the land of fast trains and slow lanes
I'm in Nanjing right now, visting the extended family of my 奶奶 (Nainai, or my father's mom). My immediate family (mom, dad, Goosey, grandpa, and two grandmas) traveled here via semi-bullet train on Friday morning at noon. I mention this fact because I had thought that the train was leaving at 9 am, but my parents basically cheated me out of sleep by not enlightening me of the fact that the train was at noon. But yeah, basically the moment we got here we got invited out to dinner by my uncles. We're constantly being waited on by everyone, pretty much over-graciously as usual. In fact, right now the only reason I'm posting is that I'm being given gratuitous internet access by my uncle and cousin. Really, they're all being super sweet to us but it gets a fair bit distressing not knowing enough Chinese to be able to ease them off a little in a light-hearted manner.
So today was another one of those "move little, eat lots" days. It started with waking up for the first time past 9 am (only after I forced myself to go back to sleep at 6) and taking a walk outside in the nice weather. I'm pretty much amazed at how nice it's been - by nice I mean Nanjing isn't currently the tropical steam boiler I'm accustomed to it being - it's actually almost temparate today, and that's saying a lot. So after this very very short 15 minute walk, it was off to my cousins'house…a car ride which took close to two hours because of this horrendous traffic jam caused by what seemed like a single truck not being able to take its desired left turn. Just when my sister and I had been complimenting Nanjing on its user-friendly roads (in stark contrast to Shanghai). Anyway, we arrived for lunch at 12pm which I guess made us late, and my sister had a moment of confusion when she realized she'd been looking at the radio frequency instead of the time and thought it was strangely early for lunch at 10:24 AM, or should I say, 10:24 FM.
After lunch we stopped by and my cousins and I played some 八十分 （bashi fen, or "the eighty point game") which basically resembles Euchre, except with all the point values multipled by 10 as is usually the case with Chinese card games for some reason, and also 10 times as fun. It's a game I'd picked up for a bit in a simplified form years ago, and I was surprised at how easily I flowed back into it. Later, my family went to see the former “palace” of Chiang Kai-shek, which is basically like a defunct white house. Not being the biggest history buff, I didn’t exactly get the full experience of going around reading the commendably translated information boxes (which I doubt told the complete story anyway) but we did take a tour of the rather pretty garden.
And then we ate at the same hotel we did last time for my grandpa's belated 80th birthday, which is now infamous in my sister's mind and my own for offering the unhealthiest cuisine in the nation - a blend of the most conveniently oil-splattered chinese cuisine, strangely transmuted unhealthy western tastes (think country-fried steak with mayo and watermelon bits...unexpectedly delicious but pretty frightening nonetheless), and another gigantic chocolate cake. Oh and of course the liquor and cigarettes. The Maotai (50-proof sorghum liquor) is damn good...I've been gaining an appreciation for that stuff lately and bum it off my dad sometimes, but I still do not understand how people can bear to stick flaming rolls of noxious chemical- releasing paper conglomerate into their mouths and suck in the polluted fumes for fun.
It's been fun but I do kind of miss the craziness of my previous years here. There were about thirty people tonight at the dinner but it was still relatively subdued...I got a little nostalgic today thinking about 1994 and the Karaoke afterparties in the ghetto but charismatic homes of various members of our extended family...or 2006, when we had that huge long dinner with upwards of 40 people, including some people i didn't even know were related to me... All in all I think I'm a little ready to go back to Shanghai and live under slightly less scrutiny. :)