The last whole school meal was to a very classy buffet, but fellow-teacher Kelly and I weren't able to attend because of Lattitude training duties. So yesterday, we had a catch-up lunch at the school's expense. And boy, what a meal. The restaurant (amusing called "Gloden and Silver Jaguar"!) lays on between 200-300 different dishes to choose from, and it's all-you-can-eat. They specialise in seafood, and as well as oysters, shrimp and various shellfish they also offered sea cucumber, shark and crocodile! I'd deliberately not eaten for 18 hours before, and so the temptation to gorge was immense. The seafood I could ignore (gout dangers), but there were still 200 other dishes to try. After 2 hours I could barely walk! Didn't even bother with dinner that evening. or breakfast today, come to that!
1 Comment
My good friend and colleague Kelly [right, in photo above], got a nice little write-up on Lattitude's blog recently and rightly so. She is Lattitude's Country Coordinator for China, which means she sets up projects for the volunteers, liaises with the schools and Universities concerned and visits the volunteers once they are at their placement. That, plus coping with lots of admin and hassles (it's a role I myself once managed to "nearly" do for 6 months, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone!). She does a magnificent job though and we enjoy working together during the 8-day "Teaching Skills Course" which I run twice a year. She's also a part-time teacher at Robert's School, where I work, and a regular reader of this blog. So, she's diligent, unflappable AND blessed with great literary taste!! Great combination!
I'm pretty hopeless at remembering names, but I can usually spot a familiar face. No such luck last week, though, when I was approached outside my school by a young lady with a cheery, "Hello Paul. Remember me?". Slightly embarrassed I had to confess I didn't. "I'm your old friend Josie, from Guiyang", she explained. I wish I could say there was a sudden burst of memories, but it was only the name that sounded vaguely familiar. Thoughtfully, Josie had brought along some photos of me from that time and a couple of letters I had written to her, too! We've had no contact since then, so it was shock, but a lovely surprise, to meet an old friend. Unfortunately, she caught me right at the moment I was due to take my Lattitude volunteers to lunch, so I had no time right then to stop and reminisce. However, yesterday we met for lunch and I was able to pore over her old photos and find memories of my time in Duyun, some 16 years ago, slowly creeping back! I was working for V.S.O. at that time, and Josie had just graduated from the Teachers' College as I began my teaching placement there. I met her socially amongst other friends a dozen times. In my defence, she did look a lot different in those days! The one photo that did ring bells though was me standing in front of a Mao Zedong wardrobe [below], which I spotted in her grandma's house, I think, when I visited. Josie is now living in Kunming, and married with a 5 year old son. She heard I live here too through a mutual friend and tracked me down to Robert's School on the internet. Unbeknown to me, she'd been waiting for me outside the school for over an hour, poor thing. I'm jolly glad she persevered though. Jiajia and I have been blown away by the generosity of friends and family since JD's birth. Despite the multitude of things one has to buy for a new baby, we are only now beginning to dip in to the personal money we had saved up during the pregnancy. The biggest expense has been, and remains, the live-in nanny. But boy, is she worth it! With both Jiajia and I having extra work this month and Ma-in-law in hospital (for various imagined ills), we would be in dire straits were it not for our gallant nanny keeping the daily feeding, clothes washing, bathing and nappy changing routines going. Jiajia and I are hoping there will be more chance for us to play and bond with JD next month when we have a few week's holiday.
I hosted a Eurovision Song Contest evening at our flat once again, last night. This was the third year running, using a recorded DVD sent out by a kind UK friend. Four folk showed, after some late drop-outs, and we had a fun three hours marking our favourite entries and trying to predict the winner and the politics of the voting. Not a classic Contest this year - not enough eccentricity for my liking - but I did particularly enjoy the falsetto, Dracula impersonator with the expanding cloak from Romania [who came 13th]. Fellow teacher Chloe [centre left] correctly predicted that Denmark would win. The other teacher, Della [right] went for Azerbaijan who came second. Joanna [between them] chose Spain - second last! - while JD tapped his foot to the Irish song which came in last. UK were disappointing, as ever, in 19th.
My Ozzie friend Gemma left China for good last week, heading for her second home in Spain. She was a student studying Chinese at our school, but has become a close friend of our family over the last year or two. I've a feeling she'll be back again soon though - China has a way of getting under your skin! Plus we still have a couple of boxes of her stuff in storage in the garage, as hostage material! Before she left she had to pop into the Bank of China and, while I waited for her, I spotted this sign outside. One obvious mistake (the sends?) and another more subtle one. Even top Chinese banks can't manage the simplest of English! Enjoy. I spent a fun afternoon recently with my Chinese teacher Leah, and fellow student Gemma [catch her cool blog here]. We were tracking down a small art exhibition we had heard about. We eventually found it - fairly underwhelming - but nearby was a small temple which I want to investigate sometime, and this cool dinosaur model, made from junk. I was really sorry to hear of the passing of Sir Patrick Moore today. I had some contact with him in my youth and he was a really generous and humorous chap... ...I used to have an odd thing for ferrets in my teens (...bear with me on this!) and, when a friend of mine at school who was into astronomy told me he had Patrick Moore's home address, I decided to write him a strange letter asking him if it were true that "the earth was actually held in orbit around the sun by a long line of hand-holding asbestos ferrets" (...I kid you not!). To my amazement and great delight he sent back a signed photo saying "Yes, your theory is stoatily proven". What a cool guy! I wrote a couple of more sensible letters after that and had two further replies back (I have kept them all) typed, personally and very badly, on his trusty typewriter [see photo]. I met him briefly too. I spotted him walking towards BBC Broadcasting House and, wanting to boast that I'd met him but not knowing what to say, I bounded up and asked, "Excuse me Mr Moore, do you know where BBC Broadcasting House is?" He looked at me and replied patiently, "It's right there, behind you". A genuinely kind man and an excellent scientist too, of course. RIP, sir.
Yesterday was Ma-in-law's birthday (although she didn't seem to know it - she says the date changes with the lunar cycle?) and, by coincidence, Ava and I had been invited to have some home-cooked western food at our friends' (Peter and Judy) house. So we took Ma-in-Law along. The "roast beef and trimmings" dinner was delicious, as was the "3 fruit crumble" dessert. Ma-in-Law coped with the cutlery and the non-spicy flavours and we ended the evening with Consequences [see below] and simplified Pictionary, which she found quite amusing! She only ever plays Mahjong usually, so a light-hearted and gambling-free game was quite an eye-opener for her, I think. (Check out Peter and Judy's blog by clicking here)
Our good friends Peter and Judy visited for a meal (by Ma) yesterday evening and a jam sponge cake (by Judy). Dorta watched how it was made [see photo] and we are fully expecting imminent gateaus and pavlovas from her. Peter and Judy are just in Kunming for a few months this time, though they have been regulars here for some years before. AND they brought me five curly-wurlies from the UK ...woohoo! Welcome here any time, chaps!! (Check out Peter and Judy's blog by clicking here)
We returned back to Kunming today from our trip to TongHai. We've been eating way too much food, thanks largely to YangPing's generosity. A Dai minority meal, a Hui (Muslim) minority meal, this meat and vegetable stew [see photo left] in a special copperware pot and a "3 dishes speciality" meal at a famous restaurant en route home [see photo right] - the three dishes being chicken, fish and goat. Also, Yang Ping's maid cooked us a lovely meal at her villa, and not just us, but 10 of her shopping mall employees too. So we've all returned a little bit fatter and a little less fitter.
One place we didn't try in TongHai, though, was this fast food joint selling "HAMBUGERS". Without the "r", it didn't seem that appealing! The hotel where we are staying is great except for one bizarre aspect. As you can see from the photo, the bathroom has a glass wall! There is a curtain, but it is on the bedroom side! So people can look in on you as you use the facilities. Why oh why?? We took in another free movie today. Whilst the others watched an American action flick, Ava and I took AiRan (CAL's daughter) to a Chinese cartoon movie. It was dire, and Ava and I struggled to stay awake. As you can see from the photo, we were the only people in the cinema. At one point I got up and ran a lap up and down the aisles just to wake myself up. AiRan seemed to enjoy it though. TongHai is proving something of a Mecca for Chinglish. Check out this shop sign and see if you can work out the intended meaning... Ava and I are having a few days holiday in a town called TongHai with our good friends Catherine and her family (CAL) and a mutual friend Yang Ping who has business interests in TongHai. It's a pretty town, with many old areas surviving and a distinctly "countryside" feel. We had a bit of a fright on the way down, however, when an oncoming truck lost control on a slippery road and slid backwards, at speed, onto our side of the road, coming within 2-3 inches of the car Ava was travelling in. I was in the car behind, watching it all happen as if in slow motion. Thankfully nobody was hurt, although it was a bit of a shock. Yang Ping showed us the centre of town, with old and new buildings on cobbled streets. And she was, of course, keen to show us the newly opened shopping mall which she owns! Seven stories high and including a multiplex cinema. Did we want to watch a couple of movies for free? Sure! With free popcorn and coke? Why not? Good friend to have! The movies were great, but I had to bite my tongue on seeing the large advertising hoarding along the road. Yang Ping asked me if the English was correct - she'd translated it by computer. Rather embarrassed, I did at least offer to check any future slogans for her! Tonight is mid-Autumn Festival - the second biggest festival in China. As we prepared the ingredients for the hotpot, Ava, ma-in-law and I realised we had bought far too much food for just ourselves (plus Ava's "uncle"), so we also invited a couple of our foreign friends, Sam and Gemma, who study Chinese at Robert's School. They helped us work our way through perhaps half of the food before we were all full up. Guess what we're eating for the rest of the week...?
I went out for a hotpot meal with Ava and a couple of her friends last night. It was a surreally international affair. One of her friends works for an Australian company, the food was Vietnamese [check out the revolutionary poster on the wall] and the accompanying background music was South African. All enjoyed in China, of course. We had a nice goodbye meal for Monique and Peter [back of the photo] this evening at a Japanese restaurant. They are off next month to teach English in Morocco and will be very much missed at our school. They sit opposite me in the Teacher's Office and I always describe them as the "grin/groan" pair. Monique was generous enough to laugh at any and all of my awful puns while Peter would groan if it was bad and go ominously silent if it was really bad. Kunming's loss is Morocco's gain.
I hosted my annual Eurovision party here last night, thanks to a DVD recording sent by my UK friend, Ratch. Only five friends and colleagues came this time, so we had plenty of food and drink to go around. None of us was particularly impressed with the Swedish winning song, "Euphoria", but then the UK entry was no better. We had most fun predicting (with some accuracy) the political voting of each nation! Fellow teachers Monique and Peter (left) are moving to Morocco next month, so it was a chance to say goodbye to them. Jan and his wife (and fellow teacher) Juvy, in the centre, are having a baby later in the year, so they'll return to the Philippines for that. And our Australian teacher Ross, and French teacher Manou, both left a few weeks ago, too. So there's a big turnaround of foreign staff next term, Emily (right) is a local, so at least I'll see her again. Ma-in-law made dumplings and then headed for bed. Jiajia was working until late and arrived just as everyone was leaving. A fun evening all the same.
The foreign teachers and our secretaries were all invited to Robert's (my boss) house for a marvellous barbecue meal yesterday. Andrew, one of the foreign teachers and a regular badminton adversary of mine, used to be a cook in a restaurant, so spent most of the day preparing the dishes and concocting various yummy sauces. By 7pm, I had won the pre-meal mahjong game and we settled down to burgers, chicken legs, bean salad, green salad, roast vegetables and two huge racks of ribs! Then some table-tennis and Wii games to work off a few of the calories before heading home. Great fun. Jiajia and I hosted a nice evening yesterday with a bunch of foreigners from my school. We offered DIY pizzas (dough bases, with a wide choice of ingredients, as half the visitors were vegetarians or similar) followed by fruit salad and cream. Plenty of snacks, drinks and a silly game of "guessing lists" made for a fun time.
We met up with some friends for a huge buffet lunch yesterday. We know Peter and Karen, next to Jiajia and I, from when they briefly lived in Kunming. They have two lovely kids, Connie and Cosmo [left and right, centre]. Poor Cosmo dislocated his neck 6 months ago jumping on a football (?!) and has had to wear a brace since then. The family were heading off for a holiday in Macau, but managed to meet up with us en route.
After saying our goodbyes, Jiajia headed off to the markets again to buy more stock for her store. It's always interesting to see her at work, picking out which items she thinks will sell, accepting some prices given to her immediately, while bargaining hard about others. She has a great rapport with all the shopkeepers, despite only seeing them briefly once a month. In this store, she persuaded the salesman to show me his monkey impression for the camera! Earlier this week I had dinner at the house of a Chinese teacher from my school and was fascinated by their large aquarium - home to fish big and small. Unlike many such tanks in China, it also had a nice selection of real plants, so the fish looked like they were in a more natural setting. It reminded me of my recent snorkeling in the Philippines. But yesterday Jiajia and I visited a friend's house for dinner and discovered a much more unusual pet. A baby owl! It was very tame and apparently likes to fly around their large flat. But with the wife due to have a baby in a month, I sincerely hope the bird doesn't grow too much bigger or hungrier. The other big surprise in their flat was a whole room devoted to Buddhism. The husband is a keen devotee and it felt like walking into a mini-temple with incense burning and recorded chanting in the background. Luckily, the evening meal did include some "meat for the visitors"! I spent a fun evening yesterday with friends in a seventh storey flat. So we had amazing views of the Kunming skyline and, being the last day of Spring Festival (Lantern Festival), there were fireworks going off outside all evening. After some tasty Chinese food, rustled up by Gemma [right], we played "Bananagrams" (like speed Scrabble) and then "Ticket to Ride" (like Risk with trains). Modesty forbids me revealing the winner of both games!
Jiajia and I are sharing our holiday trip with "CAL" a Kunming family we know well [above]. "Catherine" speaks very good English and gave a speech at our Chinese wedding. Her husband, Liu Zhen, is a kindly man with more English than he lets on. This is his first visit to another country. And their daughter, Ai Ran, is full of fun. It's her first new country too. We spent today island-hopping together, which involves skimming between small islands on a hired outrigger boat and snorkelling whenever we see some fish or coral in the clear seas below. Great fun.
Old college friends of mine, and their growing families, meet annually at a beautiful old country house in Britain and, although I can't join with them often these days, they always think of me and send me photos of them having fun. This year they sent me a little puzzle - they had lined up for photos in three different groupings and challenged me to guess the reason behind each order. The first two are fairly easy, but I struggled with the third. For guesses and the answer click on "Comments" above.
|
AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
May 2024
Tags
All
|