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.
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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.
looks like a pretty good spread for thanksgiving - don't think i would like octopus in my salad - or hard field corn -- but it looks like a good crowd and good food.dad
ReplyDeleteThat looks fun, Don! But those are hardly hot butteries. Don't worry, no one's turned out over here, so you didn't miss out on anything (I tried three batches, but I think we were using bad yeast, and Shmee's didn't work either).
ReplyDeleteWe did have hot butteries, and they were great! I was too lazy to roll them out, I just made little balls of dough. It worked well enough, and made me think I'm gonna make them more often. Once a year just isn't enough.
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