Yes, I am still sleeping on the bamboo bed but I am getting used to it and I have a softer pillow now so that's good. I'm staying in Anhui provice with a family I met years ago on a river tour of the Three Gorges. Their grade school son kept in touch via postcards, and here I am their house guests for a week. The Chinese people's desire to learn English can really serve you well. The family is well-off, with government ties and a very nice house by Chinese standards, and the bed I'm sleeping on is good quality, but their custom in the hot summer is to remove the mattress and sleep directly on a mat of bamboo tiles. Imagine a bunch of bamboo dominoes laced together into a grid, and then imagine sleeping on this wood-like material. Ouch.
The family just took me to a weekend at a family friend’s in the mountains. That was fun because three families were there and there was lots of laughing, eating, talking, mahjong etc. One night we played this game like hot potato but if you get the potato you have to sing or do some other performance. It's funny because in the USI would be pretty embarrassed to sing out loud, but here I've grown accustomed to it. The house was in a village on a hill and everyone was gawking at the city folk coming in, especially the foreigner. Food abounded, but none of it was too much to my liking. Snake soup of course--a staple here-- weird duck parts, pig meat wrapped in huge pieces of fat, and porcupine, only to name the specialties. Yesterday we made the left overs into dumplings for dinner and I had a good time perfecting my wrapping technique. You have to wrap different shapes depending on what the filling is so you can tell them apart.
