Learning to Cook and Sing!

Today at 3 o'clock Laura, Matt, and I were signed up for a cooking class. After a little run around trying to find the place, we walked up three flights of stairs into the kitchen of a hostel near the Tibetan District. On the table there were 5 cutting boards and 5 cleavers set out along with a myriad of spices and bowls. In the class there was only the 3 of us and a German guy staying at the hostel named Heinrich. Then there was our teacher lady and 3 other ladies who I can only describe as prep cooks. None of them spoke any English except a few key phrases, like the names of the different ingredients. She would give us each ingredient and show us how to cut it or prepare it and we would just follow her lead. We also each had our own wok and after we finished our dish we would each sit down and eat what we just made. It was really fun! And delicious. I was so full afterwards. They gave us each a sheet of the most basic instructions for the dishes in English. We made 5 different dishes. The first was sweet and sour pork, then kung pao chicken, then vegetables with sauce over crisped rice (it has a better name in Chinese), then "fish smelling eggplant" (which is my personal favorite and really misleading because it doesn't smell, taste, or involve fish in anyway. It is just called that because its prepared the same way as fish is), and lastly a spicy cold carrot and cucumber salad. It was like eating 5 meals in a row. Fortunately they were pretty small. I learned alot about how to use the spices and I feel confident that I could make them all again and will try to experiment now too. You can all benefit from this when I get home! :)

That night we went to karaoke at a club called ATT for my birthday party. Karaoke is really big in China. There are many clubs right by school and they are all GIANT. The clubs are all composed of lots of individual rooms that you rent with couches and a TV. It is not at all what I imagined, but it was really fun. This one had a big lobby with fish tanks too. Our room had a big black leather wrap-around couch and coffee tables and a huge TV. It was a "medium-sized room". They also have large and small rooms. You pick the songs on this computer off to the side and they can organize the songs in all different sorts of ways. We had them organize them by language and just looked at the English ones. We had heard that they don't have very many English songs compared to the number of Chinese songs they have. This may be true, but they had a ton of English songs for a country that does not speak the language. We sung all sorts of songs from oldies, like the Beatles and John Denver, to Michael Jackson, to Air Supply, to newer music like Britney Spears. I invited some of my Chinese friends also and they picked some Chinese songs too. There were some Chinese groups that I really liked that I might try to buy CDs for or something. We made huge fools of ourselves and a great time was had by all!
As far as the birthday celebration part, they got me a beautiful cake too. All the cakes in China are so amazing. People don't have ovens here and so everyone buys these gorgeous cakes that come in big Styrofoam hat boxes.They have fresh fruit and chocolate decorations on top and always have a filling of some kind as well. The cake itself is light,kind of like angel food cake and it is delicious! All in all it was a great day.