Making Lists .

These past two weeks have been nothing but uneventful. Last weekend the group of us made a trip down to Yunshan village in the Ningbo district of Zhejiang. It is a tiny village surrounded on three sides by pretty large cities. It had held on to its charm,  and other than the large highway and train tracks cutting through, it was exactly like I had imagined it would be, the misty rice fields and all. Yunshan is home to one of our friends from our host university here in Hangzhou. We were put up at the town hall offices and our hosts were very welcoming. After settling in a few of us were interviewed by a local news crew as we pretending to shovel around some rice grain. Actually, I am not all that clear who they were, but they had a big camera and a pretty lady with a hand-mike.

Being in a village, we had the chance to eat some of the local delicacies, a good change from Hangzhou food. Zhuting’s family (our hosts) also happen to own a pig farm with more than a 1000 pigs, which of course meant there was a lot of pork on the table. It isn’t abnormal, at a special meal to be consuming such a wide variety of animals that it would make most zoos jealous. But don’t worry we are getting used to it.

Also, we got to walk around the little town along its disproportionally wide roads to the pig farms, duck coops and fish ponds and hiked (strolled) up a mountain in the center of town. We did try our hand at fishing and failed quite miserably, but it was a good way to spend a lazy weekend afternoon. That Sunday I met up with family in Shanghai and made it back to Hangzhou just in time for class the next morning.

After a tiring week of school work, we decided to treat ourselves to the midnight premier of Harry Potter. (I may have watched it the next afternoon too). We had opted for the tickets that provided us with free tea which caused a couple of us to disturb the entire theater audience by having to run out and back in half-way through the movie so as to head to the restroom. Embarrassing. Us laowais are apparently not all that immune to the competence of all the diuretics we injest daily, all that tea: from longjing to bubble aah.

It has finally dawned upon us that the semester here in Hangzhou is slowly coming to an end, we have less than a month now. One evening, a few of us got together and wrote out a list of things we would like to accomplish before we leave. These include singing together on a crowded bus, taking our professors out to a bar, walk a full circle around the Western Lake, eat smelly tofu, eat with our hands etc. We have already made it through a bunch of things on the list but I am pretty excited for the time we have left here.