|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hover over the green Chinese Pinyin and a brief definition will pop up; click on the word to see it's Glossary definition. |
|
| ||||||
|
| imagesshaoxing绍兴
The story behind the wine is that when a family has a daughter, the father will bury a bottle of Shaoxing wine in the ground. Later when the daughter grows up and is ready to get married, the father will dig up the wine and serve it at the daughter's wedding feast. The wine isn't very good; it tastes like sherry. It does serve well as an adequate substitute cooking wine if your recipe calls for sherry. Lu Xun, on the other hand, is a different story. He is a great writer. He wrote in the early 20th century and his stories and essays are pearls of wisdom. I have read, I believe, every essay and story he wrote that has been translated into English. After moving to Hangzhou, I was eager to visit Lu's old home in Shaoxing. In the winter of 2003, I had a chance to live in Shaoxing for a week while teaching at a winter English camp there. I visited Lu's old home, old neighborhood and old school. Some of his best known stories are set there so it was interesting seeing the places he wrote about. It's worth a short trip to Shaoxing if you are a Lu Xun fan. Otherwise, I found the city noisy (constant honking horns on every street), the people loud and rude (they particularly target western tourists-be careful in the taxis and sanlunche's), the food awful (Shaoxing's specialties are Stinky Tofu and something even more nasty called Mei Gan Cai). Here are some pictures from Lu Xun's neighborhood. Also, I included a couple of pictures of a massive traffic jam I got caught in one day there. I WAS RIDING IN A SANLUNCHE AND WE STILL COULDN'T MOVE. The driver and I literally had to pick up the sanlunche and carry it over to the sidewalk and then around the mélange of vehicles to get away. Lu Xun's 'hood
Shaoxing Traffic Jam
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
