After studying all morning on Saturday, I headed farther into Jinan to meet Stephanie and go to an open-air market. The market was enormous and full of stalls selling traditional Chinese artisan products and supplies. Calligraphy brushes, jade chops, carving tools, collectables of all kinds, books, paper, instruments, turtles, cactus, jade and other minerals, medicinal supplies, and thousands of other categories. And the strangest site: bowls of live scorpions. I’m not sure what they are supposed to cure, but they’re used in Chinese traditional medicine.
After the market, we climbed Hero Hill. At the top is a monument reproducing some of Mao’s (messy) calligraphy and dedicated to soldiers who died in the war against the Nationalists. As I was headed down the steep stone stairs, I heard a yell from behind, and I was quickly passed by a man running down the stairs backwards. Two flights at least. Running. Down. Backwards.
We walked around for another hour or so and then went to Stephanie’s home for a big meal. I’d met her mom briefly before, and this time I met her dad as well. They are such warm people. And of course the eating started the minute we walked in the door. They sat me down behind a big table of fresh and dried fruit and nuts and delicious green tea and started insisting that I eat. Gena came over, too and was also placed in front of the food. After a while, we started making dumplings. Unfortunately, the technique I’d learned at Vivi’s was not the same technique they used, so I had to learn a different method, but I didn’t do too well. All of my dumplings were long and skinny. They held together though, so I guess that’s the main thing.
I also watched as Stephanie’s dad cooked 6 different dishes that we would eat before the dumplings. There was a very tender chicken that is a Shandong specialty, perch cooked in a savory sauce, shrimp and cucumber, lotus root, some amazing kelp and beef, and broccoli with some kind of fungus. In the traditional family style of Chinese meals, these dishes were placed in the center of the table, and we just used chopsticks to take what we wanted; there were no plates. Also, no rice. They don’t eat very much rice in this part of China. I miss it. I tried to save room for the dumplings, but by the time I was able to convince them I was full, I was really stuffed.
After dinner, Stephanie’s mom taught me to use an abacus, and she also demonstrated some acupressure points on me. Fortunately Stephanie and Gena were translating. We watched a TV show about a Chinese family, and then Stephanie’s dad drove Gena and I home, but not before they’d given me a large container of green tea and most of the nuts and dried fruit that we hadn’t finished. I was so stuffed, I slept like a baby.
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