Tea, Silk, MTV and the NBA...

(Cassie) Hello everyone! Today is the two week mark...we return home in fourteen days, and we only have one more week of school in Hangzhou. Time has flown! And today was no exception; it was a fun day and it went by so quickly. Jiawen and I woke up and had breakfast out of the house for the first time this morning. We walked down the street to a local restaurant, where I had some dumplings and some sticky rice and she had a dish similar to an omelete wrapped in a thin pastry. Not quite as good as our daily baozi, but tasty anyway. After eating, we walked about down the block to a busier street to catch a taxi. It was tough, as there were many people vying for very few taxis, but we got one just in time. We arrived at the school only five minutes before our departure time. When we got on the bus, Jiawen said goodbye. She was given a ton of homework this weekend and needed to go to the library to take a chunk out of it. Our first stop was the Hangzhou tea museum. We didn't end up spending too much time in the actual museum, as much of it was under construction, but we did spend some time in the beautiful grounds surrounding the museum. We were all particularly enchanted by a small grove of cherry trees. Right now all of the cherry blossoms are blooming spectacularly, and these trees were no exception. Around us there were people sitting eating and talking, while children rolled down a nearby hill. All in all an idyllic area. After walking around the small park for a bit, we went to lunch at a restaurant called the Green Tea restaurant. It was awesome! The restaurant itself was beautiful...all of the walls were made of small panes of glass seperated by thin pieces of wood, with wooden tables and teacups to match. We all sat at a long table and ate lots of delicious food, including chunky tomato soup with bamboo shoots and broad beans, a slightly spicy curry potato and beef dish, and other great dishes. The dessert was just as appealing. It included four heaping bowls of peanut and mango ice cream as well as a small mountain of sweet ice with red and green beans on the outside covered in honey, and cube-shaped loaves of warm bread with vanilla ice cream. Unsurprisingly, there was quite a bit left over when we'd had our fill. When we'd finished lunch we made our way to our second museum of the day...the silk museum. As Lauren had already been to the museum twice so rather than going through the exhibit, we were instead brought to a special area to make our own Chinese-style tie-dyed handkerchiefs. The style of tie-dying wasn't too different from the usual except that a tightly wrapped string was used instead of a rubber band. Lauren's was particularly interesting - she ended up with a cool pattern of rings all over her blue silk handkerchief. When we'd finished, we jumped on the bus to go back to school. Jiawen met me at the school when we arrived. After saying our goodbyes at the Hanggao gate, we turned for home. Jiawen was hungry from her long morning of studying (she hadn't had lunch) so she grabbed some food when we got home. Then we watched the Chinese version of MTV, which is called Channel V. After some TV watching and singing (on Jiawen's part) we both settled down to read a bit before dinner. Dinnertime rolled around and Jiawen, her brother, her mother, and I walked down the street to the family's favorite restaurant to meet her father. At dinner we were met by two of her father's friends as well as one of the friend's son. Dinner was fun as I spent most of it teaching Jiawen obscure food names such as seaweed, ketchup, pumpkin, and snail. She kept making me laugh because she couldn't seem to remember ketchup and was getting somewhat frustrated. She'd always get the same look of concentration on her face when trying to remember it. We went home to meet two of Jiawen's cousins while the adults remained in the restaurant to chat. When we got to the house her cousins Jiaming and Jiayi were there. The names of her cousins are a bit confusing because they all have the same family name (Ling) and the first syllable of their given names are the same (Jia). So Jiawen calls the whole group the Ling Jias. Jiawen, her brother, her cousins, and I spent the rest of the evening listening to music on the computer and watching NBA highlights. Jiawen loves Jason Mraz...she's already memorized "I'm Yours". Her brother and Jiayi are both big basketball fans. Jiayi is a Celtics fan (I told him it was the way to go) while Jiashang really likes the Lakers. We went to bed pretty late. It was a very fun day followed by a very fun evening. I can't believe we'll be in Beijing soon! I'll be sad to leave Hangzhou a week from Tuesday. That's all for now. 'Til next time...