My birthday was last last Monday, and frankly it was completely pre-empted by the early arrival of Anna Rose West, my best friend’s daughter, who came at 33 weeks. I was hoping that April could hold out till my birthday, but selfishly, she decided her life threatening preeclampsia entitled her to ignoring such niceties. Let me tell you, do not plan on being half way across the world when people you love dearly are in danger. Not only do you have to deal with time differences (and may I just say, thank goodness for how cheap skype has made calling to international land lines), but something can delay email arrivals—apparently the words placenta and umbilical cord set off all sorts of alarms in emails, which would be delayed up to 12 hours. Both baby and mom are doing wonderfully, though. Anna is 3 pounds today!!:

My birthday was a little pushed away by all of this and let me tell you, I’m a person who makes a big deal out birthdays—other people, and mine. I had, 2 weeks before, announced to my class that my bday was coming up, so my sweet babies got me a cake!!

This also involved them getting into an epic frosting fight. That’s why, if you look carefully in this picture, half of the kids have white smears all over them.




Chinese birthday cake, by the way, is a take on western traditions. The cake is a nice light sponge cake with preserved fruit between the layers, and a thick layer of whipped cream. The top is covered with various fruits. In china, tomatoes are firmly classified as a fruit (let me tell you tomato-strawberry-pineapple juice? Not good) so it was my first birthday cake with tomatoes on top.



Afterwards, I’d arranged to go out with Nina, Jane and Maggie to hotpot. For the uninitiated, hotpot is like a fondue, though no cheese of course. Instead you get boiling broth, either spicy or plain. We get a dish shaped like a yin-yang sign with spicy on one side, not spicy on the other. It’s called two ducks pot because ducks mate for life and stay together. The first time Jane, Nina and I went we ordered so much food that the waitress yelled at us—and the Chinese can seriously eat. The Chinese for big appetite is “dai wei”—big belly—and when I told Jane who weighs about 18 pounds and can eat me under the table that by American standards I had a big appetite, she looked at me in shock and said, “Americans must not eat anything.” This time we toned down our ordering—“just” lamb (oh, and also 3 orders of lamb skewers to start), fish sausage, Chinese “bacon” which pretty much tastes like bologna, seaweed, spinach, a zucchini like melon, tofu skin, rice noodles… -- here we are after dinner.

Nina and Jane had also ordered me a cake—what a thing of beauty!

The horse (yes, that is a horse), by the way, is for my Chinese zodiac sign. This is not common for bday cakes, but last week we were hanging out watching Jane Eyre (apparently loving it as a trans-cultural nerd girl trait) and eating an epic lunch prepared by Jane and Nina (one more food listing! Spare ribs, turnip and beef broth soup (we sucked the marrow out of the bones), stir fried broccoli and carrot, bok choy and mushrooms, shaved cucumbers with ginger and garlic, salad, and two shaotsai or small dishes—pickled veggies and seaweed bought premade) and I was showing them pics including my bday party last year and the moose cake Tony designed for me, so I think they thought animals were de rigueur on western bday cakes. I also got a lovely birthday crown.

It actually says “Happy Bistday.” The card my kiddies got me is another great piece of chinglish btw—it says happy bday and has a poem in Chinese, but up in the left hand corner, it also, perplexingly, says “best wishes on your retirement.”



So it was a good birthday. The next day I went out with some Americans here and had a hamburger…a good one…yum. I also had my triumph of directing the taxi home completely in Chinese. I mastered the name of the school last week, but no taxi knows how to get to our residence, so you always have to direct them from the gates of the school. I practiced ‘turn left” ‘turn right” “go straight” the entire mile walk home the day before with Jane and Nina, and, lo and behold, it worked!!



This weekend, Jane, Nina, and I, along with a friend of theirs, Professor Wang, went to Wulongtan, or 5 dragon pools. The legend is a sort of Leda and the sawn, with dragons, and the dragon impregnated mother and her 4 children (can’t understand why they wouldn’t believe her story about fire-breating conception after the third time!) were shunned and all turned into dragons, each of whom got their own pool. Anyways, it’s about 30 km away from Ningbo, but we took the bus, which involved taking one bus downtown, stopping at KFC to get food for the picnic (here’s Nina looking excited about the future lunch!)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Walking around till we found the other bus which proceeded to barrel through villages and around windy mountain roads with the usual Chinese high speed and disregard for other cars and niceties like watching the road. I wish I had a picture of the driver casually turning his head to chat with a passenger as we took a hairpin turn. In a bus, people. But we got out to this: