In the Cup of Tea

Spending this late Monday evening with Shawna in a very comfy tea house off of 湖南路 drinking a bottomless cup of "Invigorate the kidney to maintain the skin" tea, I wrote a 643-character essay in Chinese about Nanjing people's perspectives on local housing. We were here a few nights ago eating snacks and drinking tea for hours, enjoying the atmosphere as little packs of business men filed in with flushed cheeks to end their work day with a cup of tea and a game. Opposite us sat two very focused, very well-postured men playing Chinese checkers, while another friend of theirs, a penguin-looking guy came barging in, and found himself quite uninterested in his friends' quiet affairs. He sat and occasionally poured them tea, and seemed to call every single person in his cell phone to yell in completely incomprehensible Nanjing dialect. He would cover his mouth at times to be quieter, but yell even louder into the phone to make up for the muffling effect his hand over the receiver made. I like this tea house a lot.
The other say Shawna and I went to an older, more run-down area of Nanjing that was right beside the big huge commercial district of Xinjiekou (新街口). Here we wandered through a narrow street full of food stalls and various other abodes/shops. We stopped in at an underground "fresh" food market where we were amply greeted by by far the worst smells I have ever experienced. Here they sold everything from live, de-shelled turtles to ducks and geese and chickens and pigeons in cages next to stacks of their butchered fellow inmates, they had fruits and vegetables abound, and tons of pork cuts and other seafood, live or dead including eels and shrimp and random no-name fish. Once we had re-emerged from the marketplace out into daylight once again we meandered some more through the same area as before, passing along the way a very out-of-place dentist office in the middle of this mess.