Night Market, Chicken throat, Sushi, and Chinglish.

It is hard to keep track of the days. For some reason it feels like I have already been here for a couple of weeks when this is really only the 4th day. I guess it is because I have done so much every day. We usually go for a morning bike ride around 6:00 am, train from 9:00 am to 4:00 or 5:00 pm and then we usually go bike around some more.

on Tuesday we went to the night market. It was pretty small and was supposed to be bigger on Saturday night. They have tons of vendors (food, clothes, music, toys, etc.) and carnival like games.

Wednesday morning we went to a morning market that was much larger than the night market. It took up a few blocks and had vendors of everything imaginable. There were a lot of interesting food for sale like the chickens below.

Wednesday night we went to a huge mall that sold really expensive American brand clothes and things. Most of us only spent about 10 minutes walking through the mall and got bored of it (it looks like a normal mall) and went around the different stores down the street. While out Lien, Allison and I decided to try our hand at some food from the street vendors. At one place we were trying to ask them how much some things were and I guess they took that to mean we wanted some and started to cook up some mystery meat on a kabob then put sauce on it. We had no clue what it was but later found out it was chicken esophagus. We bought some sushi at another place and some of it had some more mystery meat in the center. We found out the next day that that mystery meat was pork fiber. The chicken esophagus wasn’tall that good but the sushi wasn’t bad.

There are a lot of clothes and signs here that have English on them but a lot of them don’t make any sense. Many people speak what is called Chinglish, which is when they speak English but apply Chinese grammar to sentences. Below is one example of a shirt that makes no sense. It is supposed to say “Don’t talk back”. There is another example in the Week 1 photo album.

Tonight we went to the cultural center, or at least the building next to the cultural center. The actual cultural cenrter wasn’t open, but I think the building we went into is part of it. Inside they had a library, a place for weaving classes, and a cool little art gallery with Chinese script.

All of the above pictures and many more from this exciting week can be found in the Week 1 album.