Home Cooking
Stick’s parents asked what we were eating, and the short answer is that I’m trying to cook at home.
For example, here’s our dinner the other night. It might not make a magazine cover, but this is some hardcore polenta. I scooped the cornmeal out of a giant bag at the street market, pre-boiled the tap water before I cooked it, and then fried it with chopsticks.
The long answer is that anything and everything I want to cook is a production. I don’t buy meat, partly because the unrefrigerated hunks of flesh kind of creep me out and partly because it’s a butcher-shop situation and I don’t know the Chinese for “hack off some of Bessie’s flank there, no intestines please.”
So, I’m cooking vegetarian food, except for some maple-flavoured bacon that a trendy import shop happens to carry in their Western food section.
We don’t have an oven. We have a stove, with two gas burners that remind me of this Sterno-can camp stove my dad built when I was kid, only our Beijing stove is bigger and not quite as safe. We also have a microwave… it’s in the living room, on top of the fridge, but it works fine.
If you’re confused, “kitchen” is the room where the stove is, and “living room” is the room where the fridge and the TV are. They are connected only by the unheated balcony. Oh, and the “balcony” isn’t a little porch for enjoying the view, it’s a screened airing closet for drying laundry. Sims would starve to death in our house.
(In the interests of honesty, there is a big pass-through window between the kitchen and living room, and Stick is quite good about getting up and handing me the milk through the window. )
Posted in Beijing
Tagged chinese, Chinese life, cooking, e3, Sims, Stick, Western food
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…With Chinese Characteristics
I thought that I was familiar with the demo class as a shady recruitment policy, but my current school’s plan for a demo class might actually be a record for sketchy Chinese ESL policies. Basically, the parents are going to be invited to watch a class in December. The reason we know about it now, and not 10 minutes before the parents arrive, is that everything we will “teach” is scripted, down to which students we call on in what order. The parents will then be evaluating the carefully rehearsed farce English lesson and then offering suggestions on “our” lesson plans, as if there would be any input from the foreign teachers in the planning of the class performance. I’m not entirely sure how any of this benefits anyone involved.
I thought I was just being grumpy about it but last night Stick got on the job boards and starting reading listings.
Posted in New York City
Tagged chinese, Chinese life, ESL, lesson plans, New York City, reading, Stick, with Chinese characteristics
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Shadrach, Meshach and Abendego.
My TAs insist that Pike, Elics and Filick are English boys’ names. Their reasoning behind each choice is that they know someone by that name. I don’t doubt it for a second, but my role as imported English teacher is to reduce giggle-worthy Chinglish, not spread it.
Anyway, it’s probably better that I’m not allowed to change their names. Sure, I’ll probably call the boys Bill or Joey or Matt, but I might also go with good, old-fashioned Biblical names, like Zebidiah or Nebuchanezzar. You never know.
In Defense Of Calibri
Or, “I don’t know why Scep even talks to me”.
[11/15/2007 11:48:23 PM] Scep says: what, you don’t like calibri?
[11/15/2007 11:49:03 PM] Meg says: no, no one wants to read a paper in a zany font!
[11/15/2007 11:49:11 PM] Scep says: it’s not zany
[11/15/2007 11:49:43 PM] Meg says: it’s not standard
[11/15/2007 11:50:09 PM] Scep says: it will be
[11/15/2007 11:50:39 PM] Meg says: yeah, well I’ll have a flying car someday, but my house shouldn’t default to a roofside garage
Stick’s Adult Class
Stick has an adult class on Thursday nights, and I often go with him. It’s a class for students who want to pass their conversational English exam, so it’s a good chance for us to ask questions about Chinese life.
He received the list of discussion subjects, in Chinese, a few hours before the first class, and got them translated into English a few minutes before class. Well, almost translated, “vacation” and “vocation” may only be a letter apart, but they’re quite different conversational topics. (If the translator’s primary school teacher had been allowed to teach phonics, that might not have happened.)
“When are we going to start our stories?” one of Stick’s students asked last week.
“Stories? What stories?” he asked.
It turns out that Stick’s class was supposed to be preparing compositions based on that list of conversational topics. To pass their conversational English exam, student write a short piece on one of the selected topics, and recite it to their examiners. The testers will then ask them some questions based on their composition, so I suppose there’s a little bit of non-memorized English.
I don’t know which is funnier, that Stick assumed that he’d need to teach conversational English for students to pass their conversational English test, or that he taught from September to November without anyone mentioning that he wasn’t covering the material.
Missing Teeth Club
Enica and Carol both lost teeth this week!
Important Matters
Why does the new version of Word, with Microsoft Office 2007, default to something that isn’t point 12 Times New Roman?
Sure, there are times when I don’t use Times New Roman, but seriously, the first time I heard of that point 11 Calibri garbage was when we got the new version of Office. It was in a sentence with a question mark and the F word.
Schnapps and Dumplings
Our neighbors invited Stick and me to lunch on Sunday. See how nice and normal that sounds?
Our neighbors are Manfred and Xuemei, a retired German and his Chinese wife. They are retired newlyweds, which is hilarious enough, because he’s seventy and the two of them seriously cannot keep apart.
Manfred doesn’t speak any English… or any Chinese, to Xuemei’s dismay and amusement. Stick was in Germany for 3 years in the military, so he can follow a lot of German, even if he can’t respond very well. Xuemei speaks decent German and a few phrases of English. Our conversation was hilarious, if not quite the relaxing Sunday afternoon we usually have.
The highlight may have been Xuemei telling me, in Chinese, that Stick and Manfred are useless menfolk because they won’t learn a second language! Haha!
No, the highlight was when Manfred asked Stick if I was some German word that sounds like steer. We had no idea what he was saying, so he had Xuemei ask me what my birth month is. I told her it was month 4, and she asked the day, and then asked do we call it something niu something? I finally caught on. “Oh, Taurus!” I laughed. “Yeah, I am! Wait… how did you know that?
No, I changed my mind. The highlight was Manfred telling Stick, via gestures, why he doesn’t like German girls.
Of course we had the universal language. Alcohol.
Eins, zwei, gambei!
Night Elf Seeks Gnome for LTR
On a completely unrelated note, I just found out there’s a World Of WarCraft dating site, where WoW gamers can, er, hook up. I’m not making this up, it’s called World Of DateCraft.
The site’s pretty new, with beta warning labels and tempting links without content (One of them is an intriguing murloc link! But nothing’s there yet), but there seem to be quite a few users. I’m not saying that I spent all morning on the site, but the profiles seem to be real people, who really play WarCraft. Romantic WoWers tell their faction, race, level and in-game professions on their profile, as well as the usual location, job, marital status info from other online dating sites.
This profile, though, cracked me up.
Laughable requests to exchange cyber for gold aside, I think this is a pretty good idea. You already have something pretty major in common, so you can just talk about Defias bandits to avoid all that first-date awkwardness. Plus, you won’t be surprised in a few months when your new special friend wants to stay up all night and slay bad guys!
Posted in Gaming Culture
Tagged beta, dating, ThumbGods, WarCraft, World of WarCraft, WoW
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