In the states, I typically spend January 1st recovering, watching sports, and maybe making it out for a late brunch around 1:00 or 2:00. For some reason I thought we were planning to meet Laura’s family later in the afternoon. I was wrong – Laura woke up early and called around 10:00am and they were already wondering how soon we could come over for lunch. With everything I consumed less than 12 hours before still swimming around in my system, I’m still not quite sure how I made it through the day.
We went to her Great Aunt’s house around noon and were greeted by about 15 family members sitting around a table with the most food I’ve seen on this trip. Picture “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the Chinese version. (Although, in the Chinese version if you’re a vegetarian they won’t offer to make you lamb, they’ll offer to make you pork.) Despite my stomachs rebellion, I found a way to eat more of the delicious home-cooked food. (The dumplings were amazing although I wasn’t up for more animal feet.) It was really fun to meet her family, including her grandparents who I have been hearing so much about for the last couple of years.
After lunch, Laura’s aunt and cousin were awesome and offered to drive us to some of the tourist sites farther outside of town. We drove by the Olympic Green and saw all of the Olympic buildings. (China by the way is still OBSESSED with the Olympics. It plays on continuous loops here. E.g. after lunch everyone retired to the couch to watch the men’s ping pong finals, China vs. China.) After that we trekked out to the Summer Palace of the former Empress Cixi. Click here for Wiki pictures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Palace We had a perfect day and a lot of fun wandering around, I was actually starting to feel like a human by the end.
After the palace we had to go back to say bye to the family and we were, of course, just in time for dinner… which consisted of an even bigger spread than lunch. I really don’t know how everyone stays so thin!!! Once we were all stuffed to the point of not being able to move, one of Laura’s aunt suggested we all play a game to finish more of the food on the table. For those of you who have played speed quarters with two glasses… you know how you have to drink when the glasses meet up with each other??? Well, we had to play speed “rock, paper, scissors” for chopsticks – if you ended up with two chopsticks you lost and had to eat more food. It definitely made for quite the post-dinner entertainment. At long last, we made it back home where I refused to do anything else that required moving… including typing the blog. We watched a movie and went to bed.
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