Daily Discovery
April 2018
April 30: The last day in Chengdu before heading back to Wuwei brought us to the top of a building in Chengdu, to take a picture in front of the giant panda - as pandas, of course, are one of the main attractions of Chengdu given the big Panda Research Station and tourist spot just in the north side of the city.
April 29: My dad was able to find a super cheap flight to China, and a few days off of work, so I'm super fortunate that he was able to make it over to visit me again! This time we decided to first visit Chengdu, and hang out with my host family there.
We spent the evening at a little bar near the river in Chengdu, enjoying music, playing games, chatting, and drinking a bit of the local beer - overall, a great night.
April 28: I went to the ice cream store across from the school for a bit of a refreshing treat on this hot afternoon, and I was feeling like a chocolate sundae would hit the spot.
Unfortunately, I was under the assumption that the sundaes would be made with the vanilla ice cream. It actually turns out that the standard is made with the swirl of vanilla and matcha (green tea flavored) ice cream, and topped with the chocolate sauce.
So, today I discovered that chocolate and green tea is a flavor combination, though, personally I'm unsure why ...
April 27: Getting dinner tonight with some friends, and I ran back into the tea of Wuwei - a local specialty, filled with nuts, dried fruits, flowers, and of course tea. It's a bit sweet, but has a lot of great flavor, and definitely could help someone convert to liking tea!
April 26: One of the things my host mother taught me how to make last weekend when I was visiting was homemade milk tea - pretty simple, pretty delicious.
Simply boil some milk and add in the black tea, and let it steep for a few minutes, and you have a perfect reddish milk tea - add a tiny bit of sweetener if you like, and some tapioca bubbles for texture, and you're ready to go.
April 25: Over the weekend, my host mother and her friend showed me how to use some good old origami to transform the fliers that you get bombarded with while walking on the street into nice little trash boxes, perfect for any dining or living room table.
I forgot, though, how to make it, so luckily my host mother was able to send me a video on WeChat reminding me of the key steps...
April 24: For the train ride home, my host mother snuck in a bit of food for me - this time, a new version of the classic 'dirty dirt bao' that I have shared before, only this one was matcha flavored .. or something like a green tea flavor.
It's not as good, in my opinion, as the chocolate one, but then, I do love myself some chocolate. For train food, however? It's great. Though, eating something like this on a train definitely marks me as a foreigner.
April 23: One of the other perks of being in Chengdu is checking out and touring the great selection of snacks/food shops located just outside every large university - and Chengdu has enough of those to keep me busy for awhile.
Today, we stumbled across a huge line of peopling waiting for these fried potatoes - so what did we do? Just jump in line and wait ... and wait ... and finally, about 50 minutes later, we had them... sweet and spicy sauce, deep friend potatoes, crispy on the outside, fluffy and soft on the inside ... yep, it was worth the wait!
April 22: So, I taught my host mom how to make cookies yesterday, and she is already showing the brain of a great baker. We didn't have any chocolate, so she pulls out a Snickers bar from the freezer, and suddenly we are now in the cookie making business yet again!
April 21: Luckily, I was able to see my host family in Chengdu during this weekend after training sessions were finished, and even more fortunately, they had a lot of friends over for a dinner party.
And the food. was. great! It was a real spring/summer feast, complete with sangria (non-alcoholic versions available), chips and salsa, and some cookies that I taught my host mother how to make before everyone came. Oh, and a pizza she made using the recipe I taught her a few months ago! Make sure to check out all of the pictures!
April 20: I'm back on the train to Chengdu today, heading to Chengdu for a week of training for VSV (Volunteers Supporting Volunteers) and working to reinvent our support network and get it better set up for the next year and the future in general. So, it's another train ride tonight.
Luckily, this time I packed a few snacks for the ride and for breakfast in the morning: little date muffin type things from a bakery on the way to the train station.
April 19: Next week is the midterm exam, so it's time to do a little bit of a quick print job on the office computer.
I think out of all the teachers in the department, I work this printer the hardest sometimes. Luckily, it hasn't failed me yet!
April 18: I was just a little bit hungry tonight so I detoured on my way home past the cafeteria and picked up a few of these mini baozi - steamed buns filled with eggs and leeks, and only ¥2 for 3 of them.
A great steal and just enough to get me through the night of lesson planning for classes later in the week!
April 17: Time for a little bit of a homesickness to return - so back to the cafeteria for a little bit of a comfort-food lunch: 炒面 or stir-fried noodles (I think?). Anyways, it's a delicious combination of sauteed vegetables and noodles together with a (tiny bit of spice) spicy tomato based sauce, which I augment with a few splashes of vinegar to kick the flavors into true comfort food zone.
April 16: Every time I have showed lotus root before on this blog, it has always been in its delicious, cooked, ready to love state. Can you pick it out in this picture?
Yeah, it's the ugly, dirty looking, tubular appendages attached like beads to one another in the top right. But don't let looks fool you! It's delicious.
April 15: Those trees I was talking about the students planting earlier in the month? Yeah, they're huge, and I ran across some new ones on campus, too, that might even be larger than the 15 feet I predicted last time I mentioned them.
Their size, combined with the hard, rocky ground here, suddenly makes me realize that those pickaxes they were hauling were probably extremely useful.
April 14: Now, I don't mean this daily discovery to be a derogative post, or to be taken wrong, so I'm not posting it to make fun of the English sayings in China, but only to highlight how common English is used (and often incorrectly) in clothing that students everywhere will wear, even if they don't know what it says. It is actually something I see every day.
Oftentimes the mistakes are just two words switched, or in the case of brandnames, just a single incorrect letter (like nile instead of nike, or fjorida instead of florida) though I feel that perhaps these mistakes are intentional.
April 13: The market feature today is fresh pineapple. You can select the one you would like and it will be peeled for you to take home and enjoy (though I did wash it off first).
I managed to buy two of them for ¥12 and I never realized how much pineapple was, well, actually in a pineapple. These two will definitely be enough to keep me full of fruit for, oh, let's say, a day or so. (I love fresh pineapple.)
April 12: Happy Birthday to my friend Amy! My friend and colleague who invited me to her house last weekend to play some majiang also invited me to join her birthday dinner hot pot celebration. While we were waiting for some others to arrive, we played a pick-up card game - it was a new one for me, but easy to learn.. luckily I didn't lose too much money as we transformed the toothpicks into chips worth ¥0.1 each (about a penny).
April 11: A trip to the market, a bunch of vegetables, and a feeling that perhaps the best way to cook them is to just cook them all together ... so that is what I did. I'm not sure what to call this dish, but I just sauteed some fresh mushrooms, frozen corn, onions, peppers, tofu and cauliflower. A little bit of a lackluster discovery today, but it shows easy it is to acquire fresh vegetables every day.
April 10: And just like that, the weather can change on a dime it seems: one day sunny, the next sun-less. A lot of dust and dirt in the area today .. I'll stay inside when I'm not teaching.
(No, my window is not dirty!)
April 9: Why not try to recreate my own version of a (granted: unhealthy) food from home that I have eaten in a long time? That's right, there is no reason not to!
So I cut up some potatoes, soaked, double deep fried em, salted em, and voila! French fries. Now, I didn't have any ketchup but it was still pretty darn good - at least, when I was eating. But the first time eating this much fried food caught up with me later and I was feeling just a touch queasy.
April 8: A few of my student friends (not my students, but friends from campus) invited me to hang out with them and go for a walk at the botanical garden this afternoon. So we grabbed some lemon teas and went for a nice walk among the just-start-to-bloom-again greenery.
April 7: Saturday is here - and I was able to hang out with some of my friends and colleagues here in Wuwei. We went to one of their houses, made dinner together, played some Settlers of Catan, and then finished off the evening with a few games a majiang! (mahjong!)
April 6: It's a Friday night, and this afternoon the English club asked me to help them plan an activity for this evening - not a lot of notice, but what can you do? The fun must go on.
So, I searched high and low in my apartment and found a few hula hoops, and searched in the back of my high school student council brain, and came up with an hour's worth of team building/bonding activities that we could do outside by the pond.
It worked pretty well - hula hoop races, the human knot, relay races - and was lots of fun on a Friday night.
April 5: My latest order (or just my second order, really) of online shopping came in the mail today, and I'm pretty excited - I hope it works.
It's originally a fat separator for broths and soup stocks, but I thought it would be great for separating cream from whole milk that I can buy right outside my apartment... if so, this will be amazing for making whipped cream, ice cream and butter in the future!
April 4: Students are done planting trees, so it is back to normal classes here - well, almost normal.
After class, a few students randomly decided to give me some candies that they had .. I'm not sure why today of all days, but it's just another random moment of kindness! It was also a random moment of discovery, since it was a new candy I've never seen/tried before ... corn flavored hard candy. Yeah, it actually tasted like corn. It wasn't too bad - definitely worth trying if you ever see it.
April 3: So, today the students are also out planting trees, and it's heavy duty tree planting! Cue the shovels, pickaxes, axes, and 15ft tall trees! I tagged along with the students, chatting for a bit, and then left when the students told me that "I should take a rest."
April 2: There's definitely a very disconcerting feeling when you walk into a classroom and it's empty, and you wonder ... did I forget what day it is? Did I miss my other classes? Did the rooms change?
Turns out today that this wasn't the case. Just my class students were out planting trees on campus today, and no one told me ahead of time. Off to go see the newest green space on campus!
April 1: When my dad visited over winter break, he brought me a nice bag of coconut shreds ... which I put to good use today make myself some coconut custard cream thingy - with my grandmother's recipe, which is of course the best.
