Goodmoring Vietnam!

Things are still going smothly here and we have continued our expedition with the Germans.

On Thursday, we spent four hours preparing Chinese food in the school’s cafeteria. We first made dough for Jiao zi (dumplings) by combing water and flour then kneading by hand. Then we cut up some veggies for the jiao zi and handed those of to professionals. Then we made a dish similar to Kung poa chicken. We diced cucumber, carrots, onions, and meat and then we moved to our cooking station. First, we sautéed the chicken in oil and added soy sauce along with chicken bouillon. We then removed the chicken and quickly washed out the pan. Then put the pan back on the heat, and added some oil to sauté the veggies. Problem 1- The pan was dried completely. I now know that oil and water do not mix. Problem two- We let the oil sit in the pan to long before adding the veggies, I now know firsthand that oil has something called a flash point. Conclusion= Fire. Don’t worry though, we casually took a step back as the master chef came in and handled the problem. Needless to say, after the problem was averted, and we were told to sit down. We stole our pan back and tried again. This time successfully. The Jiao zi and our chicken dish were great, but the process to get their was even better :) In the afternoon we visited the Shi Jia Zhuang technical University. The best part of this trip was when Leonard, one of the Americans, pulled out his computer and we all started to sing. Friday was a great day as well. Well had a day long field trip.1) Hebei Acrobats- here we saw the children acrobats practice all their different acts and actually got to try some of them as well. I have some great video that i can show you when I get home.2) Chinese Tea Mall- This was a 4 story market that only sold tea and tea related products. Here each little store wanted you to come in and drink tea with them. Yes it is a business tactic but for the owners i think they just wanted to share their culture with us. It was real neat to see this one elderly couple invite us in and then prepare us tea the authentic way. We had a hard time getting out of their because they kept pouring more tea into our glasses.3) Century Park- This was a huge park much like one in the USA. Their where paths going around a lake and it would have actually been nice except the pollution was the worst i had seen since i came. We actually rented little golf cart things and Taylor, the American who lives in England, drove it around the lake. Unfortunately, in England they can’t get their licenses until they are much older so of course she crashed on a bridge and broke one of the stone supports holding up the hand rail. Fortunately, the cart was fine so we drove away like nothing had happened. 4) Buddhist Temple- This was an extremely beautiful place. It was an outdoor campus with individual shrines where people knelt befor different alters/ statues. It was neat to see a different religion being practiced than your own and defiantly a great cultural experience. In years past people would burn incense as an offering to the Buddha, but it is now illegal to do so for pollutionary reasons, so people would sacrifice the unburned incense by placing them before the alters. Saturday i went to David's little brothers birthday party. David is an AFS student from Austria. This party consisted of eating lunch at a restaurant, and then we had cake. The only real cultural difference i noticed was at the end of the meal the Waiter, brought out a bowl of noodles for each person. Later I discovered that each bowl consisted of one long noodle, symbolizing a long life. Then we went to David’s house and while the little Chinese played we just hung out in his room. The three Americans’ that went got David’s didi a pack of Snickers and a NBA picture calendar. David said that he really likes the NBA so I was actually thinking about stealing back the shirts i gave to my brother and regifting them but decided that I better not. Sunday has been quiet, I ran at the gym for a while, went out to lunch with a few friends and came home to nap, Study, Rosetta Stone, Nap, read, and email. There are just a few things going on that i can report to you. We are going to Beijing on April 16th - 18th for the HSK and sightseeing. The HSK is a test that non-native speakers take to measure their language ability. I will fail, but this will give us a starting point so when we take it before we leave we can see our improvement. Also were planning a trip to Shanghai for the world expo in June. This is so far away so very few detail have been figured out ut were trying to get it to fall through. The school here is absolutely no help to us. Anything out of the normal school routine that we want to do is shot down, so we have kind of got into some arguments with administration over the Beijing trip. But a little pressure usually creates results so we figure things out. You know what they say the squeaky wheel gets the oil. Anyways that’s really all I have to report to you for now. We only have one more day with the Germans before they head to Beijing and then it’s back to normal school. From Shijiazhuang with peace and love, 简杰明