For those of you who don’t know, this past weekend was one of China’s national holidays known as the Dragon Boat Festival or Duanwu Festival. I really don’t know much about it (well now I do because I looked it up on Wikipedia), but it gives most Chinese people a 3 day weekend and its a time to spend with your family, as are most holidays in China. This holiday in particular is famous for making and eating what is called a rice dumpling or zongzi in Chinese. I am not sure if we have these in the States, I’ve never seen them, but basically they are this pyramid shaped piece of rice which is wrapped in leaves and stuffed with a piece of meat, before being cooked. The flavors of the leaves, combined with the stuffed meat and some additional sauce make them pretty tasty. They kind of remind me of a tamale, it’s a Chinese version of a tamale. This kind of snack is part of a huge repertoire of street food that you can find on every corner throughout Shanghai.

JJ’s mother tried to teach me how to make them from scratch, which we would eventually eat for dinner on Sunday night. The process of making them is almost more like a craft than a cooking skill because its about folding the leaves in a certain way so that there are no holes for the uncooked rice to escape. Once the rice is filled and the pyramid shape is concocted, they are boiled or steamed. Finally when they are finished cooking, the leaves are taken off, just like the corn husk is taken off of a tamale, and the snack is ready to be eaten. As you can see from the pictures, the less string you have to use to protect the leaves from breaking, the better. If you are JJ’s mom, you never have to use string and if you are me, you always have to use string.

Prior to eating this dinner, it was incredibly rainy over the weekend. I mean, ridiculously poring outside. I have never seen rain coming down so hard. To top it off, I had made the intelligent decision to not bring an umbrella when we went outside, in the hope that the rain would not last very long (at that point it hadn’t even started raining). By the time we got out of the subway, it was raining so hard, there were crowds inside the subway station, waiting for the rain to calm down because it was even too hard to go outside with an umbrella (I was the only one stupid enough to not even have an umbrella. And to make matters worse, I had a t-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes on.)

We eventually made it outside (after buying two umbrellas) and after a couple of hours, the rain did calm a bit. I’ve never been outside in the rain and actually feel like the weather was a safety issue. There were flood puddles everywhere, cars were driving by and splashing everyone and the sounds of lightning every couple minutes did not help things either. The city was in kind of a mess for a couple of hours there. By the time Saturday was over and we got back to our house, my feet had been inside this wet and disgusting shoe for hours and hours. I did not realize my feet could age so quickly in such a short amount of time.