Strangers in a Strange Land, Day 3

Easter Sunday in China. It was a day of rest for us. The kids collected Easter eggs around the house, including some plastic ones filled with Hersey's and Reese's chocolates, a specific request from our hosts. We spent time at Pearl City, fending off vendors. Greg took us to his nearby video store, his source for an impressively large DVD collection. This being China, the provenance of the DVDs is questionable, of course. When we entered the store, things had changed. The entire store was all domestic Chinese products. The owner recognized Greg, though, and waved us back to an unmarked, nearly hidden open doorway. Through that doorway we found a small room crowded floor to ceiling with western DVDs. Some of them had Chinese markings added, but most were what you would see in the states. As I perused an impressive supply of TV series box sets, Cheryl found a mega-Disney collection: 133 disks, covering just about everything Disney has produced, plus a few it didn't. For a touch over $100, it was ours. No more will we need to worry that most of our Disney movies are on videotape.

To recover from the shopping ordeal, Cheryl and Kate went to get massages while the rest of us hung out at home. Late in the afternoon, we went out to explore the neighborhood. We toured a "wet market," which is like a semi-indoor farmer's market that includes meet with the usual vegetables and fruits. By "meat" I mean chickens, ducks and pigeons strutting in their pens, fish splashing in bowls on the floor or lying beheaded on the counters, crabs scuttling in their own enclosures, and big hunks of roughly butchered pork displayed on the chopping blocks. The Chinese do not understand how we put up with meat that has not been butchered on site; the idea of butchering the animal on site, on the other hand, is a custom that is no longer part of the typical American's experience.

We continued our international culinary tour with a stop at a French restaurant a couple of blocks away. Founded and run by a very charming Frenchman, the restaurant specialized in yogurt and crepes. The proprietor started the restaurant because he could not find food to his liking. He now makes his own foods, and imports fine French cheeses and chocolates. He personally served our food to us, showing us how to roll up and cut or crepes, which were excellent. Our crepes were excellent, and the atmosphere unique.

We closed the day watching a disk from our new Disney collection, exploring the very earliest Disney cartoons ("Steamboat Willie" and the like). The movie was interesting, but I was most interested in learning whether the disk even worked. Thankfully, and contrary to my doubts, it did.

We needed an easy day. Our plan for tomorrow was to go downtown and take on Shanghai for real.