(literally translated to Aunt, but used mostly in situations where the elder is not your relative, but a close friend) Shu Shu ('uncle'), their grownup son and his girlfriend who returned home for the weekend from their home in Beijing, BeiBei the fattest cat... ever, NaNa our fun loving watch dog, and Dobia the son's new golden retriever puppy. My friends Yasi, Lingli and I shared a room, and a kang. Don't knock the kang till you try it. A kang is basically a large (the size of multiple beds) stone and tiled box. The hollow inside of the kang connects, in our case, to the kitchen fireplace so the kang stone is constantly heated by the wood burned to cook meals. Thin blankets and 'mattresses' are laid out on the kang during the night to sleep, but during the day the kang is used as a central location for hanging out. We ate meals on the kang, sat on the kang to play mazhong, and constantly had to keep the dirty outdoor pets off the kang.
During the rural homestay we ate a lot of food. Ok, well I would have eaten a lot of food if I could have stomached it all. The first meal we had was very good. There were quite a few dishes and about 85% of those dishes had pork in them. We watched our Ai Yi cook the first couple meals and her method was basically to waste nothing and to continuously add as much oil and pork as possible. There were these mini egg roll things which I loved. Unfortunately, once you tell the rural host families that you love something, they continuously force feed you this food. I can't really handle all of the bones and the fat that they leave in dishes in China, but have no fear, in our house if you didn't like something you would spit it out onto the table and feed it to NaNa, the vacuum. A lot of the dishes we ate in the rural village were very similar to dishes found throughout Beijing. Just way more pork, and no escaping it. We drank a lot of green tea in our household, which was REALLY good.
Cibei Yu Cun is known mostly for it's agricultural benefits. Commonly grown in this area are chestnuts, walnuts, persimmons, and this kind of Chinese dates. I was forcefully fed chestnuts every night we were there. Atleast they were super sweet and fun to open.
Over the weekend Yasi and our other friend Sean did a research project on food, so I had the privilege of watching them and helping to make some of the foods. Our Ai yi showed (them/us) how to make jiaozi (dumplings) and baozi(filled dough balls). The jiaozi was very good, and since Sean is a vegetarian, I got a break from eating pork. The baozi was the best I have had thus far in China. One kind of Baozi that I had never had before was this sweet kind. It looked liked clumps of sugar with molasses or just some kind of brown sugar, and when the baozi was steamed, the brown sugar melted inside the baozi. DELICIOUS. It got a little messy, especially with chopsticks, but completely worth the mess.After the rural homestay I believe I have gained an appreciation for the work that goes into a Chinese meal, especially one consisting of Baozi and Jiaozi. I have also become kind of a vegetarian. I really have no desire to eat pork again after eating multiple dishes of recooked pork at every meal (including breakfast) for 4 days straight. I now plan on building a Kang in my future home as well. knock on kang!
-Abigail Rebecca
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