All that Trivial Pursuit finally paid off... ...

Hello everyone! I am in the middle of midterms week right now and taking a break to update you all on the goings-on. Yesterday I had my first test, Reading Comprehension, which went reasonably well. I didn't have a test today, but I have Listening tomorrow, Conversation on Thursday, and my Basic test on Friday. I'll be happy when they are all over. Interesting things have also been happening in my cooking class, this week we are learning to make 小吃 (xiao chi), or snacks/street food. Monday we made two different kinds of jiaozi (饺子). One kind was like what Westerners call potstickers, but they are boiled as opposed to fried, these are called zhong shui jiao. The other kind are like wonton soup and are called chao shou. We even learned how to make the dough and they turned out really well. I'm excited to try them again at home and put more interesting things inside. We started out with just a basic stuffing of pork with a little chive and ginger water, which was a little bland for me. However, we also learned how to make the sauces that usually accompany jioazi, which were delicious! Today we learned to make a type of noodles that are a Chengdu specialty called dandan mian. These noodles got this name because they are a common street food in Chengdu and you used to see old men all over the place selling dandan mian from their shoulder poles. They still sell lots of other things from shoulder poles, like fruit and chestnuts, but usually not noodles anymore, I'm not sure why. Anyways, this pole is colloquially called a "dandan" so that is what the noodles were named after. They are sometimes called the Chinese version of spaghetti in that they have a sauce with a little ground up meat, but that is really were the similarity ends. But they are very yummy and, as I learned, pretty easy to make. We also made a sweet snack called tang yuan fen (汤元粉), which is very uniquely Chinese. They are these dense, gummy glutenous rice balls filled with a sweet sesame paste that looks and feels like black sand. They are better than they sound, I promise, but the textures do take some getting used to. The first time I had them I didn't like them at all, but this time a liked them alot better. You can put anything inside the balls too, so a different filling might be even more tasty.
Monday night we had another meeting with Andrea. This one was a little more structured and was really interesting. First, we all had to bring a language tid-bit. I talked about a few words that were not part of the Chinese language until after the May 4th Movement, like "progress" 近不 jin bu and "freedom" 自由 zi you. Matt talked about interesting phrases the Chinese use, like the phrase for "you're fired" is [你炒鱿鱼了] which literally means "you're squid is fried". I have no idea where this phrase came from. Deborah's was about the prominent use of numbers as both good and bad things in Chinese language. Like nine is a lucky number and Jackie Chan paid alot of money to get the license plate 999. Also 3, 7, 21 is used to mean "I don't care", like "who cares 3 times 7 is 21". There are also many bad words and names that involve numbers. We also talked about an article that Andrea had given us to read, written by Peter Hessler who wrote "Rivertown" and "Oracle Bones". It was about a new Chinese car company Chery (pronounced Chee-ray) that is the first independent car company and will soon begin marketing in the United States through the same guy that brought the Subaru and the Yugo to America, so we will see what happens. It was interesting article though because it talked about alot of things that were very quintessentially Chinese. For example, he mentioned how some Americans came over to test drive the cars and no one wore seat belts and how most of Chery's cars are pretty much exact replicas of other manufacturer's cars and they were sued by the GM/Daewoo joint venture because of it. They also started to manufacture cars illegally at first because it is illegal to independently manufacture cars in China right now, it all has to be done through a joint venture. It's a really interesting article if you want to pick it up.
Tonight was Quiz Night again at the Bookworm. The questions are beginning to be more and more well rounded, like trivial pursuit. Tonight we were able to do much better than usual. We finished tied for 3rd place with the Kiwi Cubs, a team from New Zealand that had won the previous two times. The first tie-breaker question was "What country's name and capitol were changed to Malawi and Lilongwe? Name the countries previous name and capital." Neither of us knew the answer, which is Malawi used to be a British Protectorate called Nyasaland and I'm not sure what the capital was. So, we got a new tie-breaker question. With this question Brian, the "quiz master" said the team who had someone stand up and say the correct answer the fastest would win. The question was "What French artist born in 18-something (I don't remember exactly) is well known for painting pictures of ballerinas?" I stood up and said "Degas" and we won! 3rd place anyways, but our goal from the start had been to win something and for third place we got a bottle of Australian Shiraz, which is better than any of the Chinese wine and it was just fun to win something. I was very proud of us! Well, that's all from this side of the world.
In other news, on Monday the people I swim with invited me to the dong yong (winter swimming) swim meet. It appears to be some sort of relay race with 4 people back and forth across a river. It takes place in another town called Shenzhou December 31st and January 1st. I will just go down with the rest of the team and swim. There are prizes and money awards if your team places and everyone seems to think that if I swim we are going to do fairly well. I hope so. I'll let you know more as soon as I do, however that might not be until after the meet as everything is China seems to be a little bit of a surprise.