The Racine's in China: China

During the Spring Festival, Chinese New Year, we traveled to XiTang, which is about 2 hours outside of Shanghai. Our driver, Richard, and his wife, Jessica, asked if we would like to go and we thought it would be fun. XiTang is an old water town, similar to Venus - all waterways and no roads for cars. Actually there are a lot of Water towns around Shanghai. They filmed part of Mission Impossible 3 in XiTang, although in the film they called it Shanghai.

Billboard showing that Mission Impossible 3 was filmed here.

When we arrived in XiTang we had to park outside the city and walk to our hotel with our suitcases. The hotel was a very typical Chinese style hotel. We were very grateful that they had western toilets!

Outside our hotel. We had to walk down 3 alleyways to get to
it!

This was to be Randy's and my room, but Jennifer and Daniel found
a spider in their room and refused to sleep in there. So the two of them
slept with me in this bed and Randy slept in the other room.
Yes all three of us slept in this bed

This was the bathroom/shower. Daniel is standing
at sink. Over his head, just behind him, is the
shower head. The whole room was the shower.
We could not figure out how you take a shower
without getting the whole room wet. It was also
so cold that we decided we could skip one day!

The bed Randy slept in. He could not figure out why the room was
so cold (or colder than our room). In the morning he looked near the
window and saw a big hole to the outside!

This is the bed. Can you tell from Jennifer's reaction to it!
See the white material she is holding? That is the mattress, placed
on top of the wood. My back killed for a week after! The funny
thing is, the Chinesebelieve this is good for you. HOW???

We walked into the "lobby", which consisted of a couch and a couple of wooden chairs and a coffee table tucked under the stairs. They had a large barbecue type bowl where the owners sat around a fire to keep warm.

This is the "lobby" of the hotel. That is the owner preparing us tea.
Notice that he is sitting in his coat. This is normal inside houses!
The fire, which you can not see in this picture, is to the bottom
right - just under the table.

The town is very old and has many, many shops along the walkways. There are also a lot of bridges over the waterways.

Daniel and Jennifer standing near an
alleyway. Most of the walkways are like this.

Daniel and Richard showing how small the
walkway is!

The view from one of the bridges.

As you can see, this town was packed
with people.

One of the many bridges to get from one side to the other.

This area has many bars. Can you tell that it is cold - the
guy in blue is Randy. He is all bundled up! It was way too cold
drink, we had a lot of tea!

Across the way they were performing a Chinese Opera.

Many people take these boats to tour the town. It is not a very long
ride, but it interesting to do! We rode them when it was dark.

The town is lit by lanterns in the evening.

Very pretty when everything was lit up.

There are many interesting types of little shops, which have a variety of interesting food and souvenirs. We watched a man making mugs out of bamboo. We tried local candy made with various seeds and nuts. Richard bought a bowl of warm tofu soup for us to try. Although tofu is very popular here in China, I have to say that it is not my favorite.

A woman making a taffy type candy.

Jessica with a piece of the taffy type candy. We all tried it. It is
sweet, but it tastes different from taffy.

Typical type stand in this town. The boxes have a type of bean that
is being heated.

Drying meat hung out along the walkway.

A type of fruit and vegetable drying along the walkway.

Another stand with food. The front pile is snails, the others are a
type of meat on a stick.

Chickens drying along the walkway.

Types of dumplings. Richard says they look good but do not
taste good!

This is how we got our plates and cups, then we had to take the
hot tea that they gave us and rinse everything!

This was part of one of our dinners one night.
These are snails. To eat them you take a this
cover off the opening, then suck the snail out,
but only eat the head! It was very spicy and I could
only manage one! The fish in the background, though,
was very good. We also had some wonderful
vegetables and other things. The snails are just something
that is a specialty of this town. For breakfast, we had
traditional dumpling soup and rice wrapped in
bamboo.

These are a fruit snack. The fruit is dipped in some kind of clear gel.
We did not try these, but I think they are sweet.

These are different kinds of Kabobs you can get. They grill
them for you. The one on the far left is squid on a stick!

A food stand with beans and not sure what the black stuff is

They are making Chinese style pizza in the silver round ovens. It was
tasty.

It was very cold walking along the water. We ate at local restaraunts. I think I have mentioned before that most Chinese eat with their coats on even in their own homes. I thought we could warm up in the restaurant, I am not sure what I was thinking! Doors were kept open and we ate with our coats on. We were very glad that Richard and Jessica were with us, because the menus did not have pictures or pinying (Chinese words written in English letters). We would not have been able to figure out what to eat!

This is a picture of a restaurant upstairs. People are eating outside.
It was in the 20's!

At night time they lit lanterns along the walkways. It is very pretty to see. On the 15th day of Chinese New Year is the Lantern Festival. At night they sold lanterns made out of paper. You could buy them and place them in the water and make a wish as you set them in the water. They lasted about 5 minutes before a man in a boat came along and scooped them out!