磁带: Cassette Tapes

Ironically, out of the 4 teachers I have teaching me Chinese, the one that teaches speaking and listening is by far the hardest to understand. Although most of my classmates probably wouldn’t mind seeing her hit by biker carrying three refrigerators (these exist), I actually kind of enjoy this class. For me, I think this is some of the best practice we can get in a classroom for listening comprehension, and I am fully aware that most people in China do not have the crystal clear speaking skills of my other three teachers. Also, this teacher is by far the best looking.

However, today even I was a little bit frustrated during this class. There is a cassette tape (these exist) that comes with our book, and we were actually using it. From my experience, when a book comes with a CD, you are supposed to either lose it, or use it as a coaster in your dorm room, until you forget about it and end up losing it. When your book comes with a cassette tape, you are supposed to transfer universities immediately. I don’t really have this option, so I decided to stick it out.

After about ten minutes of rewinding, stopping, playing, fast-forwarding, stopping, playing, rewinding, and making noises that have been copyrighted by the Beastie Boys, we got to the appropriate spot on the tape. When nobody was able to answer the first question, our teacher was kind enough to rewind the tape so that we could hear that sentence again. To make sure we would get all the way back to the beginning of the sentence, our teacher would rewind the tape back to about 1996, where the tape would be playing Hootie and the Blowfish, and we would have to go through the process of fast-forwarding, stopping, and playing again until we caught back up to the point where it was no longer “cool” to wear flannel shirts or have holes in the knees of your jeans.

I think this says a lot about the Chinese education system. It also says a lot about relatively attractive girls in China, and how they are completely OK with doing things that would be social catastrophes in other countries. For example, it is not uncommon to be walking down the street and discover that the shocking sound coming from behind you is not somebody killing Bigfoot with a javelin, but a cute girl hocking a loogie the size of Nebraska onto the sidewalk.

My second favorite thing to see is a group of girls sauntering down the street, decked out in their Hello Kitty backpacks with stuffed animals hanging off of their key chains, probably chatting about normal girl things like makeup and Brad Pitt, eating squid off of a stick like they were M&Ms. This is made even more amusing by the guys checking them out. “Man, did you see the way she just ate that whole squid in one bite? I’m going to go ask her for her number!”

I love it here.

做菜:Cooking

Thinking ahead to the time when I will no longer be in China, I want to make sure I know how to cook some Chinese dishes before I leave, so that I can relive the glory of legitimate Chinese food at any time during the rest of my life. Plus, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add a few more dishes to my current roster, which includes peanut butter and jelly sandwich, peanut butter and honey sandwich, peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich, and chocolate milk.

So yesterday I got on to Fudan University’s “BBS,” located the “food” board, and started “communicating” with some folks about making some Chinese food. This is fantastic practice for my reading and typing skills. Correspondence is relatively quick, yet gives me enough time to race through my dictionaries when I come across words I don’t know, without having to make up excuses like, “sorry for the delay, I stepped away from my computer to use the restroom,” while in reality I was busy burning 700 calories flipping through dictionaries trying to figure out the words between “you” and “haha.” What matters is that I found somebody to help me out.

Although I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I was secretly hoping that my cooking partner would be a beautiful Chinese girl, allowing the BBS to function not only as my gateway to professional cooking, but also as a blind dating service. On my way to meet my new friend the following afternoon, I received a text message, “I have arrived, I am wearing a black athletic jacket, jeans, and I am fat.” Because the word for fat has the same sound as the word for pan, and kinda-sorta looks the same, at first read I thought maybe it was “and I brought a pan with me,” you know, since we were getting ready to do some cooking. Upon second read, it indeed said, “I am fat.” That is one thing you have got to love about Chinese people, even though it can make me feel kind of uncomfortable. However awkward it seemed, it was extremely effective. Being overweight in China is about as common as being an American with blonde hair in China. Also, he was a male. Better luck next time, Russ.

From there, we went to the market to buy some ingredients. On the menu for tonight was eggplant, my favorite dish here in China. I figured that if I learn how to cook one dish, it should be eggplant, being that if I eat half as much eggplant in the US as I do in China, I will gain enough MVP points at Harris Teeter to buy a private jet. (When you add on all the additional points I will gain from Mint Oreos, each seat in the jet will also have a DVD player in the headrest.) In total, we purchased two eggplants, an onion-ish thing, two peppers, and a garlic thing, costing about RMB3, which converts to about USDfree.

All in all, the cooking was rather straightforward:
1. Cut stuff.
2. Add a gallon of oil.
3. Add a dash of salt (x15).
4. Make it hot.
5. Let it cool down.

As simple as the preparation was, the results were outstanding. I have eaten eggplant at just about every restaurant in China, and this was competing with the best. I think I will try it again by myself sometime in the near future, to make sure I can reproduce such excellent results, so that I can take this back to the states and do what any normal man would do: make a burrito out of it.