Monday Miscellany

It's not actually Monday, I just thought I would try to get back in the groove of more regular posting. We went to Hong Kong for Christmas; partly for the vacation, and partly to be able to do American-style shopping for American-style goods, which we sorely needed. We now have a good handle on day-to-day shopping in China, but shopping for durable items like clothing, electronics, etc., is often just too daunting here. There are just too many variables and questions: Where do I find it? How much does it cost? Is it real or counterfeit? How does this item really compare to that item? I made half a dozen shopping outings for a laptop computer for Allyne's birthday, and then finally gave up (a friend helped my out by ordering one through the IT department at his corporate employer).

I may post some pictures related to Christmas, but Lee and I decided that I was going to post about Thanksgiving, and she would take Christmas. Therefore, I'll give her first choice of the photos and the stories. In the meantime, here are some more miscellaneous pictures:



A giant Buddha statue somewhere west of Suzhou. It seems to me that Buddha statues get built as sort of an municipal economy booster. If a place really needs to get some tourist dollars, what better than building a big statue and hoping for some piligrims? I don't begrudge it to them. In the same vein I actually admire how the town of Roswell, New Mexico, found a way to turn the whole "crashed flying saucer" tale into a way to actually have a viable local economy. Side note: the traditional fat "laughing buddha" of China is not Siddhartha, the Indian Prince and origin of Buddhist religion. The true Buddhas are always thin, to represent his self-sacrifice and freedom from the appetites of this world. There is a loose historical source for the fat buddha, which is something about a kind hearted monk of centuries past. I suppose you could loosely equate him to a Santa Claus figure.

I really amused myself with this next photo. It calls to mind on of those old cheesy/good monster movies, like the bronze statue monster in Jason and the Argonauts. Or perhaps the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.

A spot on the shore of Tai Hu lake. (a redundancy for me to write it that way, since Hu means lake).

Seemingly every stinkin' consumer product in Asia has a cute face on it. It gets old sometimes.

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas to everyone from all of us.

May you one day join us in the bamboo forest (actually, it is just a spot in the park down the street). Yes, we know, John looks grumpy. He has entered the "always looking hostile in family photographs" stage of childhood development. It is a well-known phase, documented by the pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget (okay, I made that up, but you have to admit that it was a glaring oversight in his research).

Since he always swears he is not angry, I just call it his "secret agent face". So if you know what is good for you, you will have a Merry Christmas!

Oliver

Friday night was the last showing of Oliver Twist at the school, and it was quite the production. I've never seen quite so much effort, expertise, and expense put into a school play. I was actually involved, because I did much of the set building. However, that is only a side note, because the bigger family news was that Allyne was in it. She played Charlie Bates, the sidekick of the Artful Dodger. Below are two photos of her. I'm not going to point her out, because I wan't everyone else to have as hard of a time as we did. I didn't realize she was on stage until she started speaking, and she has at least one friend who sat through the entire play without recognizing her.




This is the cast list from the program, from which I blurred out the names except Allyne. It also gives a nice sense of the international student body.




















This is a video clip of one of Allyne's scenes. It is just a little thing that I filmed with my pocket camera, so the quality is really low. The school had the production filmed as well, so we will get "grandparent copies" sent home later. Just click on the button at bottom left to run it.






Finally, some pictures of the set and prop work that I helped out with. For me, the biggest part of this project was that I designed a set of wheeled metal stands with detachable steps. During this play, it was used as a bridge, a jail, a judge's bench, and part of Fagin's house. My idea was that they would be a versatile set pieces for all future productions as well. I contracted with a Chinese welder to make the pieces. They came out just as ordered, except that he built them out of much heavier steel than I intended him to use. Therefore, the end result came out as this massive, indestructable battleship. I have, in fact, given it a name consistent with the production.... it has been dubbed the "HMS Oliver". It will outlast the building around it, and would be servicable as an earthquake shelter.


The backdrop, with sets for the first scene.


The HMS Oliver

Thanksgiving, Part 2

We also had our own Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. This time the food was much more authentically American, although we did have some of our own idiocyncratic family touches (for example, the traditional Thanksgiving lasagna). Everything tasted just right, except again for the mashed potatoes, as explained last time.

We did have one casualty, which was our attempt at a pecan pie. We really tried. It took searches in five stores to even find pecans, and the ones we did find were really pathetic looking little things. Once we opened them, we also found that they had already been cooked in some form, and soaked in sugar and salt. It took Lee and I an hour and half to just to shell one cup of nuts. In the end, it came to naught, because the pie got burned. It was a tragic loss.

sp

For this second Thanksgiving we invited some of the younger American teachers, along with one Canadian. Some of them were with us at the table in the last set of photos. I'll make some commentary as I go along.

sp

sp

Preparation and Dinner:

We bought a second tabletop oven. I've set up both of them on a stand on the laundry porch, as you can see here. Lee has always said she wanted to have one of those over/under double ovens some day. This isn't really what she had in mind, but we couldn't have done Thanksgiving without it.

Along with our minature oven(s), we also have to work around our miniature refrigerator. Mostly, that just means we have to grocery shop more often and buy smaller quantities. However, preparing a large meal was too much. So we opened up all the windows in John's bedroom, which is the only room on the afternoon shade side of the building, and used his window sill as our expansion fridge. So here is some of the dinner, mixed in with John's LEGOs. As the weather is quite cold now, it worked out.

Lee with the stuffing, and Lauren with the rolls. We met Lauren in Boston when she and we were hired. She may well be the youngest teacher at the entire school, and she has declared us her parents away from home. We're happy to have her.

Me carving our solid gold turkey. It cost about $60 U.S. at one of the western shops. On the right is the full spread on the table ready for dinner. Behind me on the watercooler is the failed pecan pie.

sp

sp

sp

Family and Guests:

Nicole, from South Dakota; Elvina, from New York City; and Glen, from Canada. Elvina's parents are Chinese immigrants, and she still has relatives in Beijing.

You know, my children really are a life-loving, cheerful bunch. Why they never can manage to look that way in photos is beyond me. They look like inmates in a chow line.

It's all about the pies. Clockwise from bottom left: pumpkin, apple, lemon, and coconut. Lee makes fabulous pies, and these all tasted just they way they are supposed to (no faint Chinese flavors to be found).

The rare, whole-family picture. It is a bit blurry, but it's what I've got. Getting a picture of all of us is like trying to photograph an endangered species in its natural habitat.

Thanksgiving, Part 1

Sorry again that there have been no posts in a while. It is amazing how mundane day to day life can be even after you move to the other side of the world.

This set of photos are from an American Thanksgiving dinner that was held at the school on Thanksgiving Day. We did not have the holiday off of school, of course, and we had our own family dinner on Sunday. The school's event was a very nice gesture and a very good dinner, even if some of the food offerings came out strange.

Ironically, since the event was planned at rather short notice, most of the actual Americans had already made plans or restaurant reservations. However, plenty of representatives from everywhere else in the world turned up and helped make it a very pleasant evening. On that note, I'll take a moment to do something that I've intended to do for a while, which is give you a list (based on my best knowledge) of every single home country represented among the staff and students of the entire school.

They are, as follows: the U.S.A., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia, Peru, British Guiana, Pakistan, Iran, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia.

There are no doubt more, that is just what I know. That doesn't even include the question of ethnic and national backgrounds of staff that have emigrated to Western countries, which is more diverse still. And that still doesn't include all of the spouses of faculty who do not work at the school.

sp

I will make a few qualifying notes. Koreans make up about 45% of the student body. The second largest group is probably the Taiwanese, although I haven't seen numbers. There are mainland Chinese among the faculty, but local Chinese are not allowed to attend (the Chinese teachers are in the school specifically to teach Mandarin, which is a government mandate for all schools in China). Canadians are especially well represented among the faculty, and Americans are surprisingly few. There are also a lot of New Zealanders, which surprised me. New Zealand is a small place, and with all the Kiwis who are teaching internationally, I'm amazed there is anyone left to teach school back home. As a continuation of the diversity theme, I'll also point out that one of those teachers is a Maori, and another Kiwi friend, before she came here, owned a Mexican Restaurant in Wellington with her Egyptian husband!

Back to Thanksgiving. The following pictures are from Thanksgiving evening at the school. Some of the pictures are gratefully stolen from another teacher.

The food offerings. The boy and the girl in this photo are classmates and friends of John and Emma, respectively.

Some pictures of the family

The food was very good, although it did suffer from some authenticity issues. The only potatoes available in China are much sweeter than Russet spuds, and they don't make for good mashed potatoes. The corn that is available here is more like feed corn than sweet corn, and I've given up on it. The pumpkin pie, which I don't have here, was more like a dough with plain pumpkin paste and pine nuts on it. Finally, if you look closely at my salad, you will see the octopus in it.

The following are various other pictures of the evening, chosen to highlight friends and close colleagues. I made a fair and honest effort to not take photos of people with their mouths full, but one can only do so much.