I changed keyboard layouts...

...and relearning to type has made me really disinclined to write extensively, which blogging kind of requires. So I'm going to take a break for a little while until the keyboard exercises have me back to typing more than 10 words a minute. 
I wish I were joking about that number.

source

School Christmas (Eve) Party

Thanks to Tiffany's efforts, the school Christmas party was held at Tino's. English learners eating at a Western restaurant - makes perfect sense. What did not make as much sense, however, was the meal management ultimately settled on. 


I should preface this with two things:
   1. Yancheng people are the least adventurous eaters I've ever met, and the city's cuisine is appropriately bland to match their dull palates.
   2. On multiple occasions, my or other foreigners' commentary on Western / US eating habits & cuisine have been disregarded by Chinese acquaintances who apparently feel they have a much better understanding of what we eat than we do. (If that's not the actual situation, I honestly don't know how else to interpret it.)


After Tino, Tiffany, and management had developed a meal appropriate to the occasion, yet not too out there for the picky students, our marketing director blew in and dismissed the plan entirely because it didn't fit her concept of Western food. For various reasons that are too complicated to go into, nobody put their foot down (except for Tino refusing outright to bother with the kimchi request, which, hello!, is Korean anyway), and we ended up with the following...

Egg and tomato soup, a tasty Chinese dish.

 Spaghetti, pork cutlets, and beef and gravy on rice. All at once.

China is SO weird.

Pudding & Other Goodies from Scott

He took the time to wrap each item :D

A big package arrived from Scott the day before my birthday, packed with birthday and Christmas gifts!! He sent a real posh bottle of quality vanilla, several boxes of pudding, and my favorite gift, an Edward Gorey calendar. He bought one for me years ago, and it's been a tradition ever since on account of how much I love Edward Gorey (Christel, remember the droll cat earrings you let me have? Those were Gorey cats.), my needing a new wall calendar each year, and Scott being a wonderful friend!

THANK YOU SCOTT!!!

 

 Lemon pudding and fresh strawberries!*

*Fruit is strictly seasonal here, but for some mystery reason, strawberries have been available at the fruit stands recently. I'm curious, but obviously not complaining.

I had a lovely birthday!

Tiffany and I went to dinner, and then met Scott and our friend Victoria at Tino's (the Swiss restaurant / aka the only true Western restaurant in the city) for drinks and dessert.


Victoria gave me some lotion from The Body Shop, imported via a family member of hers in England, since The Body Shop isn't in China. I like to use this stuff after I wash the dishes, which I have to do all the time over here, so it was a GREAT gift!

 Washing the dishes is my least favorite chore, so of course I end up in a country with no dishwashers.

Tiffany and Scott gave me an apron (I desperately wanted one, although I never told her that) and Goldfish crackers!

When I saw the fabric, I was all, 'Oh my god I LOVE it.' To which Tiffany responded, appropriately, 'You don't even know what it is yet!'

The best part of the night was not even related to my birthday. It was a receipt. Before the waitress left, she diagrammed our table and what we all owed. See below.

Counter-clockwise from the top we have: "red" - me; "Chinese" - Victoria; "Tino" - Tino; "man" - Scott; and nobody - Tiffany.

It might interest you to know that in Mandarin, there is no specific word for my hair color. It gets lumped in with blonde and is simply called "huang2" / "yellow." Students are always really perplexed when I say, 'In English, the word we use for my hair color is "red."'

I now understand just enough Chinese to get confused.

For example, the other day while in a knick-knack store we enjoy, Tiffany found a stamp with a silly English phrase popular with Chinese teenagers.

in lieu of OMG; the explanation points should be after "Gaga"

We each grabbed one (she uses stamps to sign-off on the students' lesson books, and I just wanted one), and at the counter, the sales girl paused before ringing-up the stamp to ask me a question. What I heard and understood didn't make sense, so I turned to Tiffany---who'd checked out first---for her translation services. 
"She wants to know if you still want the stamp, because I already bought one."
Which meant I had correctly understood the language, and had simply forgotten to interpret the culture: in Yancheng, Tiffany and I are the same person. And why on earth would one person want to buy the same stamp twice?!

This is Judas.

Judas is wearing a wig. To keep her head warm, of course.

Yes, she has a perfunctory understanding of the denotation/connotations of her chosen name.

Count that among things I wouldn't have expected I'd ever be doing...

(image from a set of stickers I bought) 

On Monday night, I spent about an hour sorting weevils from some beans I wanted to make into red beans and rice.

Some gnawed-on azuki beans. They're fine, and if not, I'll just sue the State of California for fallacious information. Litigiousness!!

A soon-to-be-victim trying to escape my wrath.

For anyone who is likely to eat my cooking in the future, just be glad my reaction was to pick out the bugs. 

Kidding!!!

Sort of. 
See, I've kind of come around and accepted insects as a viable food source for people. I mostly lay the change of heart to an episode of the less-than-great National Geographic television show Taboo, in which people are shown dining on a gourmet meal of bugs.


But, as I told Tiffany, at this point, there's still some mental iffy-ness between being cool with eating insects and actually doing it. So I picked out the weevils and only ate the beans.


After thoroughly cooking them.

This is why it took so long. All those came from only a 1/2 cup of beans.

And for the record, no, I would NEVER serve bug-eaten food to anyone else.

Do your part! Send a letter to save "Community"!

Those of you (Bud, Anne, I'm looking at you...) who watch the clever, hilarious, amazing, ridiculous, sly, witty, and sometimes even moving, NBC show Community, are by now aware of its impeding cancellation hiatus.
The show must be saved!

Todd VanDerWerff, who reviews the show on The A.V. Club, says a physical letter is "by far the most effective way to show your support for the show."

I made up an address label. All you have to do is print off the label and tape it to an envelope containing a note about how you'd rather be devoured by a hippopotamus than lose such a fantabulous show.

In the words of Mr. VanDerWerff, "Go buy stamps!"

How much do you know about China? Asia?

The Christian Science Monitor has up two blog-relevant quizzes.


How much do you know about China? - a mixed theme quiz
--> I scored 15/20, but it should have been 16/20 because I wasn't paying attention on one of the questions and stupidly chose wrong.


Think you know Asia? - a geography quiz
--> I scored 14/20, but I really should have scored lower 'cause I guessed on several of them.


Are you brave enough to test your knowledge of the Middle Kingdom or its continent?

"Warmly love learning" - chineseposters.net