Hankou NYE

Cathy and I planned to go to Shanghai for New Years Eve.  But her being a councilor meant that she had to work on our January 2nd day-off.  Instead, we opted to go to Hankou to hang out with some colleagues.

We started off by taking the bus to Wuhan Square, a big mall complex in Hankou. We had dinner with another counselor from the school.  I had the "American potato" appie (aka: fries) and lamb chops with red wine sauce.  Yum.

After dinner, we went to a DVD store with a massive English title collection.  It was pretty awesome.  The store front looked a lot like HMV, but on closer inspection (and through a questionably dangerous back-store hallway), there were tons of DVD and bluerays...every conceivable English movie and TV series and some Korean, French and Japanese movies too.  Needless to say, we stayed there for a while just browsing the stacks.

We wanted to get to Hankou's river front area to see some fireworks, but it was way too crowded.  Our taxi got us within 5 blocks of the river, but then stopped dead in its tracks because of the legions of people and cars.  We walked the rest of the way. The walk took a long time because we were baby-stepping it the whole way due to the wall of people and motorcycles in front of us. We met up with some more friends.

From there, we took the ferry across Chang Jiang (The Yangzi River) back into Wuchang. Walked around Simakou Food Street and had some xiao chi. One place we stopped had chou tofu...stinky tofu.  Cathy was into it.  The sign above the kiosk read "The cook's great grandfather served chou tofu to Mao Zedong here."  Apparently, on any regular day, the place would have a massive lineup, but on NYE it was surprisingly short.  I downed some of Cathy's.  Chou tofu from other kiosks smelled like week old sour milk, but Cathy's choice wasn't so bad.  No wonder the Chairman chose this place to eat!