Thoughts on China

Well, I finally got it…the experience of a chicken head staring at me from the hotpot (and the feet to boot)…and I didn’t have my camera with me! OK, I’m getting ahead of myself…

I went to bed very early last night, about 7PM, since I was tired after riding a bike around town all day. I woke up at 3AM, played around on the Internet a little, and got back to sleep until about 8AM. Well, all I had to do was get to the post office to send all the stuff I bought in Hangzhou and Suzhou back home. It turned out it was quite a distance, which I walked. I rode the bus back to the hotel and finally got in a taxi for the bus station around 12 noon.

I had read in one of the tour books I brought with me about frequent buses to Yixing from Wuxi, so, stupid me doesn’t even ask for a ticket to Yixing, but a ticket to Wuxi. I met a nice lady in the bus station and we discussed (in Chinese, of course) that she wasn’t traveling anywhere and that I wanted to go to Yixing, and planned to get a bus to Wuxi and then to Yixing. Luckily for me, she worked for C-Trip, which is one of two (the other being eLong) web sites that are really good to get tickets internally in China. She told me not to take the bus to Wuxi (which would leave in 15 minutes), but got one of the managers at the station involved. The manager was a nice lady, as well, and took me to a return counter, got my money back for the Wuxi ticket and I paid the extra to get a ticket direct to Yixing.

In addition to the tour book, I had read a blog where people went to Yixing on a bus and were dropped off on the side of the road and got in some kind of a small bus to go the rest of the way. This was a fairly recent blog, so I thought I’d be dealing with more problems than I did. The bus went straight to the Yixing bus station. I sat next to a 20 year old sophomore who goes to Suzhou University, but is from Yixing. We had as good a conversation as we could have, knowing as little of each other’s language as we did. She confessed that she was lazy and didn’t study her English as much as she could, though she knows she could get a better job if she did speak English. I understand the desire of many Chinese to speak English, but I don’t understand the government’s desire that all Chinese learn English. After all, at least at this point, most will probably never even meet a foreigner. OK, maybe next year at the Olympics will be an exception, but you get the point. If I were her, I’d probably be lazy about learning English, too. There’s nobody around that speaks it natively, so it seems more like an academic language to learn than a practical one.

In any case, the bus ride took about an hour and 45 minutes. Once we got to Yixing, I took out a couple of guidebooks and looked for what hotels they recommended. The Frommer’s recommended a Y420-580 a night place, and the Lonely Planet recommended one for Y300-360 that would be discounted, so I went with the LP recommendation. It is the Yixing Shanghai Hotel.

QUICK NOTE: I’m using 7.5RMB (Y for Yuan) to the dollar for the conversions, which is what it was when I got to China. It’s already at 7.44, and that’s the official rate, which you probably won’t quite get. I knew this would happen last January, when it was 8 to 1. I only wish I could have bought RMB back then…anyway, back to today…

It turns out the hotel is in Dingshan, which is a few miles from Yixing, but is where most of the teapots here are really made (though Taiwan apparently has many famous teapot artists that import clay from Yixing) and also where the teapot museum is. The taxi meter went to Y48.20 ($6.42), but when I handed the driver a Y50 note, he handed me back a Y10 note and waived off any further payment. Amazing! This is how I got to the hotel in the middle of Yixing teapot country. I haven’t taken any pictures here, but I will get one of the giant teapot in the hotel lobby tomorrow morning and update this post with it here:

The reception clerk gave me a rate of Y260 ($34.67), which includes a complimentary breakfast. I’m going to stay here two nights, so that I’ll have a whole day to look around for teapots without having to worry about having the hotel keep my bags, coming back here, etc. That way, the next morning I can just check out and go in a taxi straight to the bus station. As you can see, they have Internet here, etc., etc. After the stories I’d heard about getting here, I was thinking it was a backwater type town where it may be hard to find an Internet connection. Never fear, this is China, where small towns have a million people in them!

Well, that brings me to the dinner I started out with. I went to a restaurant where everyone was enjoying hotpot. Of course, I could not read the Chinese menu. I did get across that I liked hot and spicy, but nothing else. After a few blank stares, she suggested one of the things up top that I guess was an all inclusive type dinner for Y48. I said OK. It started with an orange and some peanuts, which were good enough. Then came the hotpot, which had that nice red color that I knew meant spicy hot, just the way I like it! I was wondering what I got, of course. After she sat the hotpot into it’s cradle and started the propane fire underneath, I saw the chicken head looking at me, and then the foot…and I realized I must have got a full chicken hotpot. I tried everything, and it all tasted like chicken. I saw some show where a guy tried chicken feet in Korea and said they were good. I don’t know what he was eating, because as far as I could see, there was very little meat to be had on the foot (as you would expect). I tried, but I wasn’t into gnawing on cartilage, so I gave up the effort. The rest of the hotpot was good, with bean sprouts and mushrooms, as well as chicken. Finally, I got to the head. I had heard that the Chinese like cheek meat, and that it is supposedly the most tender and delicious part…well, I tried the cheek meat. It tasted like chicken and there was so little of it, I couldn’t tell if it was more tender or delicious than the other parts. Perhaps I’m just too used to Western food, but just give me the muscles of an animal and I’ll be happy. I also didn’t eat the skin, since it was cooked in liquid. I love skin that’s deep fried (aka fried chicken), but boiled skin is just rubbery and kind of yukky to me. I guess we all have our own tastes.

So, that was today. Tomorrow, it’s off to discover Yixing teapots!!! Good night/morning…