Off to Fuzhou!

National Holiday in China is a week-long Federal holiday (aka Golden Week) in celebration of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Instead of sticking around Shanghai for the break, I flew with my friend Maggie to her hometown in Fuzhou. It was a big change from what I am used to here in Shanghai, but I had a really good time and am glad I got to explore a more “real” part of China.

Fuzhou

We flew out after class on September 30 (Thursday) and took a little over an hour flight to Fuzhou.  Maggie’s uncle picked us up and took us to their apartment in Changle (the city where they live in the province Fuzhou), where I met her aunt, grandparents, and 3 year-old cousin.  We ate and then went to bed so we would be ready for our first day in Fuzhou. We caught up on some much-needed sleep and then the next morning her aunt took us out to eat a breakfast that Changle is known for: peanut noodles and dumpling soup. It was delicious and a lot more food than I am used to eating for breakfast, but I ate it all so I didn’t seem rude. Then we went to meet a different aunt and uncle at the photo shop they own. When we mentioned that we wanted to go hiking, they decided to take the rest of the day off and go with us. I got to ride on the back of a motorcycle up to this beautiful mountain with a waterfall. It was a lot of fun!

Aside from the first day, the rest of the trip all kind of blurs together.   I don’t mean this in a bad way; it’s just that I can’t really remember exactly what we did every single day. Most days included going to markets and shops, and eating tons of food. I’ll try to break it down in the most logical way I can think of though…

Food: I can’t even begin to describe how much food was consumed during our trip. I never thought I would be able to gain an appreciation for the feeling of hunger, but since going to Fuzhou, I have a new-found love for not being full to the brim.  A typical day’s food went something like this: Huge breakfast of noodles, seafood, meat, and whatever else.  Midmorning snack—usually noodles or some street food and a milk tea. Lunch of seafood, meat, rice, noodles, soup. Snacks all afternoon long. Giant dinner. More street food. Milk tea.

My Birthday Dinner

By Sunday (my birthday!) I realized I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with my Chinese hosts anymore. I silently gave up on trying to eat as much food as they wanted me to.  Every time we ate, her entire family would tell me to eat more, more, more! and I did because I didn’t want to come off as rude or unappreciative.  I started feeling unwell though, and even threw up twice because I was so sick to my stomach.  After telling Maggie that my stomach couldn’t handle so much food she assured me that it would be alright for me to say no, which I started doing immediately.  My stomach recovered by Monday night, so I was able to enjoy myself much more.

Also probably contributing to my temporary illness was the amount of new foods I was being exposed to.  In Shanghai, I didn’t have trouble adjusting to the food at all. (This is probably partly because I was in control of how much I ate, when I ate, what I ate, etc.) However, in Fuzhou, their diet consists mostly of seafood. They eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Some of the things I ate: octopus, duck feet, fish soup, mini lobster things (don’t really know the English equivalent… sort of like crayfish), shrimp with their heads on, jellyfish, and so many other things. I liked everything I had except for the duck feet and the jellyfish. After trying the duck feet I couldn’t get the smell out of my head the entire time I was in Fuzhou… ick!

Shopping: There isn’t much to do in Fuzhou so we spent most of our time just wandering the streets and going to markets. Everything there is much cheaper than it is in Shanghai so anything I knew I needed I got in Fuzhou. I bought a pair of sneakers and a pair of heels, but wasn’t really able to buy many clothes. 

As you probably know, Chinese people are tiny, so it is generally a bit hard for American people to find clothes here. In Shanghai it is not so bad because there are so many foreigners, and there are lots of Western shops. However, in Fuzhou, many of the people haven’t even seen a white person before! It was still fun going shopping though, because I was able to find the occasional top or dress, and I also got tons of attention.  Everyone was tripping over themselves to help me, as well as telling me how beautiful I am (who wouldn’t love it????) haha.  A lot of times Maggie would pretend she didn’t speak Fuzhounese and would listen to what the people said and tell me. It was always pretty entertaining because they were so amazed by me. One man even asked Maggie “Is she real???” Shopping was fun more for the experience than for actually buying things.

Maggie's Village

Man carrying human manure

Villages: Maggie was born in a village in Changle, so we spent a few hours there on my birthday.  It was my favorite part of my trip to Fuzhou because it really gave me a taste of what China is like outside of the big cities. It seemed sort of rundown, but when we went into Maggie’s old house it was actually very nice inside. (This is a general trend in China—regardless of how crappy an apartment or house looks on the outside, it usually is still pretty nice inside.) I can’t really describe why I liked seeing her village so much, but it was beautiful in a nontraditional sense of the word and I got to see how most Chinese people live.

We also went to her aunt’s home village, which was a little more modern than Maggie’s, but that isn’t saying much.  There were many more shops there than in Maggie’s, and her village was located very close to the beach. After seeing her village, we headed over to the beach and walked along it for a little while.  It was no Holden Beach, but I loved it just for the fact that I was able to be on a beach.

This post is already much longer than I wanted it to be, so I’m going to cut myself off now. Fuzhou was a really beautiful place and a great experience, and I would gladly go back. Her family was so friendly and was very patient with me since my Chinese is not exactly at their level.  I’ve also included a PowerPoint I made for Chinese class… we had to give a presentation about our holiday, so you can look at it if you want.  It obviously is in Chinese, but there are a lot of pictures so you’ll get the hint. :) Here it is:

福州旅行

View more presentations from Rachel Storey.

Shanghai Rolex Tennis Masters

So apparently my attempt at posting “regularly” failed. But I am going to make up for it with a bunch of new posts all right in a row! Chronology won’t really matter, so don’t worry about the order in which you read them. But I’ll start with what happened today because it’s still fresh in my mind:

For a special student price of 50 RMB, I went with some of my friends to the Shanghai Rolex Masters tennis tournament. I may not be an avid tennis fan, but the price alone was incentive enough for me to go check it out since tickets for other people began at 460 RMB and went up to 1600 RMB.  But anyway, today was day two of the event and our plan was to get there in time to see Roddick play at 2:00. We got there in time but figured he’d be playing for a while and that we might as well just walk around and see who else is playing on the smaller courts. The first court we checked out just so happened to have Nadal practicing against some random tennis player. IT WAS AWESOME!!! I was close enough to touch him. Proof:

After gawking for a good 30 minutes at Nadal, we left to go see who else we might be able to find. We found Isner playing which was pretty neat. He’s really young and very tall, as well as good-looking. He wasn’t playing very well when we were watching but I believe he ended up winning.  Then we finally started to make our way to the Center Court, where Roddick was playing... But as we were walking we heard all these Chinese people yelling and making noise and rushing around, so we stopped to see what the deal was. What was going on? Oh nothing really- just Nadal leaving his practice court. Because of our positioning, I was able to snag this sweet pic before he was mobbed by Chinese people. I got skillz, I know:

 

 

Finally we got to the Center Court to see Roddick, and luckily we got there when we did and got to see him play some, because the guy he was playing gave up after the second game of the second set. I was a little disappointed we couldn’t see him play more, but I was glad I got to see him whoop up on that guy! Here is the Center Court while Roddick and the German guy were playing. It was huge!!

After this match ended, we went to go find Querrey. We were the only Americans watching that match, so we definitely got a good number of glances from Querrey. We cheered for him and tried to give him lots of moral support before we left. He was probably my favorite to watch. Next we headed back over to the Center Court to check out who was playing. It was Ljubicic versus Zhang Ze, a Chinese no-name. I was the only one in our group cheering for Zhang, but I thought he did really well considering who he was playing. He won the first set, lost the second set, and was pretty dang close to winning the third set. There were a lot of people watching this match (since it was a Chinese guy playing) so it was interesting to see how loud and enthusiastic they all were throughout the entire thing. I really wish he had won but it was a really fun game to win, so it’s okay!

The last match we went to was Ferrer against Llodra. We didn’t stay for very long because it was getting late and everyone was hungry. There was food at the place we were at, but it didn’t look very appetizing and was more expensive than the 6 kuai noodle soup I got. :) Not to mention we had about an hour long commute ahead of us. (We always get on Line 1 from our school, and to get to the tennis stadium we had to go to the VERY end of Line 1… 17 stops, then transfer to a different line for 3 more stops, THEN take a taxi to the stadium.)

So that was how I spent my day today, and it was a great experience. I have never really watched tennis before, but I might start now... I had so much fun and really enjoyed watching all the matches. Plus it was obviously cool to get to see so many famous athletes!