Luncheon feast

At least in the sense that we haven’t gone to bed yet.  We’ve kind of lost track of how many hours we’ve been awake now.  But we’re having so much fun no one seems to mind.  The kids have been troopers.

We all arose staggering from our too-short naps to meet for lunch at the hotel.  We had a few stragglers who slept through their alarms (Zoe and her friend Evie, for example), but everyone eventually made it down.  The hotel gave us a huge feast — far more food than we could eat, despite how delicious it was.  It’s a bit tough here for the vegetarians in the group, as

Painting lesson

well as those who don’t like any spicy food — but we’re all mostly trying to be adventurous and have gotten used to having very little idea what we’re actually eating.

After lunch our hosts brought us to a Chinese cultural center, and they put on a wonderful program for us.  We were given Chinese clothing to wear, and divided into groups to rotate through a few different activities.  My group started with Chinese calligraphy, where we made lovely flower paintings with calligraphy brushes.  (The stems were made by blowing the paint across the canvas to create unique, delicate branches.)

In the second session, we saw a musical performance on the guqin, an ancient Chinese string instrument.  It had a distinctive and lovely sound.  The kids who were brave enough to volunteer were able to get a mini-lesson.

In our third lesson we heard about the shrine to Confucius and how to properly pay tribute to it.  We heard a little about the history of Confucism and some of the art on display.  When we were done some adorable little kids circulated through the crowd, offering skittles and taking photos with the kids.

Was our day over?  Not yet!  We headed over to Wuhou Temple and Jinli Street, a Buddhist temple surrounded by a warren of ancient marketplace streets.  The buildings are all traditional in style, and the area has apparently been a center of trade since BC times.  It was extremely picturesque, and lined with all manner of interesting shops and markets.

Unfortunately, seemingly the entire population of Chengdu thought so too, since it was so crowded you could barely navigate.  Keeping our “family group” (five kids and two adults) together was an ongoing source of anxiety.  (Though it turned out that the only one who got separated from the group was me — fortunately very close to the restaurant where we were meeting.)

We wanted to go check out the temple, but we’d arrived too late in the day, so we had to content ourselves with peering through gaps in the gate.  It was soon time to meet for dinner at a traditional Sichuan “hot pot” restaurant.  We sat at large tables with pots of different kinds of bubbling oils set into them.  Each of us got our own little can of oil, and a small bowl to pour it into.  We could then add various things to our bowl, like garlic, scallions, ginger, and peanuts.

For the next couple of hours the staff was constantly coming by, dropping innumerable different types of meats and vegetables into the oils.  The idea was for us to grab pieces out, then dunk them into our personal oil bowl before eating them.  This was another opportunity for adventurous eating, and another tough night for the vegetarians.  There were only a couple of things that most people weren’t brave enough to try.  None of the waitstaff at any place we’ve been speak any English, so you just have to take your chances and hope for the best.

The restaurant put on a show of traditional Chinese dances while we were eating, including the famous “face painting” show that many of us saw in Durham last year.

After we were done, apparently not having eaten enough strange food that night, a group of the boys set off to go back to a shop they’d seen selling brains.  I never heard what kind of brains they were or how they tasted, as my group opted to hit the incongruous Dairy Queen instead.

By the time we got back to the hotel, most of us had no problem at all falling asleep, despite the fact that it was around 10am EST.  I guess that’s one benefit of extreme sleep deprivation.  We’ll be up by 7 tomorrow, so there’s no chance of falling back into bad sleep time habits.