Daddy's Cafeteria

I am grateful for the time that I got to spend in China- a week in Dinghai where Mary teaches bookended by short stints in Shanghai. I spend most of my first three days there inside, reading and watching movies. But in the evenings, Mary and her roommate Tyler would come home from work and we went to the market to buy food for dinner. The butcher was my favorite part, a wizened old woman who hacked at the pork with an axe. At the edge of her cutting board was a tray of kidneys, uncovered, and people passing by would shuffle through them idly.

One day Mary took me to her school Zhoushan Zhong Xue to eat lunch. The food was mediocre, but I learned how to say one important thing- naga shi baba da shi tong (this is Daddy's cafeteria).

Travelling the streets of Dinghai was my favorite part of the day. All manner of bicycles, rickshaws, mopeds, and various crossbreeds choke the road. Anyone changing lanes or anyone who witnesses someone changing lanes rings their bell furiously and the street is filled with a tinny chatter. At every stop light the bicycles line up so that I was reminded of my time as a skier in a mass start.

Another curious part of life is that every night in the city square, maybe 1000 people gather to dance in unison. Mary and I went one night to watch. One man working a pushcart full of speakers plays the music and somehow everyone seems to know the moves to song after song. I wondered how everyone came to know these dances until I saw at the preschool near Mary's apartment about 150 four year olds doing a similar morning workout. On Friday at Mary's school they had a day off for a school-wide track and field event. At the opening ceremonies many groups of several hundred students put on dances. It's a lifetime thing apparently.