Today is a festival day in China. From what I can remember of the story I was told yesterday, which isn't much, there was a King (I think or someone important) who killed himself(for a reason I cant remember) and jumped into a river. All the Chinese people liked him so they threw some kind of food into the water (what I'm not entirely sure) to get the fish to eat the food rather then his body.
Anyway, now every year on this day the Chinese eat a special sweet food and throw the remains in the river so that the body doesnt get eaten. Personally, I think it's a little late for that as it was thousands of years ago and I doubt very much that he is still intact but then who am I to disagree with a ancient Chiense tradition. So for lunch I had boiled eggs soaked in tea and a triangle of sticky sweet rice. The rice was wrapped up in a leaf/vegetable and is then dipped into sugar. Unfortunately, I can't say its my favourite chinese dish but I did discover that if you use five times as much sugar as rice then it masks the bad bits and does indeed taste rather good. Consequently, I think I have possible eaten the whole years worth of sugar allowance in one day.
The photographs that I uploaded yesterday are the pictures from a mini leaving party that I had with some of the teachers, last Friday. I have almost come to dread the word 'party', when it's said by anyone Chinese, for fear of having to perform a tap dancing rap something as hideously embarassing but I must say I had a thrououghly good evening. First, we played pool and with the help of Chao Mi Er(not sure how you spell his name) I think may have even improved, the again it's not that I could actually get much worse. We then went onto a Korean BBQ resturant, where the food was so good that it's almost worth considering moving to Korea for. After a rather bizarre game involving cocktail sticks we headed on to KTV. With the help of some alcohol I did actually attempt singing, this time of my own free will. However, I was disappointed to discover that they didn't have 'I will survive' and 'Summer Lovin' wasnt quite the same when you have to sing both parts yourself, because nobody else knows the words.
On Saturday morning, feeling the effects of the night before, I eventually managed to drag myself out of my PJ's, away from ER and into Starbucks! After summoning up some more energy I went to off see Pirates of the Caribeen 3, not that it takes much energy to walk across the street and sit down again. However, I'm disappointed to say that didnt make it all the way through. Unforunately, my knowledge of pirate Chinese is about as good as my knowledge of normal Chinese and therefore practically non exsistant. I got figitty after the first hour, when I discovered that I had no clue what was going on, Jonny Depp isn't as witty when he speaks in Chinese and more importantly had no popcorn left so I decided to call it a day and wait to watch it in English.
I got back on the bus to go home, when I discovered that it was the first day since arriving in Shenyang that I had left my flat without double checking I had my key. Yes, you've guessed it, it was sitting very usuefully on my coffee table behing my locked door. I spent the next hour on the bus trying to conjure up plans of how to break into my flat.
After I arrived home and discovered that my first plan of 'lets just hope the door opens if I push it hard enough' failed, I put into action my second plan of trying to break in through my windows. I am pleased to report that dispite my reservations, my windows are indeed very secure. They are also head height so me trying to climb through them would have been highly entertaining for the 50ish students that were just a few meters away. With both these options failing, I resorted to the fact that I would have to go with my least favourable option, trying to explain in Chinese to the guard that I had left my keys inside. After saying what I think/hope was the chinese for 'I dont have my' and miming a key like action, he seemed to get the idea. He looked at me blankly for a while with a kind of 'well its not my problem' atittude, before realising that I clearly wasn't going anywhere and elected a nearby Chinese teacher to solve the problem for me. After an hour of appalling broken Chinese on my part, going to practically every room in the school, interupting a party and annoying several more Chinese people, again on my part, we eventually tracked down a spare key. I double checked twice this morning.
I'm teaching hobbies at the moment, I thought it might be fun to play the games and learn the vocab at the same time. I am since to discover that trying to organise 20 5 year olds to play golf and isnt cant really be discribed as fun. The lesson usually ends with me needing to sit in an empty room in silence for a while to get rid of the screaming voices in my head. We've moved onto ten pin bowling and snooker this week. Maybe ear plugs would be an investment.
Lots of love
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