Foreign students sample delights of rural life
Print Edition
A group of Fudan University students from 15 countries recently took a day tour to Jinshan in outlying Shanghai to experience the Chinese countryside and meet a local colony of peasant artists who capture idyllic rural life in a painting genre that has made them famous around the world.
The trip was organized by Jinshan District Tourism Bureau and Shanghai Daily and included about 20 students.
While there, they sampled daily life as well as the local cuisine. They spent a morning learning how to make dumplings, helping harvest vegetables and tending baby goats.
Australian Thomas Howell was helping dig up sweet potatoes in a local garden when a small frog jumped onto him.
“Our meeting was brief but pleasant,” he said as he brushed the little critter off.
Howell said he was thrilled to be on a trip that got him “out of the concrete jungle” of daily life in Shanghai.
The students were treated to a lunch of rustic cuisine at a local farmhouse. There, they tried their hand at frying rice on a traditional cook stove in the open air. The rice, nicely crusted, was part of the lunch. It’s a specialty that can’t be duplicated with modern electric rice cookers.
Tóth Réka, who is from Hungary, told her companions, “I don’t know about you guys, but in Hungary, food made in the open always tastes better.”
Gazing at a vast field of grain to her right, she added, “Why aren’t we doing this every weekend?”
The group wrapped up their day-long outing by viewing the Upside-Down House (30 yuan) in Jinshan’s Fengjing Town. Opened in 2014, the attraction was built by five Polish architects, and, as its name suggests, is completely upside-down. The front door is the upstairs window of the two-story structure. It’s a great tourist stop for those who like to take quirky photos.
“I always thought Fudan was where Shanghai ended,” said Dutch student Sarah Coilders, who is working on a master’s degree in Chinese studies. “I did not expect to find such nice countryside so close to Shanghai.”
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