An unexpected visitor

One of the puppies showed up in the cafeteria today while I was eating with one of my students. We’re pretty sure now that he doesn’t have an owner. But he is still alive and seems to be thriving off the generosity and attention from people at our school. I guess he is the school’s puppy now.

The best part was we were eating on the second floor. So my question is, did he take the escalator or the stairs?

Enjoying a nice sun patch after his meal

A few nights ago, one of the professors at our school wanted us to go out to dinner with him. We thought we were going to his house to make jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) because when we last ate with him, he and his wife told us that we should come over to make jiaozi with them soon.

But to our surprise, after he picked us up, instead of driving to his house, we drove to the fanciest restaurant we’ve been to in China.

We live in an area of Tianjin that is famous for its architecture. This part of the city was occupied by the British and other European countries back in the day when China was being fought over by Western powers. So all of the architecture is old and Western-style.

The restaurant that we went to used to be a residence of some British government officials. Now the center rooms have been turned into elegant waiting rooms, and each of the inner rooms has been turned into a private dining room filled with fancy antiques and decorations (some rooms are Western and some are Chinese).

When we first arrived, we knew it was fancy because the hostesses came out to meet us with umbrellas and walked us from the car to the door. When was the last time a McDonald’s employee walked us in with an umbrella? Um…never.

Then we were escorted to our private dining room where some of the professor’s friends were waiting. (The friends were the ones paying for the meal. We found out later that they want me to tutor their daughter. Smooth move, buying us a fancy dinner first. How could I say no after that? Haha)

When they told the waitress we wanted to order, she brought in an iPad menu. What??? We got to scroll through pictures of the dishes and touch the ones we wanted. Then a green check mark would appear on the screen on the ones we had touched.

At one point, the professor leaned over to us with the iPad and asked if we wanted shark fin. I looked down to see if the price was listed. Yup. 388 kuai. (That’s like an entire week’s worth of meals, including food for both of us.) We had just learned at the Aquarium of the Bay that eating shark fin is a travesty, so I politely told him that maybe we could try something else. He found another fish selection for us that he said would be just as good. (And it was only 255 kuai.) So that was one dish. We don’t know what the other dishes cost, but we’re guessing about the same general price each.

For six people, they ended up ordering 13 dishes, so we’re assuming the total bill came out to over 2500 kuai. Almost a month’s salary for one of us. Dang.

In light of the upscale-ness of the situation, I thought it would be prudent to try everything they ordered, no matter how gross it sounded. Fortunately, most of it didn’t sound too gross. (I think they were being sensitive to my American stomach.) But the puffer fish from the Yangtze river and the iced goose liver cubes wouldn’t usually make my list of things to try.

I’m glad I tried a bit of everything, though, because I did find that I liked it all. (Well, except the puffer fish wasn’t so great. It was too fishy tasting.) But even the other fish dish the professor recommended in lieu of shark fin was really good. And I normally can’t stand seafood in China, so I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s a look at a few of the more visually attractive dishes:

Delicious shrimp (this was one of my favorite dishes) with an incredible carved bird garnish that was, I think, made of carrot?

Tai Ji Soup, half of the soup is spicy and half is not spicy. Shaped like a yinyang symbol

Mashed Chinese yams in a fancy curly shape on top of a carrot slice, topped with a dab of blueberry jam

The most surprising of the dishes because it turned out to taste so good. Goose liver cubes inside a sculpture of ice. Literally, that teardrop sculpture and the plate underneath were carved out of ice. Amazing.

Matt says I should also write when I’m happy so you all don’t think that we hate being in China

It’s true, most of our lives are very happy here, but I tend to just enjoy life when it’s good instead of writing about it. So lest our readers get a skewed perspective, here is a happy Monday night blog post!

After Matt got home from teaching his afternoon classes (which last until 5:40 pm, so late!) we decided we would not talk about or think about teaching all night! It was delightful. I am very grateful for my wonderful, amazing, best husband in the world!

We went to the school cafeteria (canting in Chinese, which actually sounds like tzahn-ting in a high-pitched tone) and ordered some rice dishes that we like to eat often. We had some good conversation and then came home and watched the movie Red on our gigantic projector screen.

The school provided us with a decent-sized TV, but the quality of the picture is really bad. It’s okay for watching the news, but for movies or other TV shows, you can’t see what’s happening when the scene is dark because  the color is so bad. We figured if we ever want to have people over to watch a movie or play Kinect, we should have a screen that they can actually see. We thought about getting a better TV, but the cheapest, smallest one we could find was still over 1000 kuai. So we started looking into the cost for a projector.

Most of our classrooms are not equipped with projectors, just a chalkboard. I haven’t used a chalkboard in about…oh, I don’t know, 15 years maybe? I can’t completely remember if my high school had chalkboards, but I’m pretty sure we already had whiteboards by then. So anyway, chalk is pretty nasty and it’s not easy to write a ton of notes on the board. It’s always possible to print notes and whatnot for our students, but when you have over 150 students, that’s a lot of time printing. We do get to print for free at our school if we use the printing office, but not all of the people who work there speak English, and our Chinese level doesn’t always get the job done like we want.

So we thought investing in a projector could kill two birds with one stone. We’d have a screen to watch things on at our apartment and we can take it to our classes and project powerpoint presentations and other media on the wall for our students instead of printing hundreds of sheets a week or writing tons of stuff on a chalkboard. (I also forgot to mention that I switch classrooms for every class, so I can’t even just write stuff on the board once and use it multiple times. Nope, I have to rewrite it for every single class.)

A couple of weeks ago one of our friends who has lived in Tianjin for a long time hooked us up with some of his friends who sell electronics. The projector ended up being a little bit more expensive than we would have paid in the US, but I feel like it’s been worth it. Teaching is a lot less stressful with the projector, and we get to use it in our free time as well.

Much better!

The original TV, now sitting in a corner behind the bookcase

In case you were wondering, Red was okay. Kind of weird, sort of funny but tried a little too hard. I guess we would give it about 2 stars. Now I’m off to read a little before bed and NOT think about teaching! There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow…

As I mentioned in a recent post, cereal is something we’ve been missing here in China. We’ve spotted some in a few Western-style grocery stores, but it was 40 kuai for one small box. Way too much for our meager salary.

My personal obsession with cereal has even caused me to have regular dreams about finding cheap cereal here. No joke, about once a week I dream about finding cereal we can afford. Then I wake up so happy, thinking that I can just go to the kitchen and eat some cereal, until I dejectedly realize it was just a dream.

Last night, we decided to try shopping at Walmart. It’s about a 30 minute bus ride from where we live, so we hadn’t really shopped there before.

After picking up some winter clothing items, we headed downstairs (all the grocery department stores are multi-level in Tianjin) and checked out the food selection.

One of the first things I noticed in the refrigerated section was that they had real, honest-to-goodness milk. Most of the grocery stores just have boxed milk or yogurt in a bottle that looks like milk.

So I had a sliver of hope that if Walmart carried fresh milk, it just might carry cereal. Still, I expected that if it did have cereal, it would be as expensive as the other stores.

As we walked from the refrigerated section to the boxed goods section, I glanced up and literally had my dreams come true.

Just as I dreamed so many times, I walked past several center displays and found one with CEREAL ON SALE. In my dreams, the cheapest the cereal had gone was 20 kuai a box. But in Walmart, the cereal was only 12.5 kuai a box! I was so excited, I started singing the Lion King song to Matt. (You know, the one where Simba is being held triumphantly above Pride Rock.)

Granted, the selection wasn’t great, but when you’ve been deprived of cereal this long, you take what you can get. We got one box of each kind of cereal available (Corn Flakes and Coco Balls. Forget Coco Puffs, it’s Coco Balls in China.) We went back to the refrigerated section and get some fresh milk to accompany our new cereal.

The first bite today was pretty much the most amazing thing I’ve eaten in China.

Naaaaaazigonya!