Playing dress up

The team went to a 180 year-old restaurant for Dan's birthday this week. The owner was very hospitable and make individual laminated membership cards for each of us with our Chinese name. My Chinese name is Fu Ming Ming. Fu (the surname, for Fullmer...) and Ming Ming (well...because I like the Ming dynasty, and Ming just once isn't enough.) The characters for it mean "Happy or Good Luck" and "Bright Light". They had some traditional Chinese wedding garb, and I jumped at the chance to wear this gorgeous head piece. Then things got weird and they made Dan wear the groom costume and had us drink water out of tea cups with our elbows locked and everything...everyone laughed a lot.

Sugar Cane

When I was a little girl in Papua New Guinea we ate sugar cane sometimes. For a few weeks here the street vendors around campus had huge sticks of sugar cane, which they would strip with a machete, and then hand to you. I decided to get some for old times sake, and lo and behold...it tastes the same as I remembered! I didn't remember how "wood-like" it was however. I got a splinter.

This week's Thanksgiving celebration reminded me of my childhood too. I met a little girl whose parents work here in China. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. Thanksgiving morning I was playing with her outside and people stopped and stared and tried to come talk to her wherever we went. She took it in stride and sometimes answered their questions and sometimes just continued her playing. I don't remember this, but my parents said that when I was in PNG I had someone come up to me and lick me to see what a white person tasted like.

Glad I remember the sugar cane instead.

Hilarity

Some things are just really funny. Take for instance, this ostrich. And the fact that saying "I am a teacher" in Chinese sounds very similar to "I am a mouse." Or the fact that a random person yelled to me, "See you tomato (the British tomato)", and I come to find that is a big joke around here. Other things which are funny also show up in the newspaper. I found an article about Long Haired Women.

Three women with hair more than a metre long met together in Nanjing of Jiangsu Province on Sunday, exchanging their secrets for nurturing hair and catching the attention of numerous passers by. Shen from Anhui Province, Zhao from Shandong Province and Shen from Jilin Province knew each other from a website targeting long-haired women and arranged the gathering. Shen from Jilin, whose hair has reached 2.3 meters in length, chereisher her long, thick hair very much as it once protected her from injury in a car accident years ago. Shen from Anhui province said that she wrote a letter to the Olypics Organization Committee in Beijing, suggesting it call 2008 long-haired women together to perform at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in 2008.

Southeast Express-Excerpt from the China Daily English newspaper.

Hilarity extends to the classroom. A few weeks ago I taught my classes a lesson on Halloween. One of our activities involved the students writing the end to a scary story. They had certain vocabulary they needed to incorporate, like "we saw a light", "screamed", "under the bed", "cobwebs" etc. I explained that cobwebs were old spider webs, and I drew a picture of one on the board.

One of the student stories read as follows....

"When we act happy we hear a noise. heard footsteps. We were screamed fortunate. We saw a light. The light ran down the hall. We saw clearly a cob. The cob was making cobwebs. We were afraid of the cob. We were talking about how to deal with this cob. We were thought about a few minutes. We decided put the cob under the bed. Surprise. We were very happy and we were went home together."

Basically, I started crying in the office when I read this. AHH...We saw clearly....a cob. We were afraid of the cob.... Fear the cob!

The best things often come directly from the mouths of those learning English. I had a group of students over for lunch and we were learning about each other's families and what our parents did for a living. One girl was explaining that her parents were fisherman and that they were very busy. She then went on to say that "There are a lot of fish in the sea." Alli and I glanced at each other and smiled. Ah.... idioms!

The Lady in the Moon

Different cultures have different celebrations and I have discovered one I'd like to make a part of my life. The Chinese people celebrate Mid-Autumn Day. It is a day of the full moon. It is a day of the mooncakes (which are dense cakes which are given and received in abundance around this time of the year).

My favorite part of the holiday is the legend behind the lady in the moon. I have been trying to get the straight story from my students, and here is what I learned...

One day there was a beautiful woman and her husband. The husband had in his posession magical pills, which would enable him to live forever. The wife wanted to preserve her beauty for her husband and so she stole the pills from him and took them herself. But what she didn't know, was that the pills also had the power to make you fly. The consequences of her theft resulted in her flying up to the moon, where she lives to this day.

A Mid-Autumn Day tradition is to look up at the full moon and miss those you love.

Talons and the art of refusal

So...I went to the school cafeteria with some students. It was about time for it to close, so the selection was limited. The only thing I recognized was a dish we call "chainsaw chicken", which is just a bunch of chicken, on the bone, in little pieces.
After checking out the other options I asked for the "chainsaw chicken". I could tell as the chicken was scooped onto my rice that it wasn't going to be that meaty, because all I heard were bones clicking against the sides of the metal bowl. Even more unfortunately, when I looked closer at my food, I saw a chicken foot dangling on the edge of the bowl, in all its phalangeal glory. Gross! I couldn't eat it. I was terrified. So, I just ate around the chicken and talked with the girls. The End.

Just kidding. They realized that I wasn't eating the food, and then made fun of me, and pointed it out to Alli and their other friends. Then they bought me new food. We had a good laugh about it, but I made a mental note to maybe just go for rice or a drink next time, or buy the students dinner on my terms, aka. sans chicken talons.

P.S. I also saw a feather.