China Guidebook Reviews

Hi Friends! I have service again after 2 weeks, so sorry for not giving any updates on how we’ve been doing. We have two days left in Mongolia, so I’ll hopefully get some posts for here up soon. For now though I have this one post from China. This was actually part of an assignment for my Travel Writing class that I expanded upon. Hopefully it gives you a glimpse into some of the food we ate and places we went. If you ever find yourself in this part of China, here’s a few tips.

Shepherd’s Field Children’s Village

Cost: A few hours of service work a day

We begin by pulling up to a gated campus where Naomi meets us and shows us to our 8-person dorms. Before we go in however, we are greeted by Stevie the dog, who continues to be our faithful companion, following us to dinner most nights and waiting for us to drop food. The institutional white rooms are comfortable and quickly littered with the colors of exploded backpacks and laundry lines tied in zig-zags from bunk to bunk. The air conditioning unit becomes our best friend in the China humidity. The bathroom door doesn’t stay shut, so we jam it with a towel and lay the other towels on the floor to soak up floods from the leaky shower. When we want to leave the room, we go down to the comfortable common room where students lounge around on couches and eat at the kitchen table together. Homework study groups and game circles form and laughter echoes through the building inviting others to join in. Our service fee often requires us to go outside to the surrounding green campus to move dirt, build beds, organize, and sweat each afternoon. We eat a provided lunch each day in the cafeteria and walk to a number of restaurants every night. Shepherd’s Field provides great comfort in a place far from home. Tip: COME HERE!!!!!!

Mao’s Skewers

Cost: about $7 a person when there are 40+ people (50 yuan a person but we only pay 30 and the rest is covered for us. Yay!)

Our caravan of American college students make our way down the restaurant strip to Mao’s restaurants for skewers of unknown food after a long afternoon of service. We struggle to find enough tables to line up on the front sidewalk to fit all of us. We eventually crowd around, drinks in hand, to seats that will be switched and abandoned by the end of the four-hour dinner. Course after course appears on the tray in front of us, each getting more weird than the last before subsiding back to edible food. Lamb, chicken wings, chicken skin, turtle, and a variety of shelled seafood are pulled apart. We find ourselves choking down snail and whatever fleshy, squishy mass is in the largest clam for our food challenge, before washing them down with beer and coke. My stomach still hurts thinking about it. Spirits rise and volume increases as the night moves along, and we find ourselves jumping from friend to friend shoving, snapping, and laughing. We are lucky to have John, the groundskeeper, with us to talk Mao into letting us back into the kitchen to toast the bread and take the small teacup poodle from the cage that I proceed to hold for the rest of the night. We all stumble home at different times maintaining wild moods until the seafood hits our stomachs, and we are all made to rest. Tip: Stay away from snails. They taste like dirty water and mush. 

Red Lantern

Cost: $3-5 (20-30 yuan)

On the first night in town, a large group of us wander to the Red Lantern, named such for the red lanterns that hung in the store front two years ago, but are now gone. Our nickname for it remains the same however. A few nights later, our eight-person travel team returns for team dinner where we are given a private room with a large round table and huge, glass Lazy-Susan. We glance through the menu, thankful for the pictures that decorate the pages for each item. We debate which meats and sides to get and order by pointing to each and asking for “pijiu” which is the only word we seem to all know. I firmly stress the importance of getting honey, rice-krispy covered sweet potatoes, and with chopsticks in hand, I quickly snatch a bunch up and devour them when they come. The Lazy-Susan doesn’t stop spinning as we all dive into our meal and share plate after plate. With content bellies, the pace of the meal slows, and rousing discussions arise in the family atmosphere of our room away from the smoke of the surrounding restaurant. When the meal ends, we find that it is pouring rain, and while some duck and hurry home, I jump through the dirty puddled streets, dancing and laughing in the downpour. Tip: Eat the rice-krispy potatoes. They are made of joy. 

KTV Karaoke

Cost: $2 (13 Yuan) for a large room when there are 40ish people

We want to have fun our last night in this town, and most of us don’t care enough about the test tomorrow to stay home, so the karaoke club seems to be the right option. We walk in to a beautiful lobby with chandeliers and golden trim. After sorting out options and prices, we are led up an elevator to a large room on the third floor with a couch lining the entire back wall and tables with drinks and snacks. The stage and screen are set in the front, and the lights shine on it and flash all around the room. The volume grows as the room becomes crowded with students standing around the stage as if it were a concert. We search for the classic songs of our generation on the computer in the corner, struggling to draw out the English letters needed to find them. We sing “baby, baby, baby, ohhh” and “you don’t knowww, you don’t know you’re beautiful” at the top of our lungs back in our middle school days. We yell and chant for our friends who form a boy band to sing “I never wanna hear you say, I want it that way”, and we cheer and join in as our professors sing “sweet Caroline bum, bum, bum”. Professor Santon raps an entire song much to our enjoyment, and we all throw our hands up and scream out “ohhhh, it’s a party in China!” (The USA). It’s like a high school dance all over again with pounding music, flashing lights, and dancing students. Our friends slowly trickle away, leaving the party to go study. I wonder how they could pull themselves away from the action of the atmosphere and sparkle that this karaoke room provides. In the end I am envious when they lay in bed, and I sit up studying, but I would never trade the moments singing in a foreign karaoke club. Tip: Take a night to maybe relive something fun in your past. Go sing and dance. Don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself. Live! 

The Great Wall of China

Cost: $20 (140 yuan)

Sleepily stumbling onto the bus, we head northbound to the wall at 5 am. The Great Wall is almost fabled in our society and romanticized among tourists. We don’t like being called tourists and prefer the term traveler, but I would include myself among those with wonder at such an architectural feat. How could a person not be amazed by the Wall when it was built centuries ago through thickly forested mountains and is over 13,000 miles long! It’s a foggy morning when we arrive at the visitor center. We wait restlessly for our passes and then hustle to the transport buses, stopping only to laugh at the Burger King and restaurant called Good Food Happy People. The buses take us to the gondolas where we wait to be taken to the top. Six of us squeeze onto the benches inside and peer through the windows to the surrounding mountains as we ride up. We make it to the Wall. We examine the mortar for the sticky rice that was used in its building, and gaze in amazement at the history surrounding us. Camera’s click, and people pose. We take a huge group picture, and then we are all on our way to explore. I take time to stand in a window and sing Mulan songs and quote the only part that takes place on the wall, “Now all of China knows you are here.” My friends go in search of a flat stretch of the wall in which to set up our Spikeball set. We play a few games, rotating in and out so we all have a chance to say we played on the wall. We come to the end, not of the wall, but of our walkable part, and while some opt to pay for a toboggan ride down, I take the steps with a few friends. They are steep and go on for too long, but good company makes them bearable even if my legs shake by the end. So the Great Wall, a masterpiece of the constructed world once built to keep others out, now beckons visitors from all the world to experience a piece of history. Tip: If you ever get a chance to visit the Great Wall, take a few moments at first to just take in the views and appreciate it. After you’ve created a mental picture, then take some real pictures. Be stereotypical tourist for a few moments, but then return back to the moment and the awe. 

Dumplings

Cost: $3 (18-24 yuan)

Dumplings are a great, safe comfort food in a land where we don’t know what half of the other items are. That being said, we aren’t always sure what dumplings we are ordering either. We make our way up the narrow stair to the table in the back of the room decked in red, with a lazy-Susan, and set with wrapped dishes. We stare at the unfamiliar symbols, saddened by the lack of pictures. Our waitress. Yu Li Wei, comes, and we attempt to get pork dumplings. Twenty minutes late, four plates of steaming fried dumplings appear on our table. We quickly snatch some up to move to our own plates. A few friends stuff the entire dumpling in their mouths and quickly regret it as their tongues burn. The rest of us take a bite out of one and savor the warmth and taste. The dumplings all disappear fast, but in the end we are all happy and filled. We return again a few days later when we all find ourselves wanting something that we know is safe and tasty,  and trust me we do not regret it. Tip: The dumpling place is a safe food. If you find that you are not ready to try eating weird seafoods or meats again right away, then you should go get dumplings