Turkey Day in China

Hi to all of our friends and family and we hope you all had a delicious and merry Thanksgiving. We finally had ours this past Saturday, August 25th. Although this may not look pretty now, it certainly was a tasty 20 pounder. We are happy to introduce you to our dinner. No names please! This bird was injected with Caijun juice and deep fried for 1 hour so that 10 foreign teachers from our school, one foreign teacher from Shanghai, one Texan businessman named Craig, and two wonderful Chinese friends could have a fantastic Western meal.

Here's Craig placing the bird into the fryer. He injected the bird with a tool he had sent to him by his family/friends back in Texas. He bought the cooker and borrowed the gas tank and burners from a gentleman down the road and we cooked and ate the beautiful foul at a restaurant by the name of Van Land. Van Land is about 3 blocks away from the main gate of our University. It's the only place around school that serves some types of Western food even though most of you wouldn't say it was real Western food. Items on the menu include curried chicken/meat/fish and rice, a spagetti of sorts, fried noodles, soups of varies flavors, pizzas (not my favorite) and even a club sandwich. The main wall of the place is painted as you will see, it has a second level with booths and also a picture screen so they show films during the weekends if people like.

This is Michael with a university student named Arthur -- who not only speaks very good English too but who is also very sweet -- Craig's roommate's girlfriend (don't remember her name but she must have weighed at least 80 lbs.), and of course, Craig...all sitting outside talking and watching the turkey fry to a crispy delight.

The restaurant use to employ a young student from another university in the area and her name is Jenni. Although she didn't join us this night I wanted to add her picture into the mix because we met her at Van Land and you haven't gotten a chance to meet her until now. Jenni speeks beautiful English, is mega friendly and very helpful to anyone needing odd things like directions (I'm speaking of us if you didn't already guess that.) Anyway, even though Jenni no longer works at the restaurant she lives and goes to university not too far away from where we live so we see her every once in a while. She's a doll!

Well, to get back on track and to the Thanksgiving event, here are some more pictures for your viewing. Here's John (sitting /3 yrs) - Robert (middle/3 yrs) - Ken (standing/new to our school) chatting before the turkey has been fried. Here are a lot of the same folks including the teacher from Shanghai, Tom, who is sitting second from the left and who also use to work at our school but found a much better paying position in the big city. Molly, the pretty blond is talking to Ken, the happy beer drinker. See the wall? Don't know who painted it but they did a great job.

Everyone was put into action. Besides turkey we also had stuffing (kind of a stove top stuffing but made from scratch) and here we see who made the stuffing.......which everyone was very impressed with by the way.

To finish off this wonderful starchy meal Craig prepared mashed garlic potatoes, Stephen prepared the baggette with butter, garlic and Kraft parmesean cheese (thank you Stephen who is pictured above) and for dessert, I chopped apples which were placed onto a pizza pie and laddened with sugar and cinnamin. Oh yeah, Craig also bought Hagen Daz ice cream to put on top of the apple turnover that wasn't really turned over.

And finally, the whole reason we all got together....

On a non-Thanksgiving note. We're flying with our eyes wide open again. This means for those of you who haven't kept up with the blog (naughty naughty) that we can get to our blog ourselves and that the government of China is not blocking us amymore.

Exhaustion looks like this sometimes

Well, Michael likes this picture and demanded that we get it up on the blog but personally, I think I look like shit! To be honest, I felt like it too. You see, Michael's class of Sophmore English majors asked us to join them on an outing about 45 minutes from Hangzhou where we would have a BBQ and a hike. These students are warm and have been very helpful getting a variety of things done for us. Also, these are the best English speakers Michael has for students.

The students rented a bus and tour guide and we met them at 8:30AM. As soon as we got on the road the cards came out and people started to play. The microphone also came out and people took their turns singing and of course, they wanted us to sing a song, and as usual, we didn't dare.

Soon, the bus stopped on a road that was so narrow that we all climbed off of it and started walking toward a dark tunnel. The tunnel was black, damp, curving right and left and about 400 yards long. As cars and motorcycles went through it one at a time and in one direction at a time, we squeezed the wall and finally, came onto the cutest little village you could imagine. This particular picture is while walking toward one of the farmer's homes and looking across a field -- just what you would imagine China would look like, isn't it?

Well, soon we arrived at this home, walked to the back of it and found ourselves in a huge bamboo grove surrounded by tea plants and hundreds of other students from the surrounding colleges and universities. Apparently, we weren't the only ones to think of enjoying the weekend! It was almost magical if it weren't for all the young people cooking in woks and talking up a storm.

About the BBQ. Stop thinking about how and what we have -- okay! Here's a couple of pictures because you know.....they speak a thousand words



Okay, so, why am I so exhausted in the first picture of this post? We didn't just eat some good but weird stuff in a beautiful bamboo grove all day. Remember, the hike part of the day? Well, it started out to be one of those normal hikes where one walks along a stone path that slowly but surely meanders upward toward a beautiful view. We walked about a half a mile and all of a sudden, there's no path. Not only no path, but the hike turned into almost verticle climb. We were pulling ourselves up by the roots of trees and shrubs and placing our feet against rocks and stubs. This went on for about an hour and you can bet your petuty we were all grateful to get to the top without loosing anyone from the group.
Here's a picture looking down from above. We think we climbed maybe 1000 feet from the ground to the top but we don't know for sure and this approximation is looking backward on a day's hike that we'll never forget and probably will always magnify every time we tell it.

One last story of the day if you don't mind. You see, it didn't end at the climb up or at the easier trip downward but kept on going until into the evening. There was the traditional bon fire in the big ole'wok, a TV playing bad old Chinese rock videos with students singing kareoke and a bit of dancing. This lasted until we finally got to board the warm bus at 8:30 PM, get back to school at 9:30, ride our bikes from the school where we left,and then, climb four flights up to our place.

Exhaustion -- it lasted until Thursday.

By the way, we are still posting without seeing what these look like so we hope all is well with this post and that the pictures and copy follow one another. Any comments must be sent to our email address if you would either like a response or would like us to know what ya think about our adventures.

Flying Blind

Well, you might be seeing this but we can't. Apparently, China is blocking people within China from seeing blogs on blogger.com. So here it goes....

Lot's to tell you and many pictures to show but it's hard to create a post with pictures without seeing where to place the picture. We hope that in the not to distant future we can see what we're doing and put more pictures up for viewing.


We've gone to a BBQ put on by one of Michael's freshman classes -- hopefully you can see a picture of that -- and we've also attended our own school singing contest -- and hopefully you can see a picture of that too. Tomorrow we go hiking with another one of Michael's classes and they too will have a BBQ.

You ask, where are Cindy's students. Why don't they have BBQ parties. Well, most are postgraduates so they apparently are way to busy to play and have parties and BBQ's :

A couple of things we love here in China:

1. Every day you can have something different to eat even if you don't eat scorpion on a stick.
2. You can go to a hair salon and get the works for only 15 RMB or $1.90. This includes getting your hair washed and head massaged for 1/2 hour, then, your arms, neck and back get a massage, and then, you get your hair dryed. The whole process takes 1 hour and makes you feel like 100 RMB.
3. A one hour foot massage can cost $6.12 or 50 RMB.
4. Two people can stuff their face with great food at a really good restaurant for $6

Tell us if this post looks okay because, really, we are flying blind. We aren't able to see what this entry (or the last one for that matter) looks like.

As time passes we get busier and busier.

Last week I heard about a singing contest through a student, Candy, but it was at another university near us. I’d heard her before and she has a beautiful voice and we thought it would be fun to go see her. We asked for directions and it seemed easy enough. Go out the north gate of our school and walk through the beautiful park just to the left of the students’ cafeteria. At the other end of the park we would see another university and the contest would be held there.

As we came to the end of the park we saw a school with a stage set up outdoors including concert lighting, speakers and fairly elaborate backdrops. Many people were congregating and we, Pauline from Canada, Cindy and I walked up to place. About one hundred students were standing around and there was a section of seats that were blocked off. We asked if anyone spoke English and a young girl responded in ‘Chinglish’ -- meaning she spoke a little broken English but didn’t speak well enough to converse or understand too much of what we were saying.

At first she told us that the section was not for general seating and we could not sit there. Then she quickly returned and told us we could sit there. Cindy suggested that we should sit in the back row in case we wanted to make an inconspicuous getaway. We sat down and waited. After a moment the same girl came back, very embarrassed, and asked us to please sit in the front row. There are no easy and quick getaways when you sit in the front row.

Well, you could say she asked us to move to the front row -- and the judges table -- but it really wasn’t a question, it was more like, “We are putting you in a place of honor and you are to move to the front row so we can honor you.” As good foreigners we moved and grabbed the last three seats in the row just in case we still needed to make a quick escape. Well, wouldn’t you know it, after another moment some other Chinese people came to us and again asked us to move to the center of the judges table, which of course we did. Then they pinned corsages upon us and we thought, are we judges at this event? How could that be?

The judges table was very long, seating at least 20 people, and covered with black velvet with some simple decorations and a bottle of water in front of each seat. Soon the chairs around us began to fill. When we turned around there must have been over 50 people sitting and another 100 standing behind the bank of chairs. Now we knew we were in trouble, big trouble. There was no escaping!

Two young college students behind us began to talk to us in “Chinglish” about where we were from, how long we had been in China and other information that in the end was given to the President of the University who was sitting two seats away from Pauline (we found this out later of course.) Well, it suddenly dawned on us that we were the biggest thing to happen at this school and event since sliced bread.

A young student in a tux (our host) and a young student in a beautiful Chinese red dress (our hostess) came out and addressed the crowd. Then a young man who sang a beautiful song in Chinese entertained us with the help of a state of the art sound system backing him up. We all thought we were in for a real treat that evening. The host and hostess came out often and the rest of the evening (6:00-8:00) was a series of skits, a dance or two, a little more singing, and a speech given by a student on the importance of reading. It wasn’t much later in the evening that student’s climbed up on the stage and different “judges” went up to the stage and gave out awards. Through the English speakers sitting near us, we found out these awards were being given out for various things such as best English reader, Chinese reader and best decorated dormitory. Where the hell were we?

During the entire ceremony the President of the University and others around us continued to request that we get up on stage to sing a song. Even the president asked Cindy to sing with him. Singing is a huge tradition in China and our students, who are too embarrassed to speak in class, will sing a song in front of strangers. Go figure! Anyway, Pauline, Cindy and I were not about to sing in front of these strangers, or anyone else for that matter, but they would not stop pestering us to sing. I even told them that if we sang the birds would all fly away and the small animals would die but that didn’t stop them. They really wanted us to sing. Finally Cindy said that I wouldn’t allow her to sing and that stopped the requests.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, yes, you guessed it; we were at the wrong event at the wrong school. Remember, there are 14 universities in this educational zone and of course we walked into the wrong one.

In the end, the President got up on the stage and thanked the “invited” Western foreigners for attending. When the “production” ended we, and the beautiful corsages they pinned on us, hightailed it out of there. We asked around and finally headed down the correct road to the Broadcast University which was about ¾ of a mile away and not just on the other side of the park. As we were entering we met Candy, our singing friend, on her way out. We not only missed her singing but all but two of the other performers. That’s right, we caught the last two acts. Candy won’t be performing again until next month but tonight at our University is the finals in our music contest. We caught the preliminaries a couple of weeks ago and they were sensational so we’re looking forward to tonight’s affair which will be on our campus. We won’t get lost this time! Before the big singing contest we’re attending a B.B.Q. with some of my students.

It will be interesting to find out what they mean by a B.B.Q. We’ll report on that later….

On a personal note: Foreigners, especially Westerners, are held in high regard in China. Only God, Allah, Moses, Buddah or some other supreme power knows why. The West is doing a righteous job of messing up this world we live in. We start wars every few years, utilize way to much power for the amount of people we have, pollute too much, waste precious water, and do all of this with arrogance. For reasons not understood by us, they still hold us in high regard.