cultural wednesdays: duck tongue

instead of taking the introduction to chinese culture class offered on wednesdays, last week adam and i decided to initiate Cultural Wednesdays: every wednesday we will explore a part of shanghai that we haven't yet seen and introduce ourselves to chinese culture our own way! unfortunately this week's cultural wednesday had to be replaced by homework wednesday (waaahhh waaaahhhh) but we will resume our cultural education next week. last wednesday adam, anna, and i rode our bikes to the metro and took a train down to Xintiandi to get dim sum. although the crystal jade restaurant was listed under "cheap eats" in lonely planet, it definitely wasn't cheap by chinese standards. nonetheless, we began our day of culture with some delicious dim sum dumplings!

afterwards, we explored the rest of Xintiandi, which is mostly an expat shopping/eating hangout so there is not too much to see that you can't find in america (read coldstone creamery and coffee bean). but we found to a museum dedicated to the 1st National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

this museum was great...until the captions stopped being in english when we wandered into a wing devoted to Zhou Enlai (1st premier of the PRC). we weren't allowed to take pictures either, but the museum was located inside of the actual location of the 1st national party congress, which took place on July 23, 1921, and is a refurbished shikumen (traditional shanghai architecture, which no longer exists, with the exception of this preserved area). the museum had relics and artifacts of chinese history dating from mid-1800s and the opium wars up to the communist revolution in 1949. there were pictures of the founding members of the communist party in china and life size models replicating the seating arrangement of the NPC where the Chinese Communist Party laid out its manifesto and goals.

then we walked to old town to check out the antique market. this antique market is really amazing! there are seemingly endless alleys with stalls packed in like sardines selling all

sorts of interesting items. we had all become frustrated with the oppressively empty whiteness of the walls in our dorms rooms and wanted to spice things up with some cool chinese things, such as communist propaganda posters, old tapestry scrolls with chinese calligraphy or

landscapes painted on them, and lanterns. i bought a really great propaganda poster that i think says "long live mao zedong" on the bottom, if i translated correctly, which i probably

didnt. i'm hoping this poster can survive the trip back to america where it can join my soviet

propaganda posters in decorating the walls of my next room. i also bargained for a really cool, colorful tapestry thing with a buddha on it. we bought all sorts of other "antique" and "real" jade knick knacks, although we had a sneaking suspicion that all of these antique items were mass produced in a big factory in china and made to look really old because every stall pretty much offered the same deal.

after spending waayyy more time than we expected in the antique market, we realized the propaganda poster art museum was already closed (but we already saw plenty of communist propaganda at the site of the NPC and bought lots of poster art at the antique market) and

would have to be postponed until the next cultural wednesday. we had dinner plans to meet up with some chinese friends that adam and i met in a clothing store near our dorm in about an

hour and a half, which didnt give us enough time to explore any other parts of shanghai, so we decided to stay local and check out the flower and animal market.

on our way there we wandered through a park that had really funny, brightly colored "exercise" equipment and lots of older chinese men working out. this is the 2nd park i've encountered

with colorful exercise equipment, so i figure every park has them....i guess it's how chinese people all stay so thin, despite the obscenely greasy food!

sorry i don't know how to turn it, but that's adam

as it turns out there were a lot more animals than flowers and plants in this market, and we soon became overwhelmed by the squawking, barking, meowing, etc...of cats, dogs, birds, crickets, turtles, fish and snakes. by the time we conversed in chinese with a chinese parrot and wandered past crates of chickens that would mostly likely be someone's dinner, the looming

threat of bird flu sent us running out and dousing ourselves in hand sanitizer!

farm fresh H5N1 al forno anyone?

we met our chinese friends, silvia and yuan shi (that's them in the picture), at a restaurant called bao luo, which is apparently really popular with locals but little known by non-chinese. our initial plan was to speak only chinese at dinner, but it fell apart pretty quickly as their english is significantly better than our chinese and it would have made for a pretty silent meal.

we were determined to have a real cultural experience and therefore let them do all the ordering. this was definitely a chinese banquet, reminiscent of those in movies, where the dishes just kept coming and coming. the highlights of the meal for me (the delicious and the exotic) were: the shrimp served with a vinegar (cu) sauce, a pork and bok choy tower filled with bamboo shoots, the most delicious baozi of my life, and of course DUCK TONGUE!!!!

actually i didn't like the duck tongue at all....but i had to try it; it was a big basket filled with chilies and duck tongue, which are shaped kind of like the letter "Y" (maybe they're split like snake tongues...i don't know i've never looked inside of a duck's mouth before), there was some sort of very hard tendon/bone thing which comprised the bulk of the tongue and then a small quantity of extremely fatty meat around the tendon-thing. overall duck tongue is pretty unrewarding - i'd rather have a whole breast deep-fried in those chilies! but hey, when in china..........

the end of our meal

anna and i unfortunately had to leave the feast a little early, which i'm sure is incredibly rude to do, in order to make it back to campus in time for the taijiquan (aka tai chi) class we wanted to check out. after taking the extra loooooonnnnnnng way and getting very lost we arrived about 30 minutes late and attempted to do taijiquan. we all decided it was a little too slow for our liking, which probably means we don't have the patience or qi or harmony or whatever it takes to be taijiquan masters. i'll stick to my neon green t-shirt of pandas doing the 24 poses of taijiquan instead.