We woke up quite early this particular morning, packed our bags and traveled the streets for some morning breakfast before embarking on our journey to visit family in rural, Changsha. A driver met us in the market and such began our three hour journey to the other side of the world (it felt like.) Our driver was quite the man. I felt like, during some parts of our trip, we were speeding along dirt paths at roughly 90 miles an hour. As one should know, there are no speed limits in rural China-you simply travel at the pace you wish to travel. 

I was told before landing at our destination that we were going to meet the extended family at a restaurant. Eventually, we landed at what looked to be an authentic, bamboo structure. Actually, it was quite beautiful. We walked inside and there were six huge rooms-each with a large lazy Suzan in the middle. The floors were cement and there were a few giant spiders that I noticed climbing up and down the walls while I ate. I prayed hard they weren't poisonous. One particular room was already set up with silverware, teacups, and large bowls of food. The first meal we had crawfish by the buckets, turtle soup, eel and eel skin and these bread biscuits that tasted a lot like sticky rice. The turle was admittingly chewy and tasted a bit like rubber. However, the crawfish tasted like small, baby lobsters. We dipped them in a dark, salty soy sauce. 

After our meal, we were taken on a speed boat ride, which was an incredibly cool experience. We stopped two times. Once, to explore a boat house that belonged to the gentleman who was manning the boat. The boathouse was truly unbelievable. It had two bedrooms complete with beds and mosquito nets. In addition, it had a hole in the ground which acted as the "bathroom." The second time we stopped was to climb on someone else's boat to watch them take part in the art of catching crawfish as well as snails for supper. Huge nets were cast into the lake, the goods were then brought up to the surface and spilled into the boat. 

After an extremely wet boat ride, we changed our clothes and then prepared ourselves for yet another supper of crawfish, pumpkin, turtle, eel and chicken. In fact, we watched two women cut the live crawfish and boil them right in the downstairs kitchen. Watching the food preparation was very interesting. There were live tubs of eels swimming around as well as turtles which seemed to be two of the specialty foods of this particular restaurant. 

As night approached, we headed to the hotel and then slept until the next morning. Ironically, although we were dwelling in a fairly rural area, the hotel itself was quite modern complete with an actual toilet and toilet paper. For me, this was very exciting.