29 September 2006

Wo shengri kuai le!! (Happy Birthday to Me!)

So I am now 21. It doesn't feel alot different than 20, especially in China. The drinking age here is 18, when it's enforced, and it was pretty much just a regular day. Laura and I went to the post office so she could send some packages and went to lunch. We went to this little jiaozi (potsticker) place on campus. There is a really cute lady that works there that is trying to learn English (like everyone) and she is so nice. We are going to frequent that place so we can make friends with her and then see if we can set up some kind of trade where we help her learn English and she teaches us how to make jiaozi.
After that I had tai ji class, then I went swimming, then I had Chinese history class. We finally got home at about 9pm. I got to talk to my mom and Mike and they both wished me a happy birthday and that was nice. Laura also bought me these little Chinese cupcakes. They are just as beautiful as the big cakes, but more fun because you can try all the flavors! There was strawberry, blueberry, chocolate, lime, lemon, and two that were indistinguishable. But they were all delicious!! We were going to wait for Li Juan to come home to eat them, but then it got to be like 10:30 and she still wasn't home so we decided it was time for cake. That is the time I was born you know... Then, right after we polished off all six cupcakes ourselves, Li Juan came home with a Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival speciality called mooncake (yuebing). I'll talk more about the Mid-Autumn Festival later, but the moon cakes are really weird. They are these little, dense, undercooked round cake things with some sort of preserved salty egg yoke in the center. The egg yoke is hard too, so I don't know what they do to it. Needless to say it was not very good. But I'm glad I got to try it. Most Chinese people don't even like mooncakes. The tradition is to by them at Mid-Autumn Festival (it celebrates the harvest moon) and offer them to people that come over. Everyone has a box but no one ever eats them because they are gross. But they do come in very beautiful packaging. Four come in a pretty big red box with yellow and gold Chinese characters and pictures all over it. Then inside the big box is 4 little red boxes with yellow Chinese characters on them nested in yellow satin. Inside the little boxes is the mooncake. Its alot of show for a not very edible thing.
After cake I have been doing homework all night. It never ends!

2 comments:

Regina said...

HAPPY 21st BIRTHDAY SARAH!! And super congrats on the IPE Scholarship! Great things come to great people!!

-Regina

Anonymous said...

Mooncakes sound like American fruit cakes. They taste bad and people always give them as gifts.