Pingyao Celebrity

A few weeks ago, Jon, some friends, and I took a weekend trip to Pingyao, a well preserved city built apparently 900 years ago.

Is the city or the people better looking?

Pingyao was a 12 hour night train southwest from Beijing, so it is a bit out there.  A side effect of this is that Jon, being a tall white male, was a minor celebrity wherever he went.  This started right on the train when he walked into the dining compartment and random people started excitingly greeting him and trying out their English.

At Pingyao, his celebrity status only increased, so much so that random girls would go up to Jon and ask to take their picture with him.

Jon is a minor celebrity.  Meanwhile, I get charged 1 RMB less for bottled water.

In any event, the original reason we went to Pingyao was that it is the place the movie Raise the Red Lantern was shot.  In fact, before going on the trip, the six of us all watched the movie together.  (If you haven't seen the movie, it is kind of like a season of Survivor where the contestants are four concubines, the prize is sleeping with a 60 year old man, and the punishment for being voted off is you get hanged.)  So on Sunday we went over to Qiao's mansion, the site of the filming.

Sure enough, there was a ton of Raise the Red Lantern paraphernalia all around.  You could see the actual set, check out pictures of the actors, and even dress up as the people there.  This might be a good time to mention that Jon and I, in a situation I will call anti-Man Jose style, went with four girls to Pingyao.  Hm... four girls, four concubines in Raise the Red Lantern, costumes... can you see where this is going?

Bam!

Unfortunately, Jon and I got cajoled into dressing up also.  We looked ridiculous, but perhaps because of this, Jon would walk around and people would ask for his picture every there of four minutes.  This happened so often, he even told one girl that the picture would cost 3 bucks!  

That will be sān kuài

And I could not resist getting a picture as well:

Looking very gangster

All in all, good trip!

Wángfǔjǐng

I recently spent some time at Wángfǔjǐng which is a road where there are a long strip of Chinese merchants selling street food. Here's an (overexposed) picture of myself there.

The spot is famous for selling a lot of strange food, including caterpillars, silk worm cocoons, and various internal organs.  Merchants aggressively yelled at me as we weaved around tour groups.  With the pushy sales and questionable food, I basically got a lot of practice saying "bú yaò!", which roughly translates into...

After ordering some boring food, I did go ahead and try some new things.  I ate something called bee cocoon, a bit of snake meat, and a scorpion.  The scorpion tasted surprisingly similar to soft shell crab - I guess anything deep friend and crunchy has some similarities.  The bee cocoon was somewhat like the scorpion, but a little less crunchy.  Snake meat, which was cooked, tasted a lot like raw squid you would find in a sushi place (I find both relatively tasteless and a bit chewy).

(Yup, that's scorpion all right)

One merchant provided the most entertainment of the night, though I am not sure his pitch was sound business strategy (you'll see what I mean in a second).  We approached his stand and started asking what various things were, per usual.  In particular, there was one item that was not at any other stand, so we were very curious about it.  The man first started grabbing his chest and flapping it around, so we thought it might be breast. But it really did not look like breast, so we asked again.  He finally said it was "testicles." So naturally we asked, "Who's testicles?" By way of answering, he started jumping up and down, grabbed his own crotch, and yelled "Wǒ de! Wǒ de!" (It's mine! It's mine!).

Bú yaò!