Aunt Shao in Zhuliangqiao

So to try and cut a long story short... Frederikke (my flat mate) was in Beijing three years ago and met a Chinese girl who is now studying in Frederikke's city in Demark and she has been in contact with Frederikke's mum. Wang Lee found out that we were in Changsha and insisted that we visit her Aunt here, we agreed of course. Nothing better than actually knowing Chinese people and getting to know the real China. It was the Sunday just gone. The sun was shining so we were in high spirits anyway, we got picked up from our school by Aunt Shao's nephew and his Fiance. They told us it was going to be an hours drive North of Changsha to the countryside, I was sooo happy when they told us. The city can get really tiring sometimes and we both needed some fresh air at least. We arrived after driving down some really narrow, winding country roads. We pulled into the drive way and came face to face with the whole family, I really felt under dressed and out of place... The "house" was so fancy, I've never seen anything so grand. Aunt Shao is an architect who designed the whole house herself, she and her husband also own 14 properties in Changsha that they rent out. The country house is only for the weekends. So posh!
We were served tea the traditional way at a table with a thousand tea pots and minute cups. Soon, we had met every member of her family and had seen the whole house. As we were being shown the house, I was in complete amazement. Everything was so "show home" like, it didn't look lived in at all! We were told that Aunt Shao had arranged activities for us in the afternoon. One of the activities was digging up bamboo shoots. It was much harder than it looked and they had to end up taking over from me and Frederikke, just not got the strength. The bamboo shoots that were dug up, were cooked and served to us at dinner time, they were so good. I'd never had bamboo before so I wasn't sure what to expect but it was so delicious! And so fresh.
Aunt Shao and her husband were eager for us to play cards with them, a Chinese game of course and it was definitely a step up from what I'm used to (Snap), it took me a while and a lot of help to get the hang of it but we ended up playing outside for around an hour, in the sun. Then there was also their Mahjong table "machine", they thought it was great that we sat at the table so they decided to get lots of pictures of the white girls playing Mahjong ahah.
Before dinner, we went for a walk around the village, it was so peaceful. We were introduced to some of the other people in the village although there only seemed to be around 5 houses in the whole village so everyone knew eachother. We were served tea at each place we went. We ended up refering to it as the "tea crawl".