Beijing Hutong and Cricket Liu

One of the lunch stops on our tour included a luncheon prepared by and with a local resident of Beijing Hutong..this was really one of the highlights of the trip for me.  We were taken by cycle rickshaw through the narrow alleyways of Hutong to the house of Chicken Liu.
The house was one of many connected together within the heart of Hutong.  It consisted of an entry, kitchen, and two rooms (I couldn’t help but note that on the wall of one of the rooms as a flatscreen tv, in the other room someone noted two computers. )

There was no bathroom in the home, there are various public toilets here and throughout the Hutong.   Apparently, according to this Wikipedia article, the hutong are disappearing as communities, this is not surprising because it does not appear that they have the infrastructure to meet the needs of today’s modern society.  However this is a critical piece of China’s culture, history and society so I hope that some piece of this will be preserved.

Below are some of the pictures I took of Cricket Liu, his wife,their Hutong Home, and a Youtube video I found of him.




The Second and Third pictures show Cricket Liu and our interpreter for the lunch. She did a great job of telling his story!


The flatscreen tv in the first picture:



The cricket’s “home”


Cricket Liu’s wife in the kitchen preparing our meal..I am not sure if they had running water in the home or not:




Cricket Liu is quite an expressive story teller:


Our meal was ready and on the table waiting for us when we arrived:



Cricket Liu also had some very impressive looking grasshoppers:























Holding his cricket house:



He really loves his dog who he called a “movie star”





Cricket Liu:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfurk2-Q6AA

Visiting an Emperor’s Tomb

While in China we had the opportunity to stop at a Ming Tomb.  According to Wikipedia these are:

The Ming Dynasty Tombs (Chinese: 明十三陵; pinyin: Míng shísān líng; lit. Thirteen Tombs of the Ming Dynasty) are located some 50 kilometers due north of urban Beijing, in the People's Republic of China at a specially selected site. The site was chosen by the third Ming Dynasty emperor Yongle (1402–1424), who moved the capital of China from Nanjing to the present location of Beijing. He is credited with envisioning the layout of the ancient city of Beijing as well as a number of landmarks and monuments located therein. After the construction of the Imperial Palace (the Forbidden City) in 1420, the Yongle Emperor selected his burial site and created his own mausoleum. The Ming tombs of the 13 emperors of the Ming Dynasty were located on the southern slope of Tianshou Mountain (originally Mount Huangtu).’

This was one of my favorite stops on our tour. I feel that the pictures I took there better illustrate our experiences at the
Tombs.