Pizza, PETA and a Show

On Friday evenings here in Jinji there is a 2nd weekly run of the "shopping bus", except this one leaves @ 4:45 which gives one just enough time to clear off your desk run home and change then dash out to get a seat. Well this week it was nice and sunny on Friday so Kristen was basking in the sunshine in the living room drinking some tea and NOT getting ready, while Paul was off doing some speech correction work with a student. Needless to say we missed the bus by just a minute, so we ran for it. We did catch it but by the time we got there there were no seats left. Being full of endorphins we walked to the Qingkauy (ching-way) and caught the train into Kai-fa-chu.

We had an extensive shopping list which included a stop at Deli Harbour, which is actually a little piece of Fernwood smack in the middle of China! It has real cheese, salsa and good chocolate! After that we went out for our first real "date night" since arrival and we seriously splurged! We went to a family run Pizza place the Nurmburg since we heard they make good pie. We were greeted VERY warmly and encouraged to use or broken but becoming functional Mandarin to order. Since the place was quite small the entire family was listening to our conversation, this was strange as we are largely ignored when we speak here. SO just to be awesome we switched to French! We had a very long and somewhat stumbly conversation but it was a lot of fun and the family quickly lost interest in us. So for the grand total of 22 Canadian dollars we had 2 appies, 2 gimlets (with REAL ICE) and a large veggie pizza! Not bad!

After dinner we wandered around and got the other food stuffs we needed! We also picked up some posters we had made for our house. We blew up 3 pictures from previous trips which are now up on our walls making our house feel much less like an asylum.

Then we wandered over to the "Robson Street" market, so named because Vancouver is the sister city of Dalian. You can buy pretty much ANY accessory there as well as many t-shirt with sayings like "don't worry Micky is always behind you" and poorly spelled lyrics of Beatles songs. There you can also buy animal in the smallest cages you have ever seen. the bunnies look like little puff balls and they stand on wire cages. We kinda want to buy them all and set them free in a park or something but as UVic students we know how that turns out!

So being fed up with the animal cruelty we walked quickly away from the market only to bump into a dance troop performing in costume with a band. Paul thinks that the story they were performing is a Chinese fairy tale about a pig farmer who wants to marry a princess and she is saved by a traveling monk and his disciple. It was really awesome to just stumble upon it! At one point a man in the group tired to give his fan to Kristen and make her join in but she politely refused and we left soon after that~!

 The costumes were very colourful and they had bejewelled just about everything!

The Band

Many of these performers where Men dresses as women, it seems to be a common thing here!

Here is a little taste of Chinese street theater