Daily Discovery

July 31: It's time for an early morning train .. that will last all day, so I had to get up early, find some breakfast and scout out some food options for lunch and dinner on the train. Luckily, I managed to run into this Hangzhou style baozi (steamed bun) shop that was up early making food. I grabbed breakfast from a street vendor then grabbed a combination of lunch and dinner from the steamed bun/baozi shop: 7 egg and leek baozi, or soft, chewy breads stuffed with eggs and leeks and then steamed. I personally like baozi because they are easy, cheap, filling, and quite delicious if prepared well - and these definitely were - all qualities that go well with food for a day-long train ride!

Here's a look at the little steam baskets filled with baozi enticing costumers at 6am in the morning.

July 29: It's the end of of quick stop in Wuwei - this is my second and last full day in Wuwei, just enough time to wash the clothes and repack them for another month of travelling. My host family in Wuwei also just got back to Wuwei, so we had a reunion dinner of sorts: hotpot!

I've talked a lot about eating hotpot, and have showed it many times here in the Daily Discovery pages... but, I don't know if I have explained how to eat it... so I am going to explain one small part: the condiment dish that everyone has when eating hot pot. Essentially, when you eat hotpot, you have a small dish to which you can add any number of condiments: garlic, sesame seed paste, oils, peppers, cilantro, peanuts ... and the list goes on! You can add them together and then mix them up .. once the food is cooked in the pot, you can take it out and let it cool in the condiment dish, soaking up some additional flavors!

July 27: Summer Project is over - and all that's left is the travel back to Wuwei (this train ride marks my 383rd hour on a train since coming to China!). I don't have much time to relax, wash clothes and prepare for August, as I'll be leaving soon to head to Chengdu and then Hong Kong where I will meet my family for a week - I'm super excited.

Unfortunately, my train to Chengdu on the 31st was cancelled ... which means that I had to refund some tickets and scramble to find a new way to make it to Chengdu for my flight. Luckily, I found a ticket, but in the process I lost some money due to ticket cancellation fees (strange, since they cancelled the train ... but, it's only a few RMB.). I find it super interesting, however, that when you lose money by cancelling tickets, they provide you with a receipt: little slips of paper with different monetary amounts, almost like a new currency, that shows how much money you lost in the process.

July 25: Day 9 of Summer Project - back to a short digression on food: after 10 days in Jingchuan we discovered this little restaurant that serves delicious food next to the hotel - the best dish? Take a look, and guess what vegetable it is.

Did you guess eggplant? Probably not - it didn't look like eggplant, but it was perhaps some of the most delicious eggplant I have ever eaten in China. How did we find this particular dish in a menu full of hundreds of options? Well, the name was funny, we thought: 风味茄子, which we translated first as "wind-flavored eggplant," so of course we had to try that. Turns out that the translation actually means "local style eggplant," which makes more sense, though it means I might not be able to try this again for awhile - looks like I'll have to come back to Jingchuan at some point.

July 23: Day 7 of Summer Project - it's amazing how fast summer project is just cruising by. It feels like we've been in Jingchuan for hardly any time at all, and we've already had to begin planning for the training's closing ceremony on Thursday.

How did we spend the night? Playing football (soccer) with some locals... though, we were extremely outmatched - the team showed up in jerseys, already warmed up, and fresh off of their daily morning and afternoon practice sessions... many of us hadn't played a game in years, but it was still a bit of fun to hang out together in the cooler evening air.

July 21: Day 5.5 of Summer Project is here; I'm calling it Day 5.5 because it's not a teaching day, and it's not quite a free day either ... it's somewhere in between.

It's a guided excursion of the Jingchuan sights, that was a very interesting experience that I'll elaborate more upon in an upcoming blog post - but here's a first look: two busses shuttling us around to see some pretty cool history in this smaller region of Gansu.

July 19: Day 4 of Summer Project - did I mention that it was hot? If not, it is hot, and humid .. but today there was a nice treat in the afternoon to combat a little bit of this heat. One of the teachers brought two watermelons to class (they're being sold by the ton on the roadside at the moment) and we all had the chance to enjoy a refreshing snack during our afternoon break.

July 17: Day 2 of Summer Project brought the opportunity of a nice evening hike at the base of the local mountains ... a decidedly new experience for me in China, since Wuwei doesn't have many nearby areas to hike, though many of my friends in the more southern provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan tell me often of the many amazing hiking opportunities that they have. It's great to have the chance to try that out for myself here in Jingchuan.

July 15: We arrived in Jingchuan today to begin summer training - here's a quick look at all of the Volunteers from the Gansu province China 23 cohort who will be here in classes for the next two weeks, along with our two Peace Corps bosses (Program Manager and Director of Programming) and a few officials from the local education bureau and party committees.

July 13: This might be the last Daily Discovery that actually comes daily for a few days - starting tomorrow morning at 4:30 am, I'll be travelling and heading out to Summer Project in Pingliang. I'm pretty excited ... more so than I was at the beginning of the planning process - it will be a great experience.

Therefore, I'll leave an extra cute picture up for this last post for the next day or so - a picture of baby ducklings that appeared in the market today. I'm not sure how much they cost, and I don't really want to think about the end result of their sale, but they are cute.

July 11: For breakfast this morning, I was looking around the kitchen wondering what I could make with whatever I had left (since I'll be leaving for summer project in like two days!), and I found a potato, two eggs, and some frozen pepper bread that I had made earlier this week, along with a little bit of leftover cheese saved for an occasion like this: some breakfast potatoes, fried eggs, and some pepper bread. A good start to a long day of planning for the summer project classes!

July 9: Many students here on campus (mostly second year students) begin their internships tomorrow - some are in Lanzhou, and some are here in Wuwei. This afternoon I got lunch with one of the students before she starts her internship tomorrow in a hospital in the city.

She told me this was 烧烤 (shao kao)，or barbecue, and I was a little confused by that, since it looks a lot to me like 麻辣烫 (ma la tang), or a spicy soup based food ... but no matter what you call it, it was delicious! And oh, you pick out the vegetables that you want and pay by the weight of how much you choose!

July 7: It's a Saturday, again, and for the first Saturday in about a month, that means that the cooking club is back in action! Today we had a real bountiful lunch - starting with the 8am trip to the market to buy vegetables, then the 10am-12pm food preparation/cooking process, and the 12pm-1:30pm eating/chatting/washing dishes process. It was a lot of fun with some great students, who are definitely much more talented in the kitchen making Chinese foods than I am - though, they were impressed by the pizza I taught them to make! (see picture overload below)

July 5: The power and water came back this morning, and with it, the motivation to take advantage and make some of my own food - this time, I tried making a homemade version of the pepper bread that they make in the cafeteria and often sell to me for breakfast.

I had no idea what ingredients/spices they used, but I guessed, and it turned out pretty darn good, despite the fact that I later learned from students who make it at home that .. well ... my choice of spices was "interesting."

July 3: It's been raining a lot here.

I mean, a lot. Like three days in a row in a place that had rained perhaps two times previously the entire year up until now.

It was a heavy rain, too, with water pooling in the streets, prolonged enough that it started raining in the morning and continued until the sun set.

And it was my first time actually seeing these lily pads and how beautiful they are once it has rained, with all of the water on the surface forming a bright translucent gem that is repelled off of the surface of the lill pad, or tucked safely in the crook of the leaf's curves, seemingly defying all visual expectations I had based upon any prior experiences looking at water.

My last thought for the discovery: it's strange how it took coming to a place known for having little water to partially see for the first time the true beauty of water!

July 1: It's that time of year - where Peace Corps China Trainees head off to live with their host families in Chengdu for 6 weeks.

That was me a year ago - and I received a picture from host family in Chengdu bringing back all of the nostalgia of that day, waiting in the hotel lobby for the host families to arrive, seeing a host dad/mom/brother/sister walk down the stairs, each time wondering ... 'is that my host family?' until someone approaches you and leads you off to home - and an overabundance of food!

This picture is the short description that my host family received before meeting me - the information that ultimately led to me being placed with the best host family in Chengdu: just a few short lines about my English name, Chinese name (which they changed hours later), a few hobbies (reading books, writing, riding bikes, travelling, cooking) and the fact that I am a vegetarian.

I'll always be grateful for the wonderful families I have now on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.