I promised in my last blog post that I would answer some questions. I will do that at the end of this post ☺.
One of the benefits of teaching both middle school and high school (yes there are some) is that I get to go on field trips for both grades. So this past Friday me, 7th, 8th and 9th grade students, as well as their homeroom teachers, all set out to go to the Laoshan mountains (which is quite redundant, since shan means mountain).
There we had a chance to hike around a beautiful lake that is created by a manmade dam. To be honest, I don’t really know what the point of it was, but it made me and at least half of the kids pretty tired. And when I say hike, I mean we walked around, not really much up or down.
In this picture is Owen, Tom, Vickie, Yumi, Andy, Carl and Sam. They are all 8th graders. And Owen is just about the finniest kid alive. I literally laughed right in his face once when he made some ridiculous noise. It was amazing.
But after that we scuttled our way over to this…building…factory? where we could make mantou, which is a type of Chinese bread. I would say it is pretty similar to sourdough, without the sour part. So yeah, it just pretty much tastes like dough (I don’t really like it dough, I mean though).
So all 100 or so of us crowded though a narrow hallway into a big open room that had in it only a few stainless steel tables. And in one corner was a worker that had a whole lot of dough. Each student got to run over and grab some and get to work making mantou creations. The bread “making” wasn’t really as much baking as it was playing with Playdough that we got to eat and not get in trouble for my our mommy. So what this turned into was each student, and teacher, trying to out-creative the person next to them. In this picture I have a few of the student’s creations. They also mixed in some dried berries and nuts with their dough.
While our creations were cooking (and mine was a snake, which doesn’t warrant a picture) we went outside to do some cooking of our own. Students were given huge bags of shredded potatoes, bean sprouts, a whole lot of raw meat cubes and skewers, and a bowl in which to fry it in over a fire they had to create and tend. The 8th grade class I ate with decided to cook all of the bean sprouts, and then eat them, cook all of the potatoes, and eat them, and then struggle with cooking the meat, and kind of eat that.
The meat was probably the hardest part, because you can’t really hold a tiny skewer over an open flam without getting your hand annihilated, so there is this special box which you are supposed to line with ceramic coals to cook your meat sticks. Well, my class probably spent at least an hour trying to get this right. And let me tell you, nothing says trust like eating a skewer of meat that a student cooked and shoved in your face saying: “Teacher! Eat!” Sometimes it involved spitting out a piece that was probably raw.
Our cooking adventure came to the end while the adventure to grind soybeans and soymilk to make tofu (pronounced “dofu”) began. And that’s pretty much all it is, you mix the beans in with some milk in this mill stone and you turn it and turn it until what is coming out is a pasty consistency. The perfect word to describe dofu.
Now I would like to share with you a video. Yes, a video. This is a short video of me at the tail end of my grocery shopping today. In this I give you a brief tour of the fish and meat section (which actually lacks a lot of variety) as well as me trying to ask an employee where I can find a 6 pack of coke. I would HIGHLY suggest going full screen because I was a noob and shot a vertical video. Enjoy.
And finally, the answers to both of my questions.
To Chad. Yes, I have been visited by the “pizza fairy” as I like to call it. I like to call it this because it happened the first time I went to a Chinese friends house (I only barely knew him) and ate way too much Papa Johns pizza. I got lucky and had the fairy visit me like 5 times while we were trying to play ping pong. Yes I am over it. The best way to avoid this is by not ingesting large quantities of food while simultaneously ingesting large amounts of carbonated beverages. This, in my mind, attaches a gas bubble to each particle of food and the result is like when you drop a Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke.
To kidwithgreatambition: I teach in a high school and middle school, not university, so I’m not really sure what that is like. But as far as my school goes, in high school, grades 10, 11, and 12 we prepare kids to go overseas to English speaking countries to attend university, so as they progress through our program, they take more and more English intensive courses. As for the government, they have a pretty indirect impact on my daily living. The only things that are different are that I had to register with the PSB when I entered the country (which I’m sure is the same in the US for foreigners) and get a health check. There is also a law that says there must be guards posted 24-7 at any schools, so we have to have guards let us in to our campus if we leave and want to come back, but the guards are really friendly. So, overall, I would say the government has been pretty normal for a foreign person entering their country. I hope this answers your question.
Love reading your blog & your video was a big bonus. Sounds like you fit right in, keep up the good work!
Pizza fairy. Nice.
If I were there, I would try to eat every o e of those weird foods. Except the feet.
And I would be visited by the pizza fairy.
And the cure would probably be feet.
I wish I could see the video but youtube is blocked here. Wah. I miss you Claydoh! Your pics are amahzing. Did you get a new camera? What is it?
Life in Qingdao sounds great. I’m jealous of your field trips and other nice-school amenities. When our school gets supplies it’s like one pack of markers and a box of staplers and they have to be split up between all the teachers, haha.
I bought a Canon Rebel T3 before I came to China. I knew that I would want to take a lot of pictures. And for supplies we have to go downstairs to this creepy room in the basement and ask this lady to get us things we need. I think maybe for next post I will take some pictures of when I go into the office at night. They don’t have any lights on and they leave all the windows open so there are all these weird noises. It’s great. And by great I mean I feel like I am scared of my basement again.