Clarks: 3-Day Valentine [part one]

Today is the 12th of February. Valentine's Day has not officially arrived yet, but in the Clark household celebrations are already well under way.

China has really taken to celebrating V-Day in the past several years, always packing out every nice restaurant in town, buying flowers and candy galore, really "romancing the stone" -- whatever that means. So we knew already that if we were going to have what we would consider a romantic holiday we better do so on some other day besides the 14th (which is a Saturday this year, which only makes things worse).

The romance bloomed early for us this year, the 10th was the first day of our (so far?) three days of sweetness: Having been intrigued by the historic charm of Liu Xia Village on the night of Lantern Festival, we decided to return the next day and look around. Liu Xia turns out to be quite an interesting little place. It's just beyond the edge of anything you'd really call "Hangzhou, proper," about half-way between our house and the Hardins. We go past there every time on our way to school, but from the street it just looks like a dull and dusty out-skirts town, so we'd certainly never thought to go poking around and exploring there. But when we did, we found a number of interesting sights. First thing you notice is the old bridges over the canal. Stone-engraved signs indicate that some of these are hundreds of years old. Each one is different, having been built one-by-one down through the years as more people demanded more convenient crossings. Also in town are some old (and some renovated) buildings with typical Chinese-style wooden railings, pitched-edge tile roofs, and small quarter-framed windows. One building we found was even made of rice and mud! It's not unusual for the Chinese to have built houses and walls of mud and pounded glutenous rice flour, with bits of straw and broken pottery mashed into the mix; it is surprising, though, to actually get to see that sort of thing in 2009, since most of those old buildings have been / are continually being knocked down. When the locals saw us wondering at and admiring the old-style architecture, they came up to us and explained the history, construction techniques, and enduring strength of the place, obviously glad to see someone taking interest. Finally, from there we went down the street and eventually into a grocery store to get a drink. It's a rather old-fashioned (that is, 80's-era) Chinese store, with all these cheap-looking little side stalls on your way in and out, each displaying either tacky or useless cheap goods in glass cases. But lo and behold, as we strolled past one of these relics from the past, something caught our eyes: a counter full of jade jewelry. Cecely was immediately drawn in; I was a bit more skeptical, but went ahead and looked at what they had. And there I saw this cute little red cord bracelet with a green jade rabbit and two orange "jade" (?) carrots. Cecely's Chinese zodiac sign is the rabbit, in case you're wondering, so it seemed like the perfect gift. "It can be for Valentine's," she said, and with that we made official what we hadn't yet realized -- "today is our Valentine date."

And now, it's about time to start our third day... I know I haven't even mentioned the 2nd one yet. I guess it will have to wait for another post. And of course, I also haven't told you about our evening with the egg lady's niece and and sister, or about last night's three-hour conversation all in Chinese with the bearded man, who turns out to be a composer, by the way.
Oh well, romance awaits us!