Monday Miscellany

I'm thinking of abandoning my post naming schemes, because I don't always post often enough to avoid having a chain of the same titles. I'll stay with it for tonight, however. Here are various pictures that didn't make it into any previous posts.


Our Christmas tree and Santa spread. Christmas photos were supposed to be Lee's blog topic, but she has waited too long and lost her privileges.


The kids with some Christmas morning treasures, which was actually held a few days late due to our Hong Kong trip (which was where we bought all of the presents anyway).


These were for sale all over Hong Kong, but I've never seen them in Mainland China. Click on them for a good look. I'm not sure what that has to say about cultural differences. I didn't visit the homes of any locals, of course, but dare I imagine convenient underwear dispensers on bathroom walls?




These are from a few months ago, on our very first foray into Shanghai. This is in the area known as the French Concession (or the "Former French Concession" for those who are sticklers for their anti-imperialism vocabulary). In other words, it was the part of the city that was on long term lease to the French government during the days of empire.

In their day, the concessions all had "extra-territorial rights", meaning that within their boundaries, the laws of China were superseded by the European laws. Today, that is held up as an example of the humiliation of China, and therefore a rallying cry among ardent nationalists. I really do sympathize, but the fact is that even the local Chinese did their best to keep themselves under European jurisdiction, rather than face the arbitrariness (and brutal punishments), of the Chinese Imperial courts.

In any case, this area of the city really does look like a blend of France and China. It is quite pleasant.

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!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.