Ok, class. I’ve received some questions from you all, and apparently the assignment was harder than I anticipated. That said, you can turn it in for extra credit, but it won’t be graded.
On a more serious note, here it is Tuesday in Nanjing! I’m sad to say that we did not have Memorial Day off. Nor did we celebrate. Nor did we have fireworks. Nor did we go out to eat. In fact, I spent my Memorial Day studying for a test. But hey, this Thursday and Friday we will be celebrating a Chinese National Holiday, the Dragon Boat Festival. Reading up a little ahead of time, the Dragon Boat Festival features boat races to honor the spirit of water dragons, considered to be the most powerful dragons (and they provide water for crops). Moreover, the festival honors a 3rd century BC poet, Qu Yuan, whose counsel was rejected by a king. Qu Yuan threw himself into a river, and the villagers raced their boats around to try to find him before he drowned. Failing to find him, they threw rice into the water to prevent the fish from eating his body (I don’t understand that). To this day, one of the central foods surrounding the festival is zongzi – bamboo leaves wrapped around sticky rice with a sweet or salty filling. I’ve seen these in the grocery store already, and I’m really excited to give them a try this weekend!
This past weekend ended up being somewhat uneventful. On Saturday, we were planning to go to a soccer game, until discovering that the game was actually Sunday. Oops! So instead, we headed south to the Confucius Temple market. Like many touristy areas, there wasn’t really a temple as far as I could tell, but tons and tons of shops selling mostly identical merchandise. You’re supposed to barter for everything, but I didn’t remember that until it was almost too late. Thankfully, I only bought a few things and I intend to return at least once more before the end of the trip. I also had my picture taken with a statue I presumed to be of Confucius. It was a pretty jovial statue, so I gave it a high five.
On Sunday, we took a nice, slow start to the day (i.e. most people were recovering from a fun night out on Saturday) before heading to the 3 pm game at Olympic Stadium. The game was between the Jiangsu Sainty and Chongqing. The general admission tickets were 50 Yuan each, which is about $7. To better cheer for Jiangsu, almost all of us purchased blue Sainty jerseys, at a cost of 60 Yuan ($8.50)! The stadium was pretty cool, except it had an interesting mix of obsolescence and modernisms. A crisp, clear jumbotron displayed the score of the game, yet there was no game clock anywhere! The stadium’s capacity was probably around 50,000, although it was only one-quarter filled. At least there were crazy soccer fans though! A couple people from our group motivated the crazy soccer fans by whooping and hollering before, during, and after the game, so we had quite a fun time. Even better, Jiangsu won by a score of 4-0! The first two goals were scored in the first 15 minutes and the last two were scored in the last 10 minutes. Jiangsu combined good defense with a hail-mary style offense that worked remarkably well. As I said, we all had a great time and really enjoyed seeing the home team pull it out.
The only other item of note right now is that we’re getting ready for our field trip to visit some transportation-sites of interest. We leave tomorrow (Wednesday) just after noon, and we’ll return to Nanjing on Thursday afternoon. Depending how interesting the festival is at that time, I may or may not have the opportunity to post again before Sunday. Zai Jian!
No comments:
Post a Comment