Mamahuhu

This oft used Chinese idiom literally translates as “horse horse tiger tiger”. The meaning, however, is that an experience is just so-so. If you were to ask me how my second week in China was going, I would probably answer: horse horse tiger tiger. Personally, I feel as though this idiom is offensive to horses and the tigers as neither species in their respective fluidity and power elicits the connotation of ok or merely all right. But personal feelings about animals aside, this week has been a mixed bag.

Physically, this week was an ill-fated adventure. After spraining my ankle last Friday while getting a rebound and summarily landing on top of a teammates foot, I was willing to except a lazy week with little exploration and lots of sitting. Little did I know that a viral equivalent to bacterial traveler’s diarrhea was lurking in my future. I’ll spare you the details of my fever and diarrhea which started on Monday and lasted for 5 days. Basically, it involved me sitting around trying to force myself to eat and having trouble maintaining my body temperature. Finally I felt bad enough that I went to the hospital where they informed me that I had a virus and they couldn’t do anything about it…

I think it is more important to go onto other topics such as my discovery of peanut-butter and a famous dumpling house. Retrospectively, it makes sense that I hadn’t seen any dumplings anywhere. I was subconsciously hoping that at one of the dinners with my Chinese friends they would order some things that I didn’t recognize and a pile of Sichuan specialty pork dumplings would come out accompanied by beautiful women and free beer, but it wasn’t to be. This is of course because dumplings are in fact, a specialty, and you have to go to a special place to find them! I mentioned in passing to a couple of friends that I wanted to try and find a restaurant with good jiaozi (dumplings), and five minutes later we were in a dumpling house. The house consisted of three floors, the bottom a cafeteria like area, the second primarily for tea drinking, and the third for Majong. The dumpling menu was extensive, and I demanded pork dumplings (go with what you know right?). The result was 6 bowls of various pork dumplings for the four of us. The local specialty zhongshuijiao, consisted of pork, garlic, and salt wrapped in a shell and steamed. They were served in a spicy vinegar-soy based sauce with the Sichuan style additions of oil and hot peppers. The other two varieties had a different shell and the additions of scallions and mushrooms respectively. As many of you know, there is nothing like a well made dumpling to soothe the soul. This was by far the most satisfying meal I have had in China. I even went so far as to comment to one of my friends that “this had made the trip to China worth it”. The funny part about that statement is I was fairly serious. I mean if didn’t find good dumplings then this whole experience was pretty much a waste of time right? As for the peanut-butter, I had looked for this to no avail the last time I visited the TRUST mart (supermarket), but this time I had to the good fortune of stumbling upon the foreign foods aisle. Although it was disappointingly small, I was able to find both peanut-butter and jelly, and spaghetti as a bonus. Needless to say, I promptly consumed 8 PB and J sandwiches over the next 12 hours 8.5 of which I was sleeping. Despite a minor stomach ache (nothing like last week though, my goodness), life was good again in Chengdu.