<\/p>\n
Her kitchen in the back is half open air with a beautiful view of hills and vegetation, including our first Banana tree spotted on this trip as we move south.\u00a0 Mrs. Zhang is asking us questions.\u00a0 As we take turns answering and explaining bits of our trip to her, her interest grows, constantly smiling, attentive with interest.\u00a0 I ask if I can take a few photos of her kitchen, and we wind up getting shots with all of us together, Mrs. Zhang thoroughly enjoying the process of setting\u00a0up the self-timer shots.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soon, Mrs. Zhang brings the dishes out to our table.\u00a0 The first one looks impressive, but within a couple minutes, our table is full of colorful dishes that look amazing, especially the pumpkin dish.\u00a0 The taste is even better, rich and so fresh.\u00a0 “This is the best lunch we’ve had so far on our trip!” I exclaim, met with agreement.\u00a0 Every bite is amazing (not something I’m used to in our usual whole-in-the-walls), and I finially break out the camera to get a shot of our spread.<\/p>\n
After eating, we ask for the bill. “Its embarracing to take money from you.\u00a0 Its not normal for friends to exchange money,” she says.\u00a0 “No no, really, no problem.\u00a0 How much?” we insist.\u00a0 We pay, through her embarracement.\u00a0 Around 50 yuan, US$6 for all of us.\u00a0 We chat further, and we tell her that we’re actually planning on staying in her town for the night, asking if she knew of any inexpensive luguan<\/em>s.\u00a0 “Oh yes, I know a good one.\u00a0 I’ll call to be sure, and then I’ll take you there.”<\/p>\n After a phone call, she’s excited and tells us that her friend has a very nice place, recently refinished, and she’s agreed to host us all for our usual rate, also 50 yuan ($6.00) total.\u00a0 We walk our bikes, following Mrs. Zhang across the street and down several shops to a luguan<\/em>.\u00a0 I go up to check out the rooms.\u00a0 They’re beautiful, and cleaner than most, indeed recently redone.\u00a0 We have three rooms with a total of 6 beds, including one single with its own bathroom in it – a luxury we almost always don’t have.\u00a0 Usually a place of this quality would go for more, but Mrs. Zhang had arranged things for us with her friend, and we were warmly welcomed, despite all of our stuff and the usual chaos of onlookers from the street 5 foreiners on loaded bikes create in small Chinese towns.<\/p>\n “This evening, I’d love to have you for dinner again,” Mrs. Zhang tells me, “but you should eat here at my friend’s luguan<\/em> since she agreed to such a reasonable price.\u00a0 When you’re done eating, be sure to come over to my place to chat and drink tea!\u00a0 I’ll be waiting for you!”<\/p>\n After dinner, Adam and I wander over to Mrs. Zhang’s place.\u00a0 She is sitting alone in her front dinning room watching TV.\u00a0 As soon as she sees us coming up, she immdiately jumps up to open her door and welcomes us in to sit down.\u00a0 She serves us tea, and we begin chatting.\u00a0 She doesn’t speak English beyond “hello” and other simple phrases, like nearly everyone we meet in China.<\/p>\n We learn that she’s 41 years old and used to live in a village near this town, but bought this restaurant\/ upstairs apartment 3 years ago.\u00a0 Her son is 18 years old and lives with her husband in a small apartment near his school only 15km away.\u00a0 Her son comes home once a month to visit, and her husband comes home most days around lunch, though I didn’t remember seeing him.\u00a0 This is her son’s last year of highschool, so his entire life is consumed by studying for the Gaokao<\/em>, the dreaded Chinese college entrance exam.\u00a0 She comes from a family of\u00a03 children, but even if she could\u00a0choose for herself how many children she could have, she’d still only have 1 child\u00a0due to expenses.\u00a0<\/p>\n She\u00a0gets up from the table and begins preparing jiaozi<\/em> (dumplings) at the other table.\u00a0 “I’m making you dumplings.\u00a0 No need to worry about cost, its free!”\u00a0she says.\u00a0 “Oh no no,” Adam and I exclaim in unison.\u00a0 “We just ate, we’re still full from dinner!”\u00a0 “No matter,\u00a0I’m making you jiaozi<\/em>!\u00a0 15 each should be enough, right?”\u00a0“Aiya! Not that many!”\u00a0 It’s obvious we’re going to get\u00a02nd dinner dispite our protests.\u00a0 When Jim comes in later, she ups the quantity.\u00a0<\/p>\n While she’s hand making each and every dumpling, we continue chatting.\u00a0 Suddenly, she makes a comment about how she only graduated from highschool, but Adam and I graduated from college so somehow we are better than her.\u00a0 After Adam and I quickly exchange some English to figure out her meaning, we tell her that’s definately not true.\u00a0 Her rich life experience trumps our book learning, she’s had so many big life expereinces like marrying and raising a child that we haven’t had yet.\u00a0 In fact, I go on, “Both Adam and I feel we are the ones who are subordinate.\u00a0 We’re just struggling with Chinese to communicate with you, there’s still many aspects of Chinese culture we don’t understand, and we are newly-arrived guests in\u00a0your restaurant and town that you understand far better than us, etc.”\u00a0 Finally, she accepts this and moves on.<\/p>\n Its difficult to pull away to retire for the evening, but after a long goodbye and mutual well-wishing, we part company.\u00a0 Another amazing person we’ve been blessed to meet along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Its about noon, or sometime later.\u00a0 It doesn’t really matter, time has become more approximate for me now that I don’t have to start classes at 10:10am, or 2:00pm sharp in Beijing.\u00a0 I’m hungry and ready for a break after our morning’s 50 some km.\u00a0 As we ride in from the countryside fields, today’s small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-here-are-posts-related-to-the-whole-group","category-petes-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}