Row, Row, Row Your Boat...

Gently down the stream.... :)

This is the story of five girlfriends in Zhouzhuang (周莊), the "Venice of China".

Two weekends ago, Jess came up with the idea to drive to Zhouzhuang, which is a "water town" (水鄉 shui3xiang1) near Suzhou and just 1.5 hours away from Shanghai. Zhouzhuang is a very famous "AAAAA Grade" tourist attraction that is known for its maze of canals, which wind through this rustic and quaint little town. Our friend Lu was in Shanghai on a business trip and we all haven't seen each other in quite some time, so we all said why not?! It was something new and much more fun than catching up over the usual mani/pedi session, hahaha. 

Quite honestly I wasn't expecting Zhouzhuang to be that nice since most tourist areas in China are horribly jam-packed with people on the weekends (straight from a claustrophobic's worst nightmare)... but boy was I in for a pleasant surprise! The weather had turned slightly chilly and it had rained the day before, so we had most of the town to ourselves. Let your imagination run wild jumping across the rooftops like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon... :) 我想成為小飛俠！

四位又美麗又厲害的姑娘。

Karen, Lu, Jess, and Tina.

Zhouzhuang is famous for its 蹄髈 (ti2pang2) dish, which is pig hooves. Sounds gross, but you're not eating the pads, instead mostly the calves/ankles. It's packed with flavor and simply divine when paired with a nice fluffy bowl of white rice. It's also supposedly good for your skin b/c of the gelatin, so Chinese women are especially wiling to gobble it down to achieve boingboing skin texture.

Local handmade sweets.

I brought a bunch of the sesame candies (the ones in the pan) back home for my Mom. Back in the day they didn't have Sour Patch Kids or M&Ms or ice cream... I don't know if I would have been such a sweet tooth if I were born in that era. :p Not the biggest fan of ol skool Chinese candies.

Everyone loves babies!

Zhouzhuang and the surrounding water towns were traditionally fishing villages before they became commercialized for tourism. We were told that entire households used to live, sleep, and work on their boats, the same size as the ones that brought us through the canal tours. Yikes, that sounds like a hard knock life. I can understand why they appreciated Communist government intervention.

Then of course we had to go a canal tour, which was FABULOUS. The town is so beautiful and it's quite romantic to be floating down the stream flanked by rows of adorable houses, ducking in and out of mini stone bridges that have stood for hundreds of years. We also asked our lady boat captain to sing us several folksongs. LIKE.

And what boat trip would be complete if the Pirate Captain were not at the helm? ;)

I am so giddy here, such a dork.

Ok Jess you can try too.

I do need to train a First Mate. HAHA.

OK, I'm totally on Team Jess if we have another Cultural Revolution.

Costco-sized rice wine (黃酒 huang2jiu3).

SO YUMMY. I bought a jar back for Gramps, hope he likes it as much as I do. I'd trade rice wine for ol skool Chinese candies any day.

Since we were already out in Jiangsu Province, we drove out to Yangcheng Lake (陽澄湖) to feast on hairy crabs (大閘蟹 da4zha2xie4)! Okay so you're thinking -- what the hell are hairy crabs. The name is self-explanatory -- they're crabs that have these weird little tufts of hair on their claws. And just so you know, hairy crabs are a pretty fuckin big deal in China. People here go nuts over them, like they probably demolish millions of hairy crab each season (around October). One of my friends even ate 23 of them in one sitting, but had to be sent to the hospital shortly after. That's what I mean, it's a crustacean craze because apparently their meat is sweet and they have lots of yummy innards to slurp on. It's good, but I give it a 7.0 out of 10 because I'm an American who cannot appreciate such fine things in life. And I don't really like stuff like crabs and shrimp to begin with for weird personal reasons.

So in Yangcheng Lake they have these restaurants along the water that farm their own hairy crabs. We got to go take a look at the goods before their hot fiery death.

This one was my victim.

Crabs look like aliens, so I gave it a hat.