Tony and Friends

We had a very interesting experience with some Chinese people this last week. It all started when we were approached by a stranger while buying some cookies from a small bakery. The man asked us if he could have our phone number to give to his friend. At this time, we were feeling flattered by his friendliness so we gave it to him, and he told us his friend would call later that night.

We received the call from his friend, Tony, and after quite a while and trying to interpret what he was saying, we were invited to come to dinner with him and his friends. The next day he called and we set up a time for him to pick us up and take us to his friend's apartment.

As time went on throughout the day, and as Alicia helped me to see, I realized that I had just set up an appointment with a complete stranger in a foreign country who has very broken English. I'll spare you the details, but long story short, he came with his friend, and there was some very awkward conversation as I interviewed him to see if we could trust getting into his car. As a measure of security, we had the principal's wife take a picture of his ID and take his cell phone number.

After feeling like we had a backup security plan in place, we decided to go with them. It turned out to be a wonderful night of dinner with some grateful Chinese people. They could not stop expressing their gratitude for us being there to eat food with them. Half of the purpose of our visit was to make friends with the 3 children which came to the dinner (ie: teach them English while we're at it). Don't get me wrong, we felt very accepted and appreciated by these new Chinese friends, but their intentions were clear when Tony would repeatedly tell us that we can correct the pronuciation of the children and teach them new words as often as necessary. We got to try some new foods, and eat lots and lots of dumplings. We even got to help prepare some of the dumplings. This kind of dumpling is called jiaozi. Dumplings are very cheap to make and are one of the most common foods in China, especially when big groups of people come together.

Alicia connected with the two girls: Rain and Tina

They busted out the paintbrush and paper they use to practice their Chinese characters and let us try a few. It's really hard!

I connected more with Kevin. (That is his English name of course.)

This is a picture of the whole group (except Tony who is taking the picture). Although the language barrier was pretty heavy, we discovered they are all very humble and good people. We haven't experienced so much friendship and grattitude in one night in our entire lives. By the end of the night we were practically exhausted from all the food and new friends.

CHINESE FRIENDS FOREVER!

National Day: Part Two

Here's the rest of what we did during our National Day break:

We came across some real life shufflers. They were a team of teenage shuffle dancers and they even had matching jackets with their logo on them. They invited us to come every night at 7 o'clock to practice, and even offered Tom an honorary jacket to dance with them for the night.

We ate at Big Pizza. We prepared for this by not eating very much lunch. This was easy, because when we went to lunch at Mr. Zhang's kitchen, he had forgotten that we would be joining him. Luckily there was still room at the table, and plenty of food, but because he was having a business meeting over lunch, we were able to slide under the radar and not eat too much. Of course, eating at Big Pizza was quite the treat, and we left stuffed to the brim.

We saw an old Chinese guy singing that reminded us of Grandpa Melvin. We have no idea what he was singing about, but whatever it was, he had a lot of spirit. This guy was belting it straight from the soul in a park on the side of the road. He had a lovely erhu accompaniment. This was a priceless moment in our week. While Tom checked out the performance, I was bombarded with questions by this really adorable old lady.

We saw a funeral celebration (we think). While we driving down the road, looking for some dinner, we came across a loud musical performance. It was great. Upon further observation, we realized that it was probably a funeral of some sort. Our first indication was that there was a little shrine where some ladies were burning fake Chinese money. This is what they do to honor their dead.

National Day: Part One

In China, everybody enjoys a one week holiday off of work for National Day. This occurs on the first week of October, and everybody travels. So, we took the advice of several wise people, and explored Cangzhou instead of traveling during this time. Here's an overview of some of the things we did with our time.

We bought a camera. Yes, another one. Our Nikon, as awesome as it is, does not have video capability. So after many many hours of researching other cameras, we decided to buy a simple but nice point-and-shoot, and we are actually quite pleased with it. Here's the first video we took with it.

We got Chinese haircuts. To see more about that adventure, click here.

We learned how to make dumplings. When we went to have lunch with Mr. Zhang on Tuesday, we were pleasantly surprised to see that some of his family members were there working together to make a crazy amount of dumplings (jiaozi to be more precise). They even taught us how to make them.

In the middle is Miss Sue, Mr. Zhang's wife. Next to her is Mr. Zhang's sister-in-law. Do I look like a giant? That's because, in China, I am one.

This is one of at least 3 trays that were filled with dumplings to be cooked.

The stove in Mr. Zhang's private kitchen is wood-heated with a large cast-iron bowl above it. There is a metal shield that slides in front of the wood fire to help with insulation.

You can see that the dumplings that we made were a tad flat compared to the pretty dumplings that everyone else made; they were also the last to be eaten.

We ate tonghulu everyday. In fact, we ate a lot of delicious street food everyday; so much so that we made a whole post about it here.

We saw a carnival in a garbage field. Enough said.

We skyped with family. Every Tuesday and Wednesday we get the pleasure of skyping with our parents. When we're lucky, we get to skype with our siblings as well. This week was no exception, and as always, it was great to see their smiling faces. They may not know it, but we look forward to our skype chats with them all week long. Not only is it great to speak to some native English speakers, but we love to see a bit of home every week.

We went to two Muslim mosques. The first mosque we went to was the "Cangzhou North Mosque." It was beautiful. The entrance wasn't grand, but if you have any ability to recognize written Arabic, you'd suspect that a mosque was nearby. The neighborhoods surrounding the two mosques were filled with hints of Arabic influence, from gift shops with paintings of mosques to restaurants serving halal food.

A man in the courtyard showed us where to leave our shoes so that we could go into the mosque and see where they worship. It was really neat.

The second mosque we went to was the "Cangzhou West Mosque." It was also beautiful. Compared to the first, the West Mosque was more ornate and Middle East-looking on the exterior, but the interior was less ornate. Similar to the first, it seemed as though the Muslim community lives in same building as the mosque.

We're so grateful we got to go to these mosques. It was interesting to experience a foreign culture within a foreign culture (if that makes any sense). The mosques were beautiful and the people were very friendly.

Harvest Season

Last week we were out adventuring when we got a call from the kindergarten, asking us to come in for a meeting. We were in the middle of dinner, so we told them we could come a bit later. We thought this was a bit strange, being fairly late in the evening, and were worried that there was something wrong. When we got there, all was well, but we were quickly told of a new assignment we had to prepare powerpoints and give presentations to the students, their parents, and a camera crew the next day. When we told them that we had classes to teach during that time at the primary school, they said that this was more important and to cancel the classes. We are no longer surprised by these last-minute things, but still thought it was a bit funny. So we went home and spent the rest of the night preparing for the Harvest Season Celebration the next day.

When I went to greet the students in the morning they told me that they wanted me to get Tom so we could come give a practice-run of the presentations. The practice runs went really well. Tom gave his presentation on harvesting hawberries, and I gave mine on harvesting sweet potatoes. The students paid attention and learned the words well, and the director lady (we really don't know who she is or where she came from, but she's been at the kindergarten for the past few days) seemed pleased after giving us a few suggestions. Then the director lady and Lei Lei, one of the kindy teachers who speaks English quite well, gave us a walk-through of how the rest of the day would go.

So when we went back in the afternoon we were prepared for the festivities. First, we gave our presentations. Those, unfortunately, did not go quite as well as they did that morning. This was in part due to yet another cultural difference that we are still not used to: here it is socially acceptable to speak loudly (and do a number of other things that would be considered quite rude in American culture) during presentations. We weren't sure how to handle this, because we didn't want to rudely hush the parents, but nobody could really hear us. It ended up being fine and the presentations were over in a matter of minutes. Then came the real fun.

I took my young students and their parents out to dig up sweet potatoes in the garden. It was pretty fun. I wasn't really sure how to be involved, but basically I just went around to each student, tried to get them to say a word or two, congratulated them on digging up such a big sweet potato, and smiled for the many cameras. Some of the kids actually dug up some pretty big potatoes, and they were pretty thrilled about it.

After digging up the sweet potatoes, we went inside to eat some that had already been cooked. It was fun to interact with the kids, and some of them insisted on sharing their food with me. They're so cute. Again, this time mostly consisted of me walking around and making sure no kid was left out and getting plenty of pictures and video clips taken by the camera crew.

After passing out mooncake gift baskets, and having a few of those shoved in my mouth by a couple of my students, we went outside for a huge group picture. All in all, it was a ton of fun, but by the end we were pooped.

In the meantime, Tom took his older kids to another part of campus to pick hawberries. I'll turn the time over to Tom to write about his experience.

My experience was pretty similar to Alicia's when it comes to the whole event being a huge publicity stunt where I was constantly being told how to pose and what to do with the kids. The camera crews for my presentation showed up 20 minutes late so I was stuck with all the kids and parents trying to find something to do to stall until the camera crew arrived. As you can imagine, stalling a large group of people who don't speak English was pretty interesting, and the other kindy teachers soon took over. After successfully completing a presentation on how to harvest hawberries, (which involved teaching 3 words to the students), we walked around the campus until we reached the hawthorne trees. The kids and parents loved reaching up and getting the berries off the tree. One student named Bill did not have any parents there with him so I picked him up and put him on my shoulders. We were the tallest thing around and successfully picked all the hawberries that no one else could reach. The camera crews loved it. The next step of the publicity stunt involved getting back into a classroom and making tonghulu with the students. (If you want to know what tonghulu is you can read a previous post about street foods). I ate many hawberries that were rolled in the same little pool of honey as all the little kids while the photographers snapped pictures. We also ate moon cakes, in true mid-autumn day fashion.

This is the group of parents, students, and teachers getting ready for the picture.

First Chinese Haircut

After being in China for about 6 weeks, our hair was starting to look a bit funky. Given that we have the best hairdresser in the world back home (my nifty sister), it was hard to go to a salon, but we finally did it. What an experience! After scooting past a few salons, scoping them out, and asking how much a haircut would cost, we finally just went for it. We actually chose this salon because one of the workers had really awesome curly hair and kind of looked like a young Michael Jackson. We were sold.

We were ushered in by the all-male staff (hair-dressing is a masculine profession here) and shown a little locker to put our stuff in. Then they quickly outfitted us with chameleon robes and set us each in our own little hair-washing station. The little massage that came along with it felt great. Tom especially liked it.

Before...

This is the couple's hairwarshing station.

In the end, it was a great experience. We felt like they took great care of us and really wanted us to look good when we left. Of course, our hair doesn't look quite as good as if Celest had cut it, but not bad for 15 yuan each! (That's less than $2.50 USD!)

After!

Woops. Didn't get a picture of Tom's after, but I promise he looks really good.

Street Food: From Lo Mein to Tacos

We've had a lot of awesome street food lately. Here are just a few of the treats we've been enjoying.

This is a tonghulu display stand. If you see one of these, you have to pull over and get one. Tonghulu is essentially a skewer of hawberries that have been pitted, cooked, skewered, and rolled in melted sugar with sesame seeds. This tasty treat is especially exciting because hawberries are fairly tart, and are a bit intense to eat by themselves. But once they are soft and sugary they are delicious. Each skewer costs 2 Yuan. That's 32 cents. Can't miss the good deals. They make tonghulu with different ingredients like tomotoes, grapes, potato thingies, kiwis, and more, but none are as good as the hawberries.

Here's Alicia lookin' cute with some tonghulu.

This is something we discovered just last week. Our adventure in discovering this food was fun because the cooking area and eating area were very dark and we could not see what we were eating very well. Luckily, it tasted delicious. According to our survival book, this dish is called choamien, or in other words chow mein. This dish of noodles cost 7 yuan: just over 1 dollar.

These are the dudes that were cooking the noodles for the chow mein. Don't let the flash from the camera fool you, there was very little light available. Fortunately, I took a picture at the perfect moment for you to see what is happening here. If you look closely, each noodle is being hand-carved out of a slab of noodle dough. These guys are so fast at carving noodles, that they are halfway done with the next noodle before the previous noodle even has time to think about it. The noodles fly straight off the slab into a huge pot of boiling water and are ready to eat in about 3 minutes. That's fast food.

This is a dish that we've only found from this one guy near the shopping mall. He takes some noodles, adds an egg, some red sauce, onions, cilantro, chops it all up, and puts it in a bowl. It's a tasty snack for 3 yuan: roughly 50 cents.

We often eat the previous snack with a meat-filled biscuit. It's a flaky round pita-thing that comes with your choice of unidentifiable meat and spices. Although I've never had a meat pie, I imagine this is very similar. This biscuit runs you 4 yuan; thats roughly 50 cents.

I know we've showed you something similar to this in a previous post, but this is a different guy. He cooks your choice of vegatables and meat that have been prepared on skewers. We always load up on potato slices, mushrooms, zucchini, cabbage, and tofu-wrapped mushrooms and green onions.Every once in a while I will splurge and get a stick of chicken, (at least I think it's chicken) and he puts it in a bun that resembles a large english muffin. Alicia likes to see it as her Chinese Taco because she is so desperate for mexican food. He fries them up on his mobile grill, conveniently located on the back of his scooter and slathers them with oil, sauce, and seasonings before sloppily smashing it all between the buns. Two of these tacos runs us 10 yuan: about a buck sixty.

This dude always has piles of grilled orange meats. We've never purchased anything from him. We just like him because he always laughs when he sees us, and we laugh when we see him. He looks like the perfect guys to be grillin' all day every day. Keepin' it grilllll.

This is also something that we never purchased, but we just want you to know that this gigantic fruitcake is not an illusion. We had to beg the lady who was gaurding it to let us take a picture. I don't think she understood what I said, but she finally gave in when I told her she would be famous in America.

Someone was selling bundles of red chilis on the side of the road and the color of the chilis was so vivid that we had to stop and take a picture.

Although this picture may look a little creepy, I am enjoying the broth from a very cheap and large bowl of lo mein. We stopped in at a little restaurant in the Muslim community of Cangzhou and just pointed at whatever the people at the other table were eating. It was a lot like eating chicken noodle soup. It has cilantro and a few small pieces of meat. It was fascinating to watch them make the noodles for lo mein. They are cut and stretched minutes before cooking, and stretched in such a way that they noodles are one continuous strand of never-ending awesomeness. It makes the noodles so much fun to eat. A large bowl costs 5 yuan: about 80 cents.

As a parting note, it is important to remember that this sign, which is prohibiting spitting, is a very necessary warning in China. You have to keep careful watch of where you are to avoiding stepping into the line of fire.

Here is a quick video tour of just one of the many chinese food alleys. Feel free to watch it 1080p to get all the nitty gritty details.

Mid-Autumn Day

Mid-Autumn Day is a big harvest holiday celebrated throughout China. This year, it happened to fall on Sunday, the day before National Day. We started our Mid-Autumn Day with chocolate crepes. Delicious.

After church, lunch, and a nap, we went to the People's Park to see what kind of festivities were going on there. They had a beautiful flower show.

We see cute old couples all of the time here. We love it.

We found a secret entrance to a secret garden.

This picture doesn't do the secret garden justice. It was so so cool. Huge vines had taken over a little half-circle of stone arches.

Flower dragon and kung fu moves. I copied the kid who was taking a photo in this spot before me.

This was a pretty spot on the bridge, so we decided to take some cool kid photos.

We came across a bunch of little groups of people playing hacky sack. Tom got right in on the action.

He said he "felt honored to play with some of China's finest."

On our way back into the apartment building, we ran into Mr. Zhang, who invited us to have dinner with his family. His parents live in the same building as we do, so it was easy to hop on over there. We enjoyed hot pot and other delicious foods with Mr. Zhang's parents, brothers, sons, and neices and nephews. It's customary to have a big dinner with your family on Mid-Autumn Day, so it was super nice of Mr. Zhang to let us come along and have that experience. We ended the dinner with mooncakes, which are the traditional treat associated with Mid-Autumn Day.

These are some of the mooncakes that the kindergarten gave us in a gift basket for the holiday.

The Lunch Room Experience

We love going to lunch in the canteen (lunchroom). In many ways, it reminds us of our time in elementary school. The food isn't always top quality, but these students are so efficient at getting in, eating, and getting out. The whole experience is better desribed with a few good pictures.

Here are some samples of the food we get during the week. There is only a couple that we even know the name of. Almost everything is packed full of MSG and flavored goodness. The content and texture is usually questionable.

Some cilantro salad on the left - Delicious!

DUMPLINGS!! - with vinegar for dipping

Tomato and Egg over rice, one of our favorites, with a couple of mystery side dishes.

And this is what I mean by mystery...

Here are the 3rd graders filing in for lunch.

We always get bombarded... everyday... with more hellos and high fives than we can handle. We feel so loved in the lunchroom.

This is standard chef attire. While the kids are dishing up their food out in the seating area, we get special backstage priveliges to get our food hand-scooped directly from the chefs.

Here are a couple of cute ones. That basket if full of twisted buns. All the buns here are steamed, not baked. They don't have drinks with their meals, they just wash everything down with a bowl of hot soup.

In this picture, Alicia is asking the 6th grade boys how many dumplings they usually eat. Some of them can pound seven of those suckers! These dumplings are huge. We never eat more than three.

Everybody's excited about the rice.

Peter is the cool kid. Because he's the class leader, he gets to divy up the rice to his classmates.

Alicia loves tomato and egg day!

Everyone jumps at the chance to say hello.

 

In true boarding school fashion, everyone is done eating within 15 minutes and the cleanup crew gets to work. These kids know what they are doing. If you blink, you might miss it.

 

They are always running past us with buckets and silverware on their way to the washroom. I was lucky to get this picture because they dropped a bowl on the way.

 

 

So that's it. In less than a half hour, over 200 students shuffle in, dish up, eat, clean up, get in formation, and shuffle off to nap time. We are usually left in the dust, eating by ourselves in the poorly lit lunchroom.