next to it for three or four minutes thinking about it and the roughly 10 door attendants and bell men had probably noticed us at that point, so we stuck to the outside.

We planned to go for one more night of Beijing duck, but we failed to take into account that it was the eve of China's national holiday... And apparently that means Beijing Duck. When we got to the restaurant what had once been a parking lot was instead a small ocean of people. We decided to ask about how long the wait was and upon inquiry were informed that there were no more tables that would become available that nigh. So that was it for Beijing duck. Even the other less famous restaurants in the area had hour waits or more.

We took a night train back to Shanghai which was a blast. We had a little compartment for the four of us with two sets of bunk beds and a table. We had too much fun playing cards, and I tried what I think is now the top of my "weird foods I have eaten in China" list: lychee flavored Lays potato chips. They were... interesting...

Getting back to Shanghai felt oddly like a homecoming and I realized how used to the city I have gotten. I also realized that I have picked up some other Chinese habits without even realizing it.

I guess at this point I fully eat like a Chinese person without even thinking about it. There was another couple on our tour of the great wall and we all had lunch together. There were several communal serving dishes, as most food here is served family style. I am very used to the fact that my plate, when I have one, is where you put the stuff you can't eat, bones, shells, etc. What you use to eat is your rice bowl. You lift stuff from the communal platters with your chopsticks and put it on the rice. You then lift up your rice bowl and eat from that. The other couple used the supplied serving spoons to fill their plates with food and then ate that, as well as just eating the plain white rice without all the sauce from the food on it. It was kind of weird to see. I guess that's eighteen years of good manners out the window.

When I got back from Beijing my host family took me Suzhou for two days to see some of their relatives, but seeing as this is already and excessively long post that has taken me an excessively long time to write, I think I will put the stuff from that trip up either tomorrow or later today