(Nik)
This past Sunday was a return to the feel our our traveling days; sunlit hours jam-packed with activities, long walks, and of course, a lunch of mammoth proportions. Our families planned three activities for us: first, a nature walk through a nature preserve , followed by a visit to a panda enclosure and a harvest of bamboo roots.
While Xixi Wetlands (from last weekend) is a conservation project like the wetlands we visited this Sunday, this swamp's aims are a bit more scientific. The park includes an endangered species, the crested ibis, protected areas ostensibly for them to nest in, and a facility to breed them. Xixi, with it's picturesque traditional town and nice adjacent hotel, is a conservation project that focuses perhaps more strongly on the integration of the human and the wild into a fun, luxurious, money-making operation in comparison to this one, where the few buildings are viewing platforms and a museum of taxidermy specimens of swamp wildlife. This swamp did, however, have another jolly oyster vendor offering an unknown number of pearls for ¥150, and many older folks selling various forms of organic matter both alive and dead that they caught or picked. Many vendors sold turtles, some as a meal, some young ones for children's pets. Ola's host family purchased two baby turtles, one of their young son, and one for their son's female friend who tagged along with us. The turtles, suspended from the children's hands in red mesh bags, seemed mildly alarmed but calmed down dramatically when released on a tea table in the lunch place (more on this later).
Turtles in tow, we drove a short distance to a panda reserve. Expecting a brief stroll through the bamboo, I was a bit shocked by the small mountain that I was directed towards. The climb was invigorating, and though I half expected myself to keel over in a small stream, I soldiered on.
I'm glad I did, because I learned something very important.
You might consider the panda a noble animal, deserving of respect for its hard life in undernourished, severe environments, wrapped in soft, bright pelts of crisp white and midnight black. Well, don't believe the image printed on the novelty mug. Pandas eat bamboo and sleep. They are cute. That is all. But seeing Dede the panda wake up from his nap, trundle out, and bury himself in a pile of bamboo which he then proceeded to chew, I got why so many people want to study and protect them. They give off a weirdly human vibe, if that makes any sense. Dede reminded me of, well, me after a week of winter break. Half asleep and always hungry.
Speaking of hungry, the families took us to a sort of incredibly elegant theme restaurant for lunch and presented a literal feast; 20+ dishes and a sort of medicine sweetened with honey as a beverage. The food was delicious: they brought Beijing Duck, spicy vegetables, all kinds of seafood including fried shrimp with French fries, chicken, peas, and a chewy pink y-shaped thing that Lindsay said was "squid." Well, not being one to fear a suction cup or two, I took one. I bit it and found a bone, and then spend several minutes holding and rotating it in my chopsticks trying to figure out where on a squid you would find this. Upon remembering squids don't have bones, I gently placed the pink wishbone on my plate. I learned later on that the "squid" was actually the tongue of a duck; my host mother told me it is one of her favorite foods. She asked me if there was duck tongue in America and I told her that it was abundant in the mouths of ducks but difficult to find anywhere else.
After lunch and a thorough photo session led by Ola's host brother's lady friend wielding a camera as big as her head, we arrived at a muddy housing project in mid-construction. A stranger greeted us and gestured with a hoe to yonder bamboo forest where we would harvest some underground part of the bamboo plant. I'm not exactly sure who owns it or if people just wander up there whenever, if there are rules, etc, but there's no on-site regulatory commission except the guy and his hoe. After scrambling up some gravel hills and leaping over a small stream (no easy task--the banks were steep and muddy and the water was hardly Poland Spring), we entered a green, damp, earthy place. It was peaceful, beautiful in the rain, so the natural thing to do was obviously to begin hacking at the ground with a large blunt iron plate to cut up plant roots.
The harvest was brief, maybe fifteen minutes, however in that short time Mrs. Li collected our combined weight in bamboo bits single- handedly. She not only harvested the most roots, but she harvested the biggest bamboo root/shoot/whatever the underground part is called that has probably ever been grown.
As we were covered in mud and a bit exhausted, Ola's host father invited us to his office for tea. It was feichang (extremely) refreshing and expertly prepared on a tea ceremony table. Also on the table were smoked hickory nuts, which I effectively utilized to make a childish mess. It should be noted that the turtles are still with us at this point in the story, and have since been given free reign of Ola's home, according to her report this week.
After this I left the turtles to attend a Zhu family meeting at the apartment of my host father's father. Rather than poking my nose into business that isn't my own, I watched the Korean reality/game show "Running Man" with Winnie and his cousin Xiaobao. This season is filmed in Asia and features a cast of Chinese celebrities competing against a team of Korean RM veterans; one of the Chinese happens to be our *favorite* Chinese notable, Angelababy. I remember when our group first met Angela in an ice cream advertisement in the Lijiang Airport, and wondering about her name.
Was it Angel, a baby? As in "This is Angel, a baby." Or was baby the listener? Like "Hi, I'm Angela, baby. What's your name, sugar?" In Xi'an, Alisha set us straight saying it was a nickname/stage name she sort of gave herself. Alisha also said that she's famous not for singing, acting, painting, or saving whales, but for dating a famous guy.
After Angela was done running after her buff Korean friends, I saw another part of a nature series broadcast as a join effort between the BBC and CC-TV, China's state TV corporation. The first portion I saw was about penguins, however, in a decision that will surely keep all the penguin lovers enthralled, they decided that today was for the spiders. In a country often criticized for it's apparent lack of concern for the environment and nature, it appears, from the efforts we went to to see the pandas and ibis, from the care that went into this series and the popularity I am told it enjoys, our foraging trip, sans the casual attitude towards a duck tongue or two, that citizens are less divorced from nature than the emissions reports might lead you to believe.
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