Just got back from my trip to the Shanxi, Hebei Province area. I'm going to break this down into a few posts because otherwise this post is going to end up way too long.
My trip started on Thursday morning. We caught an early bus and left the Global Village around 9am. It was supposed to be a 4 hour drive to our first stop, but because of traffic, it took an extra 90 minutes. The first stop was a little village in rural China near an unrestored section of the Great Wall. The villagers are the descendants of soldiers sent to control the area and man the wall. Not much remains of this section of the wall besides a crumbling dirt watch tower and dirt wall. Over the years, the bricks from the wall were removed by the villagers and used to build parts of the village. It was a neat place to explore and take pictures. Chelsea and I were playing a few games with the village children. It was really cold up in the mountains....it was quite a nice change from Beijing weather. After the exploration, we boarded onto the bus and drove to the town we would be staying in for the night and grabbed some dinner. The dinner was fantastic and there were so many dishes to try. We had a variation of Peking duck that I could not stop eating and also got Jin Yin Mian Bao, which is one of my favorite desert dishes. It consists of fried dough dipped in condensed milk -- so tasty! After dinner, the group headed to the hotel to check in and settle into our rooms. Funny enough, the hotel was in the same building as the police headquarters for the area. The beds here were so soft! I did not know such soft beds existed in China! After settling in, we had the option of going to the local hot springs to relax and take a shower. It was really really nice. Then it was off to bed since we would have an early start in the morning.
After waking up, we grabbed a simple breakfast from the hotel and got on the bus to drive the rest of the way to the village. I have to say, our bus driver was the best bus driver I've ever seen. We were off-road driving....with a tour bus! It was quite an adventure. Finally after an hour or so, we arrived in the village we were be spending and next day and night at. It was a very small village in rural china, they only have about 25 villagers. Mostly it consists of older people and younger children. The young adult aged villagers all leave to go into the cities and make money to send back to their families, but a lot of people had come home to visit for the holiday. We were split up into groups of 3 and placed with a family. The family I stayed with had 4 daughters and a son as well as a friend's daughter that they watch while the father is farming every day. The eldest sister is married and no longer lives with the family and the youngest daughter is living in another village with her mom's mom. The dad's mom lived in the village a few houses down. I didn't see much of the parents or the son because they were working for most of the day. We mostly got to hang out and talk to the daughters. We got to settle into the house and they made lunch for us. The house is really small. It consists of an entry hallway and 1 room which is used as a kitchen, dining room, sitting room and bedroom. There is a raised platform ~2 feet off of the ground which is a sitting area, add a table to make it a dining area, or add blankets to make it the bed. Very austere accommodations. For cooking, they have a giant wok-type pan thats sunk into a counter. It's used for cooking, as a kitchen sink, an oven and storage for dishes after meals. The house has no running water, shower or bathroom.
The eldest daughter still living with the family does all of the cooking herself. I was impressed. She made about 5 different dishes for us to sample during lunch. I couldn't believe how extravagant they made things, just for our visit. I talked to the daughters and they said they normally just get to eat potatoes every day and don't really get to eat much else. For them, it was such a feast! They even bought soda for our visit and refused to drink any of it. In the end, we were finally able to convince them to share it with us as they normally only drink water. I could not believe how generous they were to us. They also kept trying to stuff us full of fruit, which I know is not cheap to buy, but they had no shortage of it for our visit.
It was a little challenging to talk to them, since they speak a different dialect of Mandarin than I do. For the most part the language is the same, but some words have different pronunciations or are completely different altogether. I felt bad for the one girl in my group because she just started studying Chinese when she came to China, so she couldn't really understand anything that was going on. I had to do quite a bit of translation work over the course of the day. The girls really liked my wrist bracelets, so I ended up giving them away. After lunch, we got to sell all of the animals they had at their house. They had a kitten, 8 month old puppies, 2 other dogs, a mule, a donkey, a pig, a few roosters and a small herd of sheep. We got to play with the puppies for a while, which was so much fun. The little girl that they baby sit was hilarious. She was 5 years old and nicknamed us "gugu" (which is what you call your father's eldest sister, meaning she thought we were really old). She didnt' speak mandarin, so she just kept repeating back to us what we said. She would just follow us around saying Ni Hao over and over. After looking at all the animals, it was time to get to work. That day the family we were staying with was working on finishing up the harvest for one of their fields. We had to help pull all the plants out of the ground and put the vegetables in a pile. Then the vegetables had to be placed into bags for storage. Some of the veggies were being saved to eat and others were going to be replanted. After that, they had to hitch the plow up to the mule and drag the plow back and forth over the field. We had to pickup any veggies that popped out of the ground and bag them as well. It took most of the day to get the field cleared. It started to rain, but there was no stopping for weather here. Thankfully the storm blew through fairly quickly.
After all the work was done, we went back to the house and started to cook dinner. Again, they made a feast. We had 9 different dishes to sample and they all were delicious. Most of the ingredients were vegetables they had picked or grown themselves. It was really tasty. We got to help make some sort of potato bread. You had to boil the potatoes and then put them through this masher type thing, then it was mixed with rice flour and rolled into logs which we then broke into smaller oval piece and put on a tray for baking. At dinner, the potato things were used to dip into the sauces of the other dishes. It was really tasty. After cleaning up, all of us headed outside to one of the fields and we started a fire to roast potatos on. I definitely ate too much during this trip. We had a lot of fun around the campfire, talking and singing songs. Our bus driver was crazy and made a couple of passes at jumping over the fire. When the fire had burned down, we finally got our potatos. The skin was charred, so I had to take a brick and rub off the black charred skin before I could eat it. Shortly after, we all headed back to the house to sleep. It was really late and cold! It was so cold up in the mountains!
For bed, the small table was taken off of the dining area and all of the blankets were spread on top of it. In this area, the people sleep on Kangs, which are slabs of stone with a stove underneath to provide warmth. It was sooooooo nice and warm crawling inbetween the blankets on the kang. I slept pretty well, except for the cat that kept walking over my legs. This day was quite an interesting experience!!
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