A Visit to the Countryside

by Jimmie on November 2, 2009

We were invited by a friend to spend the night at his countryside home with his grandmother. It was a beautiful time and such a relief from city life. It is still hard to believe that only about an hour’s drive outside of the city, life can be so rustic.

This is a typical countryside home.

Here is the courtyard of the home where we stayed. The building there is the “barn” where the ducks and chickens stay at night.

This is the butcher block in the courtyard, complete with feathers from the freshly killed chicken.

All over the village we saw bundles of beans drying.

They’re called furry/fuzzy beans. We’ve eaten them often as appetizers in restaurants, but we’d never seen the plant.

In the dining room was this large, cloth covered shape. I suspected it was a coffin, but my husband thought it was a boat. Our friend confirmed my guess, telling us that keeping a coffin on hand for the next family death is a custom in this area. (No, they didn’t consider storing it in the barn or somewhere less obvious.) It’s a custom, and all families have a spare coffin somewhere in their homes. It’s one of those times when you just say, “Oh. Well. That’s your custom. Okay. Glad you’ve got your coffin on hand.”

As night approached, we had a bit of a controversy. The grandmother started asking us about sleeping arrangements. Since the room where we had stored our things had two large beds, I assumed all three of us would be together. But the grandmother insisted that Sprite and I sleep together while her grandson and my husband slept in another room.

I was a bit flabbergasted and reassured her that we’ve been married for 17 years. It’s okay for us to sleep together. But we learned that it’s the custom in their area that guests of the opposite gender must not sleep together. It matters not if they are married. When you are a guest, you do not get to sleep with your own spouse. So we followed their customs.

Here is where Sprite and I hit the hay. Literally.

The mattress area was stuffed with hay and covered with a straw mat.

This was breakfast — boiled eggs, pork and peppers, green vegetable, chicken stewed with mushrooms. Oh, and rice, of course.

Meals were cooked over a wood stove.

Here are the cook’s wood bundles.

There was no running water. Well water was pumped into a cistern in the kitchen. Instead, our hostess boiled water on her stove and then poured it into a basin for washing up. We stood in the courtyard as we splashed or spit water. It was a bit awkward to have to ask the hostess to prepare water for me to wash my hands or face, but they seemed to be happy to oblige our desires to clean up.

The well in the courtyard.