Xita!

Way back when in DC I took language classes with Mike. It was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of learning (attempting, cough cough) Mandarin. Once we got to China, Mike and I had a tutor two afternoons a week. But then it got to be winter, and I was tired of spending two hours in transit to and from the consulate for a one hour lesson two days a week, so I left Mike to his own devices and teamed up with Donal to have joint lessons closer to home. And that sort of devolved from actual lessons with actual learning of words to adventures around the city with teacher in tow (Amy is very patient with us). I may not be expanding my vocabulary much but I've seen a lot more of Shenyang than before and I know some useful things now, like where to buy a train ticket and the history of Zhongshan Park. And this week we went to Xita!

Xita (pronounced shee-tah) is Shenyang's Koreatown. Or street. It's basically a couple of streets, but it's packed full of Korean markets and barbeque restaurants and Korean people, and it's very interesting. And I actually took pictures, so we will narrate this adventure with photos.

This is the gigantic drum/tower/sign marking the beginning of Xita Street. 

So the first night we were in Shenyang two of Mike's coworkers took us out to dinner in Xita. We took a cab to Xita, but there was some confusion over where the restaurant was, so we took another cab while Luke and Jonathan tried to figure it out, and after 15 minutes of driving in circles around Xita, got dropped off EXACTLY WHERE WE WERE PICKED UP. I'm pretty sure we made that cab driver's night. This is the restaurant we were aiming for--literally 30 feet from where we were dropped off the first (and second!) time. It was very good. I want to go back, but without the scenic tour.

This is the Korean food street market where you can get every Korean ingredient under the sun. Kimchee for daaaaaayyyyyss.

Dried fishes and peppers and, uh, I honestly have no idea. There were all kinds of dried and packaged goods. I saw fish of all shapes and sizes, cut and dried veggies, fresh greens, medicinal roots, some really terrifying sausage, SO much kimchee, and bags and bags of chili powders.

There were stands like this all over the place, with pots of endless varieties of pepper pastes. Even the air was spicy.

In one of those weird quirks of language, the word "xita" actually has nothing to do with Korea or Koreans. The Korean district takes it's name from a nearby temple-- Xita literally means "west tower". Shenyang has four towers (or possibly temples, I'm a little fuzzy on the details)--east, west, north, and south--but the west tower is the most famous and well-kept. Amy said that many older cities have four towers like that. The towers were supposed to help keep the city stable and grounded. The Xita tower is a small collection of Buddhist temples and open to the public. I loved it. It's the prettiest thing I've seen in Shenyang, and so peaceful and serene.

The actual tower. At the base there is a trough of earth where you can plant your taper of incense and pray.

Part of the temple complex.

Detail of the temple decoration. It's so gloriously bright!

There were stones like this in front of each building. I'm not sure what they are for, but I do love the lotus blossom.

Temple complex. This is behind the big white tower.

Shrine? I don't know. I wish I did.

This is a sign on the main temple building. I wish I could read. 

Inside the main building they had three statues like this along with lots of saffron cushions to kneel on.

Bougainvillea! A little taste of home. Except less...large and viciously spiky.

Amy said that in the olden days all the large temples had bells like this one on their eaves, which must have been something to hear when the wind blew.

The tower again.

This was over the entrance to the complex. Beautiful artwork EVERYWHERE. 

A++, would recommend another visit. Especially if you can get there on the first try.

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words

Which is good, because I don't feel like spouting out that much nonsense. So have lots of pictures!

(I finally figured out how to get lots of pictures off my phone at once. Go me! Figuring out your phone is a lot harder when half of it is in Chinese.)

A January selfie in front of the Mao statue near the hotel. Apparently it's one of the biggest in China.

Sidewalk snowman!

There's a street that is kind of Shenyang's gentrified Japanese neighborhood that has all kinds of these
statues along it, which are very startling when you walk past them at night and
catch them out of the corner of your eye.

My very favorite sidewalk snowman

Tire art? Saw this while walking to IKEA. 

Where do you even keep a donkey in Shenyang? I saw this fellow on a downtown street corner on the way
to the consulate. I think he and his person were selling sweet potatoes.

These ladies were performing in a mall, playing (so Google informs me) the guzheng, or Chinese zither.
It was really cool and I thought I took a video but apparently I only took a picture. Boo. 

The random public art installations never cease to amuse. Attack of the mutant giraffes?
This was outside the mall with the zither players.

P.S.- I do appreciate any and all comments, and I want to respond to them, but I don't know how. :( Does anyone know how to do such a thing?

In which grocery shopping is an Adventure

Since moving to China I'm fairly convinced that I spend most of my time going grocery shopping. This is a far cry from living in DC, where I spent little time grocery shopping and all of it was across the street at Costco. Technically I think I actually live closer to the grocery store now, since there's basically a supermarket on the ground floor of the building--I don't even have to go outside!--but alas, it is not Costco (even if I sometimes find products from Costco hugely marked up at the import store there). The thing is, what would be one trip to the store in the States is usually four or five trips here. And all these trips are constrained by how much you can carry home in your bags before your spine telescopes. So instead of going to the supermarket and loading all my various purchases into the car, shopping is much like a choose your own adventure novel:

If you want produce, take the staff elevators down to Happy Family (yes that is the name of the store). That will let you out in the elevator lobby, which leads into a back entrance to the jewelry department that takes up the front third of the ground floor. I always think that door should be marked "Employees only" but no one has yet stopped the crazy white girl from wandering through, so I continue to use it. The produce area is set up kind of like it would be in an American store, but instead of having a checkout area at the front of the store, there are registers all over. So you bag the veggies of your choice (as one helpful old lady pantomimed to me the first time I went shopping there--I couldn't find the little baggies and so was just wandering around with an armful of loose cucumbers and broccoli) and take them to the register to be weighed and paid for. Then you repeat with your fruit. And your other fruit. There's some sort of arcane system of which registers you have to go to to pay for which kind of fruit, but I haven't figured it out yet. Usually there's lots of pointing and kind but unintelligible directions. This adventure applies to all produce except for potatoes, which are inexplicably the least happy part of Happy Family. For potatoes, go to Walmart.

Happy Family veggie stand.

If you want eggs, go deeper into Happy Family. At the egg counter you can get several varieties, including (I think) quail and goose. Chicken eggs come in various numbers and levels of expensiveness, but I stick to the cheap flats of loose eggs where you pick them out one by one and place them very carefully in a little plastic baggie. I do this because A) cheap, B) I can get uniformly large eggs for baking, and C) I like to live dangerously. Once you have your bag of eggs, you get to try and find the proper register, which is even more confusing than the fruit one. Sometimes you pay by the eggs. Sometimes you pay in the seafood area. Sometimes you pay in the beef area. Most confusingly, sometimes the register attendant will weigh your bag of eggs and send you off with a printed barcode sticker stuck to your finger to a different register so you can pay there and then go back to the original spot and collect your bag of eggs that you then have to carry gingerly back home.

If you want some basic staples like flour, rice, oil, and instant ramen, you can go to a few places, but I generally choose the little convenience store-like place inside Happy Family, where you can get all of the above, plus boxed milk, Kinder Eggs, thirty million types of indecipherable snack foods, and an entire shelf of things like prepackaged lotus root, chicken feet, and MSG.

If you want meat, I guess you could go to Happy Family or the like and get it, but I've never been brave enough. Meat is generally just set out in chunks in open cases--no nice portions, no plastic wrapped trays. Just lumps of meat that everyone (and probably their dogs) pokes through with bare hands. Yech. Instead, I opt for the halal market, which I think has much better meat, but involves careful planning, a buddy, a bus ride, actually having to communicate in Mandarin, and generally clearing out the entire stock of chicken breasts from one specific lady's stall. Meat buying days are always an Adventure, and generally only happen once a month.

If you want things like tortilla chips or butter, generally you have to go to fancy import stores like Metro or Ole. These both involve public transport or mooching a ride off a friend. They also involve trying really hard not to think about how much you're spending on a bag of tortilla chips. Six dollars a bag. Gah. The things I do for nachos.

If you want a mildly out-of-body experience (or potatoes), go to Walmart. A Chinese Walmart is a weird amalgamation of a standard Chinese store and an American Walmart. They smell the same, is the strangest thing. The first time I walked in to the Walmart here I was expecting the crappy florescent lighting and the long lines at the three open registers, but I was not expecting to inhale and have my scent memory go "Yep, Walmart." It's deeply weird. But hey, at Walmart I can get basic cheddar cheese and frozen corn and sometimes those are very important necessities.

Checking out at Walmart. The little shelves by the registers have things like gum, chocolate, and oddly, condoms.