Daily Discovery
January 2019
January 31: It's the last day of January and the last day of teaching my host mom a new food to cook, mostly because we are running out of ingredients here and things that I know how to teach her with the ones that we have ...
Soft pretzels .. they weren't bad, but I think they were not as good as they could have been. Fortunately, my host mother is impressed by almost any type of bread, and they looked cool, so it was a success. If only there was a cheese sauce to go along with it...
January 30: My host mom seems to have accumulated a bunch of cheese over the last year - she loves to randomly buy cheese and butter when she sees it on sale in the store or on her phone, and when I come and visit we usually find a use for it.
Today, we used a bit of that to make some homemade macaroni and cheese .. and it was really a quite delicious part of our half-American, half-Chinese lunch!
January 29: I'm mostly just relaxing with host family these days - it's nice to not have any commitments piling up in the near future with a lot of time to read, watch movies, and cook food (as I'm sure you've seen in these last few posts), which is kind of what Spring Festival means for a lot of people in addition to lots of time with family, I think.
Today, my host mother and I went to the shopping center near the apartment complex, because she wanted some ice cream, so we ended up going to a Dairy Queen - which she didn't even know was in America.. so it was a first for both of us here in China. It was pretty similar and comparable to America, except for the price - it was quite cheap here! Only 8 RMB for the single, dipped cone here!
January 28: A few nights ago we went to a friend's house to eat some homemade food, and one of her friends is an exceptional cook who sells many foods out of her home via WeChat, and does very well.
She taught us how to make these 土豆饼, or potato pancake-style foods that is kind of reminiscent of the Spanish tortilla breakfast. We tried our hand at making it today for breakfast - I added a little bit of Chinese (tomorrow we might add some more vegetables) - and it was quite good. I'll definitely be adding it into my repertoire once I head back to site.
I'm back in a place with good WiFi for a bit so I hope to be more consistent writing about my discoveries!
January 27: Today was a phenomenal day - my host mom and I went with some of her friends to a small town in the outskirts of Chengdu and we ate lunch.
Then, we went to her friends' friends' home where they have their own orange farm ... these were the freshest oranges I've ever eaten, as I picked them off of the tree myself, and they were also among the sweetest and juiciest. They are simply incredible. All together, my host mom and her friends and I bought a total of 145 pounds of oranges, and we even got the friend's discounts of only 5RMB per pound.
It was a unique experience, and a fun one, despite the rain and mud that will forever stick in the tread of my shoes.
January 26: It's back to my host family's house for me - I'm always super thankful for them and everything they do for me.
Using some of the vegetarian sausage I mentioned a few posts earlier, we decided to make some breakfast sandwiches. Grilled egg, sausage and cheese sandwiches, with a bit of tomato thrown in next time when we don't forget it, hopefully.
Cheese is a loose term, though, since my host mom loves the Kraft single variety of "cheese." Either way, it's pretty delicious and reminiscent of home.
January 25: Happy Birthday, Hannah!
It's our last day of training and I am spending our lunch time with some of my friends and fellow PCVs as we all prepare to head out on our true winter vacation which commences this afternoon.
Many of them will travel to other countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, India and beyond) to travel, but I'll spend a week and Spring Festival with my host family in Chengdu before heading off on a tour of big cities in China - Shanghai, Xian and Beijing.
We got a lunch together today, and this restaurant has really delicious dumplings and noodles - but if you don't know Chinese, you might not think so.. or even know what you're ordering, as sometimes the English translations are just a little .. off.
My favorite? "The jacket is torn to the side" or what should be "broth-less hand cooked noddles tossed with eggplant."
January 24: Sichuan University campus is full of discoveries - it's also the place where the Peace Corps office is located, and it is located between the hotels where both cohorts are staying for training this week, and I've walked through it multiple times each day to travel to sessions for training. Along the way I discovered this fenced-off wall surrounding one of the buildings on campus and I thought it was cool how the vines (roots?) from one of the huge trees growing inside the fence has grown and overtaken the metal posts, with such strength as to start bending them.
January 23: Of course, being back in Chengdu has a few things that are also less than ideal.. namely, a ton of construction blocking the roads, traffic jams that significantly delay travel times, and huge Mobike mountains from discarded dockless bike-share bikes.
January 22: Another Chengdu specialty was eaten again for me today: 糖油果子, or ... sugar oil balls. It's a sweet dough that's friend in oil, covered with a bit of sugar syrup and sprinkled with a few sesame seeds.
The quality can vary tremendously depending on where you buy it - some places are really not very good, particularly if it is cold and/or not fresh, but the hotel area has a nice little shop that sold me a stick of 4 for 3 RMB... I ate one before the picture, sorry! :)
January 21: I have moved into the hotel now to stay for the week during our training and I ran into a incredibly friendly woman who runs a restaurant next to the hotel, where I got a nice serving of 冒菜 (mao cai) for dinner.
It's simple: pick out the vegetables and meats that you would like, sold by weight, and she cooks them up for you, adds a nice broth and a side of pickled vegetables and rice if you'd like. This only cost me 12.5 RMB, and it was delicious and just what I needed after a long day.
There's a saying in China you know: 冒菜是一个人的火锅, 火锅是很多人的冒菜; mao cai is hot pot for one person, and hot pot is mao cai for many people.
January 20: It's fascinating that in China a large business opportunity exists for washing dishes. Many restaurants don't wash their own dishes, instead just throwing away the scraps and piling the dirty dishes in (oftentimes blue-colored) bins that are picked up by an independent company that washes and replaces them with these clean and plastic-wrapped sets... I think it's fairly cheap, but it's also an incredible waste of plastic, which makes me sad each time I sit down at a table and these sets show up.
January 19: If you didn't already know, English teaching is an incredibly lucrative and profitable business in China (except for Peace Corps Volunteers, of course), but particularly in the large and financially prosperous cities like Chengdu where many parents will pay a lot of money for extra classes outside of school for their students. It's essentially the standard here, and schools pop up all over the place to sell these services. Here's an advertisement from the bus for just that: English classes with only real foreign English teachers.
It's sad and disappointing, though, that the perception of a real English speaking teacher is one that is white, and this is an issue that many PCVs also face at their site: many people believe that real Americans are white... many Americans believe that, too, but I am try to make sure my students understand that this is not true, and I am thankful for my fellow PCVs who are working to change that perception here in China.
January 18: One of the benefits of being back in Chengdu, and at the same hotel for training, is knowing the area and the vendors that frequent this neighborhood.
One of our favorite examples is the man we affectionately refer to as "bread guy," and he has definitely served his fair share of Volunteers. He makes fresh bread out of the oven/cart set-up on the back of his bike, taking fresh dough and stuffing it with either sugar (3RMB) or pork (4RMB), rolling it out and slapping it on the side of the oven to cook for just a few minutes.
It's hot, fresh, delicious and a great business he runs almost every afternoon and early evening. I've been eating his food for almost 18 months now .. wow.
January 17: It's back to training today, even though IST for my cohort of Volunteers doesn't officially begin for another few days. Since I was going to be in Chengdu anyways for these few days with my host family, I was asked to help facilitate a few sessions for the first-year Volunteers who have a longer training than we do.
It's back at the hotel where I have spent almost all of my training hours in China, perhaps for the last time!
January 16: My host mom and I are both vegetarians, as you may know, and today we went shopping at one of Chengdu's vegetarian-only shops.. you might call it a "fake meat" shop, as most of the products are vegetarian versions of common foods like sausages, fish, bacon, and the like... but they are cheap and actually fairly delicious compared to some of the things I've had before in the US.
It's a little hole in the wall shop, but it's a great discovery for the next week of experimentation in the kitchen.
January 15: Tonight my host mom took me to a new restaurant at the base of the apartment buildings where we live, where restaurants are always popping up every week even as others die off as trends change or move to another location... and this is 串串 (chuan chuan), which is kind of like hotpot, where vegetables and meats are placed on skewers and cooked in a soup.
Here, however, it's the traditional, earliest form of 串串 where there is only one pot, and everyone's food is cooked together before being placed in a smaller pot of soup at the table for holding before eating. There are dozens of different options and the price is cheap - 1RMB for every 3 sticks (some vegetables and meats have multiple sticks for each piece [quail eggs have 2, and most meats have at least 3, for example]).
January 14: It's back to Chengdu for me - and now that I know Chengdu pretty well (at least the areas where my host family lives and the area where PC staff works and hosts trainings), I can often forget how large Chengdu actually is...
Until of course I take a walk to try and find some tomato paste (unsuccessful, by the way, even in the international supermarkets that I visited) and re-discover the concrete jungle that is Chengdu. It's quite beautiful in it's own unique, as you stand there and marvel at the huge constructs of human hands and the ivy that grows up their sides ... but I digress.
January 13: I'm packing and getting ready for my train to Chengdu tonight - it kicks off about three dozen days of travelling away from my site in Wuwei: I'll be spending time with my host family in Chengdu, participating in training at our annual IST (in-service training) with all of my fellow PCVs, enjoying Spring Festival, and then heading out to Shanghai, Xian and Beijing for a bit of travelling and sightseeing before the semester begins again in the end of February.
Packing is boring, however, and I didn't discover anything besides a bunch of clothes in my drawer and trash to empty from my fridge before leaving home, so I want to post some cool pictures of my friend's new instrument. It's a classical Chinese instrument called the 古筝 (similar to the English named zither), which is a 13 to 25 string plucked instrument that is very long (and looks very difficult to play!). It's fascinating, too, because to play it, you wrap the plectrum (like a guitar pick) to your fingers and use those to play. Eventually, you'll use 8 fingers, each with its own plectrum, but my friend is still learning so currently she just uses three. It sounds great, and the sound was really vibrant and strong that I almost didn't think it was an acoustic instrument at first.. and went looking for the battery!
January 12: It's fortunate that I met a couple of good friends last Spring, and even more fortunate that we have plenty of opportunities to hang out.
They told me earlier this week that they bought a "home BBQ machine" on Taobao (the online/app-based shopping site where they buy almost everything), and invited me to their home to try it out today.
They also raise their own lambs on their farm and had butchered them this week, so they had plenty of fresh lamb to barbecue - I stuck to the delicious vegetables. It's a versatile machine: small hot pot on the top, grilling surface, oven underneath, and roasting compartment for skewers!
January 11: I couldn't tell today, on the streets, whether or not these people were putting lights in the trees or taking them out ... some people seemed to be pulling them out of the trees, while others were unraveling new strands of lights, so I was a bit confused.
I was fascinated, however, to see the tools that they were using the manipulate and place/remove these lights: long bamboo poles. It's quite ingenuous: light-weight, economical, natural, and likely cheaper and easier to produce than a metal/plastic pole!
January 10: It's been sad (for me) to see Wuwei change so much over the course of the year and a half that I have been living here. One of the largest changes has been the closing of the open-air markets that were my favorite place to visit in Wuwei. Sad, too, because I lost a lot of my vendor friends and a lot of the high quality produce and food that I had found and relied upon for my meals each week.
Luckily, this week, I found another stand/store run by the same tofu shop that I frequented in the market - they had some of the best tofu I'd had, much better than other tofu vendors, and I was sad to see them close.
I celebrated finding them today by buying some 豆浆 (soy milk) to take home and enjoy. Their motto from the bag, "新鲜的，干净的，才能放心的." Or ... "Only if it's fresh, and clean, can you rest assured [that it's high-quality]."
January 9: I picked up my medicine yesterday, and it's been a long time since I bought/used medicine that I can't recall whether or not the packaging is the same. In any case, this style of packaging is ubiquitous in China; even the tooth paste containers are packaged in this manner, with the tube completely sealed, and the cap containing a needle on the outside that you use initially to break the seal. It's pretty clever.
January 8: It's day two of three for final exams for the students, and it's an exam of sorts for me, too: finding the pharmacy.
I needed to stop by and pick up some medicine for a rash that I seem to have developed somehow.. and like many things that are mundane in the US, it's an adventure for me here.
I had to study up on some pertinent Chinese vocabulary beforehand, go to a few pharmacies to find what I needed, take a few pictures with the pharmacist after we chatted for 15 minutes waiting for someone to stop by and deliver the medicine from another location, and I perused the shelves of Chinese medicine they had to offer.
There was a glass case full of leaves and roots that I assume they would grind up, weigh out, and distribute if you wanted them - using the same plastic plates that are in my apartment and (I swear) half of the apartments in China.
January 7: It's the last week of classes, and that means it's time to start wrapping things up for the semester .. and begin planning and preparing for IST (In-Service Training) in Chengdu. The second year PCVs (like myself) only have 1 week of training, while first year PCVs have two; I'll be heading to Chengdu anyways to stay and hang out with my host family, but since I'll be around, I was asked to help out and share my experiences preparing students for the AB level English exams (you might remember a few Daily Discovery posts about those last month).
One of the things that makes preparing students for these exams difficult is the fact that some questions are ambiguous - there are multiple correct answers that I see for a few questions, and I have no idea what the exam expects students to know. Take a look at this example - while each answer leads to a different meaning to the sentence, at least three of the answers are correct in my opinion, and I have no way of knowing which one the exam deems 'most correct.'
January 6: I have always been interested in coins and paper currency for different countries, and even older coins in the US.. collecting them, finding them, and comparing some of the differences that exist everywhere.
In China, I was surprised when I came to Wuwei and encountered "yi jiao" paper bills. They are very small pieces of currency, both in size and value, and I didn't find them in Chengdu. They are, however, very common and useful in the markets here, where their low value is often important to the sale. Each bill is worth ¥0.1, a Chinese dime if you will, but worth about 1.6 US cents, which makes me imagine that printing them can't be cost much less to produce (though, the costs are likely reduced since there isn't going to be much, if any, anti-counterfeit design inclusions - I found online that a US 1 dollar bill costs 5.5 cents per note to produce, for reference).
Sometimes, however, the supermarkets don't have any of these bills or coins in the register, which leaves them with a quandary: how do you give change? Well, here's the solution. Instead of the change, you receive a piece of gum from the bucket conveniently placed right on top of the register.
January 5: It's that time of the semester ... and definitely not my favorite part of being a teacher: grading.
It's terrible. I really don't like it. I love teaching the students in class, but spending hours reading and correcting exams .. that's not fun, and I imagine that this is a fairly common view among teachers.
But it must be done. And so I'll settle back on my couch with a red pen, a few liters of water, a splurge-purchased-slice (or two) of date bread (really, it's actually cake...) and get ready for the next 7 hours. As they say in China, 加油!
January 4: I think that you might be getting sick of hearing about sweet potatoes - even though I never get sick of eating them here - but you'll have to hold on for just a few more posts about them.
They're everywhere, as you know, and cooked over coals, in buckets, on the back of trucks .. you name it. I think it's quite fascinating, especially when I stumble across the lucrative financial implications of being a sweet potato vendor for college students who love sweet potatoes and can't cook them... The new supermarket opened up across from the campus this semester, and this winter a few sweet potato vendors popped up just outside the doors of the supermarket (literally). They sell cooked sweet potatoes for ¥6 a pound, while the raw sweet potatoes less than 20 meters away sell for ¥1.28 a pound.
One of my friends didn't think my snow writing venture would fly in the States, but what do you think about the sweet potato business pop-up business?
January 3: It's the last day of classes for me - or really, the last day of exams, since grading will be a long process later this weekend.
My finals have three components: a written exam, a spoken interview with me, and an individual spoken video project.
It looks like the end of the semester also brings a kind of exam for me.. a pop quiz, if you will - all of my students were invited to attend a meeting with school leaders where the students were instructed to give feedback on my teaching. It's an interesting system that exists, and I've learned to adapt to it.
I'm hoping that it went well, since many students came away from that meeting and wanted to share their thoughts with me about the meeting - they're all great and many wanted to assure me that they liked my class this semester... it's a better gift than the piles of fruit they gave me last week.
January 2: I'm back to the Wanda center for a bit of shopping before the last week of classes for me starts back up again. Waiting for the bus, I noticed that the bus stop has a ton of new signage talking about fire safety, which is great, and cute little signs that detail the fire number to call if there is a fire: 119.
I've often wondered what I would do if there was a fire, since I've never seen a fire in China nor even a fire truck.. but I'm not sure that it's a real possibility in my apartment complex, where everything is made of concrete.
January 1: Happy New Year! It's difficult to believe that 2019 is here already ... and my first resolution for the New Year is making sure to eat all of the fruit that is left over from my students' gifts last year.
I have two huge pomelos left to finish ... a fruit that I don't think I had even eaten before I came to China, but is surprisingly delicious. It's not too sweet, and not too sour, so it's kind of like a cross between an orange and a grapefruit, but it has a really robust flavor... and an incredibly robust peel to remove before enjoying!
Oh, yeah, and it's pretty big, each one probably the size of like a 3-4 year old's head... or a small high school gym class dodgeball.
