Rickshaw Ride and Dinner at Ashley’s: Sunday, May 20th

After sharing the Forbidden City with 60,000 other people, which was quite interesting, Sara, Annie and I decided to go shopping. Because we didn’t yet understand where everything was, we were unsure of how to get to the market. A rickshaw driver tried to help us figure out what we wanted to do while also advertising for us to take a ride with them. Most rickshaw drivers I immediately “Bo-Yow” (Don’t Want), I liked this guy so we agreed to go with him. Our driver has hilarious, and it turns out, he was also a tour guide and gave us a tour and history lesson of the Hutons. Hutons are the villages that crowd the spaces between buildings that people have lived in her hundreds of years. We learned where the B-U-S-S (boss) lived and also where the peasants lived according to their door decorations. Overall it was a lot of fun and I still don’t regret the $15 that it cost me.

Later that night we went to Ashley’s (our Beijing-Maryville Student) parent’s home for dinner. It was absolutely delicious and I learned a lot about the Chinese family. They lived in a high-rise apartment that was pretty ugly for American standards. It may have been ugly, but it looked like every other apartment in Beijing. Because the government builds everything, they can give everyone the same ugly apartment and no one can complain. Chinese dinner traditions and customs are different than traditions in America because the hosts bring out the food as it ready and there are about 20 dishes. We hardly saw the hosts (Ashley’s parents) because they cooked the whole time while we ate. It was absolutely amazing; I had the best dumplings of my life.