Photos
STABBING DUMPLINGS November 2005
STABBING DUMPLINGS November 2005 At the end of one of my Monday night gatherings, my Chinese friends asked if they could make dumplings at my house sometime. I think that we have the largest kitchen in all of China, so it seemed like a good opportunity to use it. As soon as I agreed, English …
CHRISTMAS IN CHINA 1
CHRISTMAS IN CHINA (1) December 2005 This e-mail aims to answer all your burning curiosities about how Christmas is manifesting itself over here in Dalian, combined with some other random vignettes about how cold I am. I wake up in the morning and I put on my bathrobe before going to the kitchen where we …
REVENGE OF THE BEAN PASTE
REVENGE OF THE BEAN PASTE June 2005 The closest I ever came to culture shock in China was the first time I went to the supermarket. Or, I should specify, the animal section of the supermarket. There are pig trotters, chicken feet, all sorts of internal guts and sacks, knuckles, heads, legs, wings…and those are …
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A TALE OF TWO CITIES August 2005 For a while, I had been grumbling about how teaching ESL was, for the most part, quite intellectually boring. Few people major in English for a love of grammar, and I was no exception. I dreamed of teaching Shakespeare in a U.S. high school; I remembered teaching Chinua …
MOON CAKES September 2005
MOON CAKES September 2005 Today is the Mid-Autumn moon festival. Although the festival technically celebrates the end of the summer harvest, the coming together of family, and the worship of the immortal woman on the moon, the festivities are manifested mostly through the consumption of bean-paste filled moon cakes. For the past few weeks, shops …
NEW YEAR EVE
NEW YEAR’S EVE BARBEQUE December 2005 On the last day of 2005, we celebrated another year gone by with two of our good Chinese friends. We planned to go to a Korean restaurant, make cookie dough, throw firecrackers out the window, and watch a pirated Batman Begins DVD. We felt it was a suitably eclectic …
WINTER SNOW
FIRST SNOW OF WINTER December 3, 2005 Winter fluttered onto Dalian last night. This morning, we woke up to about 2 inches of snow and 28 degrees Fahrenheit. As we trudged along the slippery sidewalks to school, it reminded us of the day nine months ago when we first arrived in Dalian and it was …
ICE CUBES
ICE CUBES March 2005 It was snowing when we arrived in Dalian on March 1st. People from the school met us at the airport, and we took a taxi to a hotel. The traffic didn’t seem too bad and the city seemed surprisingly normal despite the incomprehensible Chinese characters that adorned the buildings and billboards. …
Typhoon Matsa
TYPHOON MATSA August 2005 It had been rainy in Dalian for several days, and on Monday morning, there was a torrential downpour. By Monday afternoon, our school cancelled classes for the rest of the day and Tuesday because Typhoon Matsa was supposed to reach the northeastern coast of China. But seemingly from the time school …
BEIJING
BEIJING October 2005 WELCOME TO BEIJING, Population 15 millionWe arrived in Beijing at daybreak on National Day. We would be staying in Beijing for six nights and planned to see all the attractions that self respecting tourists should see. My parents and Zac and I had left Dalian around 8:30 the night before and spent …