Travel tip # 5: If you’re satisfied with seeing tall, leafy bamboo shoots and beautiful Eastern architecture on a long and somewhat difficult walk, then come to China. If you’re craving a hiking adventure with grueling trails, stony cliffs, and hours of sweating to get to the top, don’t come to China.
Our first hike was this past Friday! I say "hike" loosely, as it was more of a long, upwards walk up a flight of uneven, slippery stairs. However, that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it! Aside from overpaying on the bus (which we wouldn't have done if someone had informed us that our trip leader had already paid...) I don't regret anything about that trip! There was some beautiful bamboo, which made me finally fully realize I'm in China, and interesting temples, including a Daoist temple along the way back down, as well as some absolutely spectacular views of the booming metropolis, Hangzhou.
When we got to the bottom of the hill we went our separate way, seeking out a restaurant to restore to us the few calories we'd burned. About 10 of us piled into a local restaurant and ate our fill of spicy soups, mapo doufu, saucy eggplant, and other delicious dishes. Unfortunately, this was a late lunch that preceded a very early--4pm or so--dinner. So we essentially went from eating our way through a great many dishes at one restaurant to eating our way through a great many dishes at another restaurant merely 2-3 hours later.
I can't really say it was a duplication, though. The second meal most definitely stood apart from the first, mainly due to the dumpling eating contests. You see, the point of this meal was actually to learn how to 包饺子, or "stuff dumplings". We learned several different ways of sealing the "dumpling skin", all the way from a simple smushing-together of the opposite ends to a delicate process of folding the outer while keeping the inner layer steady so as to make your dumpling look ruffled and ornate. We competed against the other tables to see who could make the most dumplings with over 11 folds of the skin. Thanks to our native Chinese diners sitting with us at the table, we won that battle hands down. But the war was just beginning.
The real fun came after the dumplings were cooked. You see, we didn't just sit quietly and politely sample our dumplings. Instead, we brutally shoved them down each others throats from across the table...in a matter of seconds.
The first dumpling eating contest I watched as a "judge", noting how many dumplings 4 of my competitors at another table could eat in 1 minute. 2 pairs of competitors. 8 chopsticks. 25 dumplings in 60 seconds. It was a sight, I tell you.
I participated in the second competition. Four of us stood at our round table, my right arm tied to my roommates left, my left arm tied to Amy's right, and so on, so that we made a complete, tied-off circle. Thank goodness we were all right-handed, because the requirement of this competition was that each of us was to feed one person while being fed by another, so we worked out a genius system in which each of us held a small plate of dumplings in the left hand for our partner to pick off of with his or her right. Each of us downed between 3-6 dumplings in a mere 30 seconds. We cleaned our plates.
Now that I think about it, it's a good thing we went for that hike in the morning...