Getting cultural

This weekend was pretty chill but still a fabulous time exploring. Kellianne and I relaxed on Saturday morning and went to Xinancun for an early lunch, where I discovered a pretty awesome car. I don’t know exactly how this happened, but for some reason, China also really enjoys my hometown hero, Snoopy! I happened to be wearing my rainy day Snoopy shirt in the drizzle and found this car in the Xinancun parking lot.

A few of us had a little bit of a study party in our room, an interesting combo of silliness, laughter, Chinese, and Korean music, and then Kellianne, Liz, Emily, and I went on adventure in search of dinner. We went past our normal dining choices on the street and in the village and discovered another whole street! But what we really enjoyed was oohing and ahhing at a qipao (traditional style Chinese dress) store window, ignoring our grumbling stomachs for a few minutes to go in, look around, and promising the shopkeeper we’d be back at some point.


We got another opportunity to test of our Chinese skills Saturday night because we invited our friend Zhangxun to join a bunch of us for some card games! That we had to explain completely in Chinese. He got pretty good at Speed and Slap the Egyptian Rat by the end of the night, which was also celebrated with some Chinese snacks and the craziest fruit I’ve ever seen: huolongguo, fire dragon fruit. The name and exterior are daunting, but the taste is quite mild.


Sunday morning we finally found on Chinese TV a hilarious children’s program Rob discovered this summer and told us about – Xiyangyang! Literal translation: Happy sheep sheep. Good news is we can understand most of it, so we have about the fluency level of three year olds. Yay. I also learned a lot of useful vocab by keeping the TV on after it changed to kiddie art programs, and then we were both amused watching Chinese pro Latin dancers! Well, I probably found it cooler than Kellianne did, but it’s definitely better than Chinese soap operas!

Lunch in Xinancun again, and then before meeting up with Liz, Emily, and Yer to go to Wenhuajie (culture street), we took a walk to the little park where Zhao Laoshi had brought us. Here’s a picture of me with the Nankai map.

Getting to Culture Street was interesting. It was pretty much a straight shot a few miles from Nankai, but we asked the taxi driver if we could pile the five of us into a taxi, so we got awfully cosy!

The district named “Culture Street” seemed to be just an elaborate village laid out still in perfect condition from ancient times, now surrounded by huge, modern skyscrapers.


Objective: find as many interesting artifacts as you feel like carting around in your suitcase.
15 minute rule: No buying anything in the first fifteen minutes because the same or similar products could be found or haggled for cheaper prices the further from the entrance you wander.
Method: Zigzag with your friends across both sides of the sidewalk to enter whatever shops look interesting.
Common interests: All of us are determined to buy qipaos at some point in China, and a couple of us would love to bring some cool paintings back as well. And of course whatever we think our family members would like (and use).
How it played out: we stopped in literally every qipao store we saw and peeked into a good number of painting stores as well. And whatever else snatched our whim.

Some photos from the day:















We all made it out with some lovely purchases and then finally got to capitalize on our DQ urge! During the taxi ride we spotted a promising sign just a few blocks from Wenhuajie, so we entered the gigantic mall called “New World Department Store,” escalatored down to the DQ, and finished off some small blizzards. They even tasted like authentic, born in MN DQ. Real dinner consisted of a few lamb chuanr back at the village after we walked halfway back and then shoved the five of us in a taxi whose driver asked one of us to duck down just in case!

10 pm was time for our first study break! There was a sizable turnout in the triple of the boys’ RA, James Beck, and thankfully Kellianne and I had bought enough Chinese snacks for everybody. Jake was even nice enough to make hot tea for everybody interested too, as most people caught up and shared their respective tips, stories, and plans.

A full week ahead, goodnight!