Thursday, September 13
It is so fun to play with ("teach") the kindergarten kids, but it is a little frustrating that they're just so dang young that they don't understand a thing I say. They don't even understand when the teachers speak to them in Chinese sometimes. Like I've said, I think half of my job here with the little ones is to get them used to the sight of a foreigner and the sounds of English. There is one girl in my Smile Baby class that still bursts out into tears whenever she sees me or Tom, and simply starts wailing if we get within 10 feet of her. I guess we're pretty terrifying.
After teaching kindy classes, we headed over to the cafeteria for lunch. On our way, we said hi to Mr. Zhang, who was standing outside of his private kitchen messing with a little stove-looking thing called a "hot pot." He insisted that we join him for lunch along with some people from the government. What an interesting experience. We watched him prepare the hot pot for about twenty minutes. It was basically just a stove thing that kept water super hot once it got going, and is an ancient Chinese way of cooking. You put the hot pot in the middle of the table and it functions the same way as a fondue pot. You throw in what food you want, and a few minutes later take it out and put it in your bowl of sesame seed sauce and eat it. Before any of the other guests got there, Mr. Zhang threw in a bag of very very fresh (still alive) shrimp. While those cooked, the guests started arriving. Including us and Mr. Zhang, there were 10 of us. All of the guests were people who work for various auxiliaries of the local government (including the foreign affairs bureau) and the China Communist Party. Most of them knew a few English words that they would throw out here and there, but mostly they tried to speak to us in Chinese. Luckily, Mr. Zhang functioned as a great translator. Once everybody got seated and comfy, the drinks came out. Everybody had a tiny tea cup as well as a glass for the liquor (vodka, I think) or beer. This is when they first got a crack out of us. Mr. Zhang explained to them that we didn't drink liquor, and they clearly thought that was pretty strange. After using our one water bottle to participate in the many many toasts that were given (when we ran out of water, they filled our bottle with boiling water) , some people motioned for us to use our tea cups to toast. When we lifted them up and put them straight down without drinking they, very apparently, felt quite awkward that we were breaking such a simple toasting etiquette. We reminded Mr. Zhang that we don't drink tea and he passed along the message in Chinese. They sure thought that was weird too. So they started asking questions about where we were from and the "beliefs" of America. When we told them we were from Utah they all started chatting and laughing. Mr. Zhang informed us that some were questioning why we had multiple wives and gave all of our money to the church. How interesting; I felt like a bit of a spectacle. We explained simply that we gave 10% of our money to the church, and that we don't have multiple wives. They didn't seem to believe us. Then when they asked about the beliefs of America, we weren't really sure what they meant. We eventually gave them the answer of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Mr. Zhang said that he agrees, and that is a good basic belief. All the while, the hot pot food was keeping us busy. There were many things to throw into the hot pot, including lettuce, spinach, mushrooms, cabbage, tofu, noodles, potatoes, but most of all there was mutton. We'd never had mutton before, and I imagine it's probably quite tasty if prepared over a fire or something, but boiled mutton simply is not my thing. Tom liked it well enough. I thought it was like boiled bacon. How appetizing. Each person had a bowl of this extremely strong sesame seed sauce to mix all of their food in. Tom liked that too; it wasn't really doin' it for me. So I mostly stuck to the spinach and mushrooms and tofu. At one point, Tom was given a shrimp and a lady gave him a step by step tutorial on how to take it apart to eat it. When I was given this same opportunity, I had to put the shrimp down to cool down (it was so so hot) and then "forgot" about it. Woops. There was another type of shrimp that we were given too, which you didn't have to take apart. The man sitting next to me guided Tom and me through eating the section between the head and tail in one easy bite. Overall, it was a really fun and insightful experience.
Because lunch was a bit of a long endeavor, we had to skip our nap and go straight into teaching our primary classes. Thursdays are fun because at the end of the day we get to team-teach English Club (the one where all the smartest kids get together and play games). This week was for the younger kids, grades 1-3. We had a lot of fun playing alphabet and name games.
For dinner we simply had to go back to the place we ate at the night before to get another one of what we call "china burritos." So delicious. This time, I got some breaded fish or something in mine, and Tom got some chicken in his. Mmmm.
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