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.