Simplest async/await example possible in Python

I’ve read many examples, blog posts, questions/answers about asyncio / async / await in Python 3.5+, many were complex, the simplest I found was probably this one.
Still it uses ensure_future, and for learning purposes about asynchronous programming in Python, I would like to see an even more minimal example, and what are the minimal tools necessary to do a basic async / await example.

Django persistent database connection

I’m using django with apache and mod_wsgi and PostgreSQL (all on same host), and I need to handle a lot of simple dynamic page requests (hundreds per second). I faced with problem that the bottleneck is that a django don’t have persistent database connection and reconnects on each requests (that takes near 5ms).
While doing a benchmark I got that with persistent connection I can handle near 500 r/s while without I get only 50 r/s.

Hash Map in Python

I want to implement a HashMap in Python. I want to ask a user for an input. depending on his input I am retrieving some information from the HashMap. If the user enters a key of the HashMap, I would like to retrieve the corresponding value.