Zhou Zhuang - Trip #2 (Hang Zhou was #1)

Last weekend, Tiffany and I visited the old water town of Zhou Zhuang. We were joined by our friends Tara, Kevin and CeeCee, from Abroad China.

I’m not sure how C.C. spells her name, but it’s a very popular name for Chinese girls. I just saw a Cici yesterday, in fact, at Starbucks. Her coworker was guy named Joy, which added a nice touch to the rest of the Christmas decorations in the store… Anyway, similar to Hang Zhou, Zhou Zhuang offered a pleasant respite from the everyday hustle and bustle of Shanghai. The town is known for a few waterways that flow through the town, and some sort of glazed pork thing.

I really have no idea from which part of the pig it came, nor was I particularly interested in finding out (and if I wasn’t interested, imagine how Tiffany felt!).

I’ll let you be the judge.

We enjoyed a boat ride through town, and tried our hand at rowing the boat. Once again, Tiffany proved herself too tall for China!

And apparently the water is clean enough for laundry…

There were a few museums that we breezed through, until we spotted this boldly labeled historical item. This was good for a laugh at least.

We had a nice lunch where Tiffany got to enact her own little version of “Finding Nemo”. Don’t look kids!

We found some bigger fish pieces hanging from string on a piece of plywood. We figure it's some type of Chinese 'fish jerky'. YUM!
In the town center was a performing arts center where we caught a bit of opera. I think all the parts (including this one) were performed by men. This was followed by a musical duo that sort of sounded like Chinese country music? Interestingly, both the opera and musicians were accompanied by subtitles, which ran down an electronic board sitting on either side of the stage. Because Chinese is a tonal language, I’ve been told that it’s extremely difficult to sing. Typically, a singer alters the sound of a word to match the melody of the song. This is no problem in English, because the same word still comes out. In Chinese, however, this completely changes the word. So they require subtitles! Apparently, when new songs are heard on the radio, kids will learn the sounds and sing along, but won’t really know what they’re singing until the album comes out and they can read the lyrics on the album jacket!

This probably explains all the expat bars we’ve seen with dead-on covers of English music by local Chinese. They might not know what they’re saying, but with the practiced ear of a tonal language speaker, they can easily learn how to replicate the sounds!


So that was last weekend. This weekend consisted of a celebratory fabric market binge (Tiffany will need to wear a suit at her new job), and a birthday dinner for Sophia, the “little factory girl” that lives out in Hang Zhou.

We also learned "la duzi", which literally means "pull stomach", and is translated as "suffers diarrhea". We've been throwing that term around a lot this week, much to the embarrassment of our Chinese friends...

Oh, and Christmas decorations are going up in Shanghai, so we’ll put those pics up soon! p.s. sorry for the mess; Tiffany is much better at putting up pictures than me!