Meet me at the 'Gate'

It’s been quite a week of new beginnings for us. After almost three months of preparation which included the writing of a curriculum, transferring that curriculum to Power Point Presentations, having the presentations translated into Chinese, and reviewing and revising the presentations after translations, Steve finally is teaching the students in our program. Each morning from 9;00 A.M. until about noon he’s been busy teaching.
It’s been interesting to learn a new style of teaching. Whatever is said has to be translated from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English. The busiest person in the room is the translator, Mike, who needs to carefully listen to all of the conversations. Steve, on the other hand, is able to focus on what he’s going to say next. The students laugh often and are learning to participate more often. Steve’s teaching style is a bit different than what they are accustomed to, but, in a couple of weeks they’ll be adjusted, hopefully Steve will be able to keep up with them.
Kathy has begun teaching English to the managers and chef at the restaurant we work with. A bus ride downtown and a walk through the outdoor mall and she and her partner, Crissa, are at the restaurant. The restaurant is located on a quiet alley off the mall. Thousands of people frequent the mall daily, but, the walkway where the restaurant is situated is a quiet retreat. We’ll post some pictures so you get the idea. A ‘perk’ of teaching the chef is that he likes to feed people. Waffles were served on Wednesday along with the offer of free coffee or soft drinks. Since Steve didn’t have to teach on Friday the offer of free coffee brought him along to the restaurant. The chef made waffles, pancakes and special recipe orange juice. All of that with the excellent coffee made the bus ride worth it. The orange juice was served hot with a tiny bit of salt added. It tastes a lot better than it sounds. Because Steve mentioned that he enjoyed the dumplings that were served at the Spring Festival party held at the restaurant we’re guessing that next week Friday that’s what we’ll be served.
We’re off this afternoon to make plans for a trip to the Great Wall during the early May holiday and also a required trip out of the country at the end of May. (Later that day), with our plans now completed we’re looking forward to a couple of days in Beijing and at the end of May visiting both Singapore and Malaysia. We’re not sure about cost but, we were advised that the bank would charge 4% if we used our Visa card. Off we went to our friendly ATM to get some cash. To our consternation the ATM would give us no money, in fact we got a message that our account had nothing it at all. Since we had checked the balance earlier in the day via the internet and knew that there was plenty available, we were put into a bit of a panic. Two days later all is well. Apparently this kind of think happens occasionally and is no great cause for panic.
Friday night we ate at a small open air restaurant in a back alley with one of our Chinese staff. Sweet and sour chicken, tomatoes cooked with eggs, and cooked spinach along with all the rice you could eat. It was delicious and more than we could eat. Total bill for the three of us, about $4.00 US, less than the local Starbucks charges for a latte.
On Saturday we followed our usual routine of calling home using Skype, doing the laundry, cleaning the apartment and shopping. After doing the chores, we rode a bus downtown and explored in a direction we hadn’t gone before. We returned to our apartment to meet our neighbor at 4:00 P.M. in order to go out for some Chinese food. His text message had said he would meet us at the gate. Being typical foreigners, we were there 5 minutes early. We waited, we waited and finally thought, “Maybe the gate we’re supposed to be meeting at isn’t outside, but, the ‘gate’ is actually our door.” Sure enough there was our friend waiting at our apartment door.
He told us that we going to visit a tourist spot followed by a trip downtown to have Peking Duck. At the tourist spot we could not get by the food court. “You have to try this, very delicious”, he would say, and we would try them. One of the delicacies was “Three Bang Bombs” , a sort of rolled up rice dough that is covered with brown sugar. The name comes from the process of making the rice ball. After the rice ball is rolled in the sugar the cook bounces the ball off a large metal circle making a sort of drum sound, the ball bounces off the circle into the cooking material. Don’t ask what the rice was cooked in, we didn’t and we’re not sure we want to know. We were thinking that if we keep on eating at this place we won’t be hungry for the duck. However, we enjoyed the duck which was served sliced on a platter. To eat the duck you’d take a slice, put it on a crepe like pancake along with some sauce and vegetables, roll it up and pop it in your mouth. We had an interesting time learning more about the culture from our friend as we ate “real Chinese food”.