Mahjong and Rabbit's Brain

Picture of Hot Pot...best one I could find

Can you guess what these two things have in common?  I will give you a hint, one of them I ate and the other I played!  Today has definitely been a day of firsts.  This afternoon I went to my friend Jeannette's host family's house and played Mahjong with her host mom and sister.  Stephanie (my host sister) went with me but does not know how to play mahjong because her mother told her that children should not know how.  I think its sort of equivalent to poker, because many people bet on mahjong when they play it.  So I learned how! It was quite difficult because some of the pieces have the numbers written in Chinese and I kept forgetting what each of them meant.  I need a little cheat sheet when I get home.  We played like 10 games and finally on our last round I won!  It was quite fun.  I will hopefully be good enough when I get home to teach everyone else how to play. 

After mahjong the four of us (Jeannette, Stephanie and Jeanette's host sister Elva) went shopping at the Japanese mall again.  At one store I tried on a traditional chinese dress.  It was hard to walk in.  Also at the mall I got some Dairy Queen!!! I was quite excited.  I got an oreo blizzard.  But sadly...like the milk here it tasted sort of funny.  But it was still better than nothing.  

From the mall, we took a taxi ride back to our apartment complex and ate dinner at a restaurant outside of it.  For dinner, as I said yesterday we had Hot Pot! I will try to give a clear explanation of what hot pot is.  Also look at the picture to get a better understanding.  Hot pot is a very famous type of food here, and there are hot pot restaurants all over the city.  At a hot pot restaurant you sit at a table that has a huge hole in the middle.  The waiter then brings out this huge pot and sets it in the middle of the table. They then turn on the pot and it makes the liquid in the pot start to boil.  The name hot pot has two meanings.  One, the pot and liquid inside of the pot is very temperature hot.  But the liquid is also extremely spicy hot.  Usually there are a lot of spices and peppers that make the food very hot.  Luckily for me, they can put another little pot inside of the big pot that does not have all the really spicy peppers.  Once the water liquid is boiling they bring out all the meats.  The meat comes out raw because you then get to put it into the pot and cook it. There are all types of different kinds of meats that you can order.  We had regular beef, spicy beef and also some mutton.  Those were the most normal.  Then we had cow stomach and best yet...rabbit brain.  When they brought that out I thought Jeannette and I were going to faint.  It looked just as I imagined brain would look like.  We also had little bird eggs and noodles that were good.  After you get the meat out of the pot you then dip it into a bowl of sauce.  Our sauce had garlic, parsley and sesame oil in it.  So my little host mother put everything in my bowl except for the brain, i think she saw Jeannette's and mine faces to know that we were a little disgusted.  But, being the brave people we both are, we decided that we wanted to try it and each had a very small bite.  It tasted really just about what it looks like.  We cooked it first of course but it was very very soft and squishy.  I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it, but no words are really coming to me.  I did get a little nauseous when I tried it, but can now proudly say I had rabbit's brain.  I'll put that onto my list of strange things with the cow intestine's from Kenya.  The cow's stomach I ate tonight I can put on there too.  Dessert though was the best part of the meal.  We had these little fried tortilla looking things that were a little sweet.  It was a great way to end, the very strange meal.  Well, that is about it for today.  Look for the Week 2 video tomorrow morning!  And of course...comments are greatly wanted!!!