Oh my goodness, it snowed today! This is a once every three years kind of thing in Ningbo, so it was a major deal. As Jane, Nina and I walked home under what would be starlight, if China was not filled with pollution, so it was instead a sort of sullen reddish glow (how Victorian a description is that?) we engaged in a full out snowball fight. Ningbo High School, one of the top high schools in the city, has its dorms right behind our apartment complex and you could hear all the kids shrieking with excitement and their own snowball fights.
(By the way, major props to my students who managed to work pictures of this "lovely gift grom God" into their oral presentation about a survey on Ningbo's environment)We were out so late (got home about 10), because we did a “triplets,” as we refer to each other, goodbye dinner tonight. Friday I’m taking a bunch of friends out and Jane and Nina will be there as well, of course, but this was a more private affair. Tuesday was my friend Maggie’s bday and Emily and Jeremy and I took her out (except, Chinese style, she insisted on paying), so I’ve been lucky to have special dinners with all my chinese besties.
Food porn time. Last night, we went to a Mongolian place I’d been to with Maggie last year. We had lamb one million ways: on skewers (they do killer lamb skewers here—a perfect mix of lean and fat that gets all crusty and cuminy); in a tinfoil packet with fried naan (I think that included lamb stomach, but we just pretended it was curvy lamb); stir-fried with pickled cabbage and rice noodles. We also had broccoli, a salad of onions and peppers, naan, fresh made yogurt (sprinkled with sesame seeds and birthday cake sprinkles), and mashed potatoes with soup on top (Emily’s bad choice). We talked and laughed and took a lot of bad pictures, and Maggie did a very interesting interpretation of her understanding of tourette’s (made funnier by knowing Maggie, who swears like a sailor). Afterwards we wandered around the night market and I did some fierce bargaining—Ningbo merchants fold far easier than do Shanghai ones.
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| Emily and Jeremy say I always get greedy and start eating the food before i remember to take pictures of it. I say I like food action shots. Today, my triplets and I went to Grandma’s which is a chain from Hangzhou that just opened in Ningbo. Nina and Jane went at 3 to reserve a table, which is good—when we left at 7:30, the line went out the restaurant and around the floor of the mall it was in. Incidentally, best waiting room ever—they projected tom and jerry cartoons on the wall, had seats and tables and tea, biscuits and oranges for people waiting. It was sort of a mix of foods, but really good. A chicken cooked in an iron pot which gave a roasted effect—lovely after months and months of stewed chicken. Sautéed cauliflower. Braised pork belly with dried fish. “Smashed greeb beans”—actually a pea puree. Greens. Thin slices of beef sautéed with onion and an egg. Taro filled pastry. A scallop apiece with vermicelli and minced pork—a Ningbo specialty. Hot coconut milk with Taro—purple milk!   Afterwards we went to starbucks to chat and then bussed home, because taxis were hard to come by what with the snow. On the bus we were just casually chattering away—a conversation that included why Americans thought boys holding hands was weird (totally common show of affection here), how Nina’s students always write that they enjoy sleeping with their roommates (funny addendum—I was having lunch with one of the professors here today and he was reminiscing about his group of friends at the last school he taught at and how they would get together for meals and to talk and sometimes even sleep together, but only the guys) , how people in China would never wear an even vaguely low cut shirt, but commonly wear stockings, knee high boots and short shorts, which I explained were pretty sexual clothes in the US. Anyway, it was a fairly wide ranging convo, including some teasing remarks about each other’s chests, and after we’d been chattering for about 20 minutes this little Chinese girl says “Excuse me” (in English) and said she’s been listening and wanted to ask what I meant about concepts of personal space in china. Her English was gooood. We tend to talk as if no-one can understand a word we say, and we were a bit mortified—these are not the kind of things you openly discuss in China. So our new rule is circumspect conversations on busses 363, 206 and 369—the ones that circle the local universities. |
