VIP for a day

Today I went on my first outing with other gainfully unemployed women in Suzhou and the odd spouse or two. We went to Lily Island which is in the middle of Yangcheng Lake. Yangcheng Lake is a big lake that is just to the east of us. We can actually see it from our apartment and the street we live on is called Yangcheng Lake Road. It's famous because every year in September and October the "hairy crab" makes it's migration through the lake and it's a very popular local food. Unfortunately I'm allergic to crab so we won't be having any.



Getting back to the trip: Apparently this island has never had so many Western tourists as they did yesterday and the woman who helped organize things at the Suzhou tourist office alerted the media. We became celebrities, the VIP guests, and had our own paparazzi following us, as we "fished" for what are called water chestnuts and made zhongzi (pronounced jongse). So these water chestnuts grow on the underside of this plant in the lake. We were forced to wear these awful fluorescent orange life jackets, because it would be awful if the VIP westerners fell overboard! We were divided into these small fishing boats and then taken out onto the lake. You pick the plant out of the water and then pluck the pod holding the nut off. You then cook the pod, shell it and then eat the nut inside. The nut is similar to a water chestnut hence its English name, but isn't exactly the same.





Then we were taken back to the island where we made zhongzi. This involves taking bamboo leaves and folding them in a way to fill it with uncooked sticky rice. The trick is to fold it tightly enough so the rice doesn't start falling out at the corners. Once you have filled the cavity you have made, you then fold the leaves down and tie it with rope. These then get cooked for something like 7 hours. When they're finished you unwrap the very sticky rice from the bamboo leaves and just eat the rice. It's actually quite good. While we didn't eat our own, they had made some for us. At this point the media decided they had had enough and stopped following us around. They had tried to interview a bunch of us, but they were a bit disappointed when out of a group of 45, maybe 2 of us spoke enough Chinese to converse with. They'll be airing it on the local Chinese news station for the next few days, so we're going to try and go to a friends house to watch it because we don't have TV. It was quite bizarre to have all those video cameras and reporters following us around.