Sights of China #2

This was a delicious dish of chicken that is served on a lazy susan in the middle of the round table. There are probably 10 of us sitting around the table and as the serving dish comes around to you, you take what you would like and then the lazy susan is rotated to the next person. There is usually enough food on the lazy susan that there is a serving plate of food in front of each person and you just turn the table to get what you want to eat. Most of us had eaten our first round of this chicken before we looked at it closely. Then -- some lost their appetite. These are the famous dumplings. Depending on how they are cooked, they could be the "pot stickers" that we all love from Costco. There are many different fillings. The green one was in the shape of celery and was sweet -- a desert. The brown one looks like a walnut and it was also sweet. The others were filled with chicken, tofu, fish, bean paste, mutton, pork, vegetables. This is what Dad is blaming made him get diarrhea for a week. The truth is he probably already had the bug -- but these dumplings are the scapegoat and he will probably never eat another one. I liked most of them.
You know the dinner has come to an end when they bring out the watermelon. This fancy desert looked like a bird and was made with watermelon, cantalope, pineapple, pears, and tomatoes.
This is a moon cake for the mid-autumn holiday. They taste sort of like a fig newton with different fillings. Some had a funny tasting chocolate, but most were a fig or raisin or bean paste (nasty). I took this picture so you could see the elaborate packaging. It even had a matching tote bag to carry it home.
For our Pomegranate Festival appearance for the newspapers, we were given this very decorative and fancy box with 6 huge pomegranates.

These pictures are of the flowers. This first picture also has the Tai Chi people. All of these pictures were taken from a moving bus. When we buy our flowers, we transplant them into the ground from the pot that we buy them in. Here, they raise the beautiful flowers in the pot and then they just move the pots wherever they want to create their pretty flower designs. Even the pillers are potted plants stuck in sideways. The picture with the gate is the main entrance to XISU old campus and they always do something creative with the flowers. The smart thing is they can rearrange their flowers any time they want.

The students hang their bedding on the bushes, posts, tree limbs and hang ropes between the trees to air them out. The three pictures were taken from the same spot - just different angles.