We had to go shopping for some groceries on Tuesday, so we decided to go to Carrefour, a French based grocery and retail store that we like the best. It is also the easiest for us to get to from our campus. There is also a small "baking store" near there that we have been able to get whole wheat flour, good brown sugar, pickles and several other things that most stores just don't carry.
We stopped at the store (called Mike Qi's) to get pickles and look for a metal baking pan that I can use in this small toaster oven that we have. Right now I only have some glass pans and when we take things to our dinner group on Sunday, they are pretty heavy and David is afraid of breaking them. We couldn't find the pans (even with Mike's help) so we bought some bread flour and the pickles. We were checking out and Mike is the one helping us. Mike has some English that he has learned, so it was fun to talk to him. Very personable. He sees the bread flour and asks if I make bread. I told him that I did, then he says to wait, runs back to the back of the store and comes out with a loaf of bread. Mike opens it up and invites us to have some. "Just tear it off," he says. So we did and the flavor was so wonderful! It was a dried cranberry and coconut bread. We just knew we had to buy it and bring it home to enjoy. I don't think he really planned to sell it at that time because of his reaction when we told him we wanted to buy it. My mouth waters for that bread just thinking about it!
 |
| Mike Qi's Cranberry Coconut bread. YUM! |
Double Nines Festival
Saturday was Double Nines Festival in China. Eva told us that there would be things to do
on Buddha Mountain, so we decided to go with her and see what was going
on. Double Nines Festival is a day to
give respect to the elderly and, also for hiking, being outdoors and getting
fresh air and exercise.
We took the bus to where we were pretty sure we needed to
get off. We tried to ask someone on the
bus, but she tried to tell us that we needed to take a different bus. It may have been that the Chinese characters
that we had printed off were not the correct ones for what we needed. The bus was very crowded. We had to stand the whole way and there was a
traffic jam and so the traffic was extremely slow. The bus kind of crawled to the stop where we
thought we needed to get off. When it
was almost to the stop, the bus driver decided to open the doors and let us
off. (They will do this quite often when there are a lot of buses waiting in line to drop off and pick up passengers.) The majority of people on the bus
seemed to be getting off here, so we decided that it probably was the correct
stop.
We followed the crowd and soon we were in the midst of a
crush of people, some going and some coming back from Buddha Mountain. We weren't sure if we would need to get a ticket, because China has a policy of allowing people over the age of 62 to enter for free, so
we just had to show our passports to the guards at the gate and we were
in. We didn’t know where to find Eva so
we walked along and passed a LOT of booths that were selling food and trinkets
and toys.
We decided that we needed to stop and stay at one place
until we heard from Eva. There was a
little open lane that went off to the west, so we took it. The mass of people was gone (there were still
a lot there, but we weren’t rubbing shoulder to shoulder anymore) and we were
able to find some steps to sit on where we could wait.
We watched the people- and they watched us, occasionally
saying hello to some and just smiling at others. Then a really cute little baby boy that
looked to be just about one year old, started smiling at us with the cutest
smile! He kept watching and smiling as his mom tried to get him to climb the
stairs. Eventually the family just sat
behind us on the steps and David kept interacting with the baby. There was a man that noticed us and he had
tried to talk to us, but with our limited Chinese, there wasn’t much to talk
about. He had a pretty fancy camera and
started taking pictures of us and of David interacting with the baby.
 |
| We just loved this smile! |
Then a lady came by with some dried sweet potato strings
(which were really good!) and offered some to me. I took one out of her bag and indicated that
I like them, so she came over and had me hold out my hand and she poured a
whole bunch in my hand! Then she waved
and left with a smile.
We were starting to gather a bit of a crowd around us. One grandma came by with her nine-year-old grandson
and he said “Hi.” I said “Hi,” back to him and then the grandma came up to me
and said something. The boy started
using English words he had learned, and she kept encouraging him to show me how
intelligent her grandson was that he could speak English. When he had exhausted about all the words he
knew, the family decided to move on, but we had made dear friends by the time
they left. All this time, the guy with
the camera was snapping pictures of us and the people we were interacting
with. Of course, the grandma and her
grandson had to have their picture taken with me using their camera.
 |
| We saw this at one of the booths on Buddha mountain and it looked so good so we bought a package of it. We waited until we got home to try it. We thought we were getting a piece of a cake that looked so good. It wasn't. It was glutinous rice (sticky rice) that had a little flavor. Sorry, this one went in the garbage, not to our tastes. We were a little disappointed. |
Eva finally got there.
She had met a friend who works for the government, and she was going to take us
to some friends that live on Buddha Mountain and have lunch there. However, they didn’t tell us that information
until AFTER we had bought some of the local snacks and eaten some boazi (steamed buns
with meat inside), that we would be going there for lunch. They had prepared some jiaozi (dumplings) for
us and when you eat dumplings at a Chinese house, you are expected to eat until
you feel ready to burst! By the time we
had eaten about five or six dumplings each and also a special kind of wrap they
made for us, we were very full and ready to burst.
 |
| I liked the shape of this one and also the dragon handle. There were SO many shapes and kinds of pots. Some dated back to the Ming and Qing dynasties. There were over 3,000,000 RMB worth of pots in this museum. |
 |
| A very creative pot showing the elements of the earth. |
After lunch, we were shown to the museum that the family
takes care of. The museum was about the
history of teapots. I don’t remember
hearing the name of the woman who runs the museum, but she took us through with
pride and then showed us the rest of her house.
She operates a health spa at her home, but is trying to start a business
in the main area of Jinan.
 |
| This pot was for someone who was going to be moving up in life. The circle handle on the top shows that it can be picked up and moved. There was one pot that didn't have the top part and that was for someone that wasn't going anywhere in life. |
Then she
demonstrated the art of the tea to us.
We told her that we could only drink herbal teas, so she assured us that
these were not the black tea, so we would be okay. We had to take her word for it. Everything was run through Eva because the
woman spoke no English. They gave me a
stool to sit on but had David sitting on a cushion on the floor. We had tea in tiny cups (I was able to get
about five small sips out of the cup).
We had tea, more tea, ate some Ginko nuts, more tea, then some pomegranate, then she played some music on an ancient Chinese instrument, then
more tea. She gave me a silk scarf that
she had used natural dyes to make. She
also gave one to Eva that was dyed from a flower that comes from Tibet. We finally asked to use her bathroom and then
after a little more tea, and David trying to play the instrument, the woman
changed from her traditional Chinese dress to something more modern and we
all headed back down the mountain, taking the back roads and avoiding all the
people who were still there on the main path up Buddha Mountain. Eva took the bus home and the woman ordered
what amounts to China’s Uber driver and drove us home.
 |
| Playing the Guqin an ancient Chinese musical instrument. Her guqin is about 500 years old, handed down to her from her grandfather. |
 |
| The interior courtyard of her home. |
 |
| A most interesting work table. |
 |
| This water feature (the blue bowl) was added to the courtyard to add feng shui because the tree left the courtyard open to the gate, or something like that. This pecan tree was over 70 years old. She also had a Ginko tree that was 200 years old. |
Chinese Halloween Party
On Sunday, David and I had been invited by another one of
the teachers in the Foreign Languages Department (she is Chinese and teaches
English) to a Halloween Party. Wang Jing’s
eight-year-old son is in a fencing club and they wanted to have a party for
their children. She wanted us to present
a short program for the children showing how American children celebrated
Halloween. We modified a power point presentation
that we had for our college age students and made it simpler for these
children. We also sang some Halloween
songs for them and taught them one song.
One child wanted to know why it is called “Halloween,” so I tried to
break the history of it down into shorter information that could easily be
translated by Wang Jing to the Chinese children.
After the program, we watched some of the children display
some of their musical talents. One
played a guitar and sang, and three of the other children played traditional
Chinese instruments. We ate some sandwiches,
and some fruit and were invited to sit on a bench in the middle of everyone (the place of honor) to watch the
performances.
We had just finished with our
food when someone came along with a piece of cake. The man who was the fencing coach had just
asked his girlfriend to marry him in front of the group and after he did, they
cut the largest cake that I have ever seen and served it to us all.
 |
| Some of the Halloween decorations. They had pumpkin and skeleton lights up also. CJ would have been so proud of them! |
 |
| The wedding proposal. |
 |
| She said yes! |
After the cake, they brought us dumplings and then a cupcake
and then some juice. We were feeling
pretty full after all of that. There
were a few more things they were going to do, some games and a few more
performances, but we decided that we wanted to get home, so she ordered us a
taxi through her Didi account (the Uber type driver). It has been a fun week.
 |
| Here we are with Michael, Wang Jing's son. He seemed to understand English quite well. I think she talks to him at home and other places using English. A nice young man. |
 |
| They were dressing up some of the children as mummies. This boy played the part well! |
No comments:
Post a Comment