Update: Sense of Community

It has been a little over a week and a half since the food vendors in front of my building were shut down by the government. To me, this was a significant loss of culture and a pretty big inconvenience as it significantly increased the distance I have to travel in order to get food. However, for some of my classmates, this was a truly major blow. This weekend, I went with a friend to scour the city, attempting to find Shou Zhua Bing, a crispy scallion pancake topped with egg, lettuce, meat, cucumbers and sweet chili sauce. After hours, we finally found a place selling it, and were slightly disappointed by the results. Since I wrote a piece about this last week, three of the restaurants/foods stalls took the bricks down and have begun setting up shop again, including the Korean restaurant that sells Shou Zhua Bing (honestly my favorite Chinese food). It's rather funny; If I were in the same situation, and had decided to reopen by shop, I would have smashed the brick wall down with a sledge hammer. Instead, these vendors removed the mortar and took down each individual brick and stacked them in a pile on the sidewalk. It appears that they will be opening in the next few days, which has made many of us rather ecstatic. You don't really appreciate something till its gone. However, I sure as hell will appreciate it once it's back.