The Lotus Festival?

        So last Friday, September 14th, a relatively small group of SIAS teachers loaded up on a bus headed to HuaiYang for the Lotus Festival...or so we thought.  During the Lotus Festival pilgrims from all over China go to this town, where Emperor Fu Xi died, to pay their respects.  Each day of the festival the mausoleum recieves anywhere from 200,000 people to 400,000 people.  So, obviously we were expecting that.

This is the 'Tiger' they gave us.

        We pulled into town and drove to the 'tourist area' where we were greeted with small stuffed tigers, a brochure about HuaiYang, and yes, video cameras.  Professional looking video equipment and an entourage of Chinese onlookers.  My guess is that they were making some kind of promotional piece with the gist of 'look at all these foreigners that come here, you should come too!'.  The camera guy followed us around the entire tour of the mausoleum.  

       The tour of the mausoleum was actually kind of cool.  It turns out that the Chinese view Fu Xi as the beginning of the Chinese.  He was compared to Adam in the Garden of Eden.

        Oh I almost forgot to mention, we were practically the only ones in there!  Not because we were special.  Not because they were filming us.  It was mainly because the Lotus Festival happened over a month ago!  Anyways...the tour is beginning to come to an end an we're starting to get hungry.  As we are leaving the mausoleum I'm starting to get excited about lunch because it's going to be one of those big, over the top, Chinese lunches where you get to see all kinds of strange different foods.

There's something fishy about this...

        Well, I was right about the different foods.  The town of HuaiYang is obviously famous for its lotus.  Lotus grows in water -lakes- fish live in lakes, therefore the town eats a lot of fish.  We had fried tiny whole fish...like sardine looking but fried.  A couple of fish soups.  Some lotus, of course.  And many other dishes that I didn't know what they were.  But the one that caught my eye as well as everyone else's was the main fish dish.  It was a fairly large fish, cut down the middle, then spread apart on either side, sliced up, with the head as a nice trophy staring back at you.  Now, don't get me wrong, I've had fish with its head still on before, here in China as well as in Mexico.  This one just had something about it that looked different.

Yep...even Spongebob is red in China

After lunch we got back on the bus and headed for what we thought was going to be a boat ride in the lake to see all the lotus up close and personal.  However, we were wrong.  We stopped at some lakeside docks that were surrounded by lotus.  This was actually the best part of the trip.  We saw a red Spongebob, several women in wedding dresses getting their photos taken, and we saw lots of lotus.  However...we only stayed there for about fifteen minutes!  They were anxious to get us back to SIAS I suppose, so we boarded the bus again and drove home.  All in all it was a good day.

Some lovely lotus

I like signs like this for some reason