Fun Weekend #1

I had the opportunity to spend this last weekend in Chengdu with a family from church. They were wonderful as they arranged for their driver to pick me up and take me to their home. Their apartment is where we have church, so I had already been there. They have a spare room, and invited me to spend the weekends with them. I am so grateful that my need to be around Americans and western food has been taken care of!

Over the weekend we went shopping in the North Market. Never before had I seen so many little shops crammed into one space. The market consists of multiple 4-story buildings jam-packed with vendor after vendor selling everything from plastic buckets and faux antique jewelry boxes, to calligraphy supplies and fine china. It was fun to just look around. Everything was so inexpensive. For example, they sell these hand-carved stands for calligraphy brushes to hang on. These stands could easily be used as a jewelry organizer to hold necklaces. In the United States, I would expect to pay$30 or more for this item. The beautiful stands that I saw were only 22 RMB, or about $3.50.

I also saw bags and bags that looked like this.

At first I thought I was looking at noodles, but turns out they were rubber bands. Rubber bands of all shapes and sizes. You can truly buy anything here.

After the market, we went out to eat. We headed to one of the nicer shopping centers that had a western style restaurant. Once we got there, I laughed. It was western, all right… Peter’s Tex-Mex Grill is a chain of “American” style restaurants. The waitresses were dressed in what was supposed to be Mexican clothing, and the menu was all in English. One big difference with this place is that it didn’t just serve steak, burgers, burritos, and tacos…it also had noodles, dumplings, noodles, and did I mention noodles? Yep. Despite the English menu, I was constantly reminded that  I was still in China.

I ordered the avocado chicken salad. It was delicious. One thing that I loved is that they actually put an entire avocado on my plate. In the U.S. it seems like if you want even just a tablespoon of avocado you have to pay $2 extra. In fact, the salad was so enormous that I didn’t even come close to finishing it.

Oh yeah, I also got to feed fish with baby bottles, but that’s a story for a later day…