Making dumplings

I feel like every foreigner who lives in China eventually has this experience - making 饺子 jiaozi (dumplings) with your local friends.


You may remember Asian Kate.  She's was our real estate agent, and is currently our neighbor.  She works ALL the time.  The realty office that she works at is right beside the gate of our complex.  She and her husband run the business, so they are literally there 24/7.  Twenty four hours a week, 7 weeks a year.


Actually they're there every day (Monday through Sunday) from 9:00am to 9:00pm.  When her husband's around, Asian Kate works all day long and has no time to hang out.  BUT when her husband goes to Hong Kong (his hometown) to visit his mother, Kate is free to hang out.


For months she has been telling me, "When my husband goes to Hong Kong, we can make dumplings together." "When my husband is gone, we can go shopping!"  But I was never really sure when her husband actually went on these trips.  Then about three weeks ago she knocked on my door to say, "He's going to Hong Kong November 1-5th!"


So Wednesday, Kate and I went to the market to buy fillings for dumplings, then brought them back to my house to stuff the dumplings, steam them and boil them.  It was a lot of fun to finally get some time to hang out with her, and super fun to finally learn how to make dumplings.  Kate kept saying, "I think making jiaozi is fun!"  Her mother apparently is a great jiaozi maker, and it is her family tradition (actually a lot of Chinese families' tradition) to make jiaozi together and eat them at Chinese new year.  Maybe next blog I'll write about this tradition and what I learned about the "legend" of jiaozi from my chinese teacher.


There is a specific way to make jiaozi look pretty when you are closing up the dumplings, and it took practice for me to get them done well, but by the end, Kate told me I could open up an "Jiaozi Made by an American Shop."

steamed jiaozi

making the fillings

teaching me the proper way to wrap them

Let me clear my throat.....

Okay, so this post is completely random, not at all anything about our lives here, except for the fact that this is what I have been enjoying today.

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake have done 3 versions of the history of rap (I think the latest one was done last week).  Part two is by far my favorite.  And I wanted to share.  At least 40% of these songs I'm pretty sure I've either danced to or sang really loudly with my college roommate, Jessica.  Some of y'all may have even been privileged enough to see our "hey ya" dance.

I love that rap music brings us things like the stanky leg, the dougie, soulja boy, air force ones, ghost ridin' the whip....the list goes on and on.

I had a dance party by myself today, even though I've thrown up every night for the last three nights -just a little bug, that I think I dougied out of my system today...

Technology Makes Lives Better

I've wavered on what to call this blog post: Moving at the Speed of Progress, Making the Most of the Internet, The Blessing of the IT Revolution. However, none of them, not even the title I chose, captured the gravity of what this blog is about: processed meat.

Recently, my brother Isaac, who lives in Memphis, TN, harnessed the power of the World Wide Web to send me a message here in China introducing a mythical culinary delight known as the "hamdog."

Then, using something known as "electronic mail" or "email," I passed the information on to my best friend from high school Jon Bass, who lives in the greater DC area.
















A few days later, Jon used what is known as a "social networking site" called The Facebooks to send me the following deeply moving photo-essay of his own recent hamdog experience:

Step 2: Roll the hotdogs into a protective covering of
ground beef, as seen above

Step 1: Pan fry a hotdog (or 2) and place on top of
ground beef, rolled out flat

Step 3: Wrap the pre-hamdog in bacon, using
toothpicks to completely secure the bacon slices

Step 4: Various words can be used here, but I prefer
"dredge" - in bread crumbs and parmesan cheese

Step 5: Grill your creation and enjoy

Jon said that the experience was a delight and that he would recommend it to anyone, but our legal team wanted a disclaimer about pregnant women and people with heart conditions.

Jon did, however, beg me to warn newcomers that they may slip into a meat-coma partway through the second hamdog and should proceed with caution, in the presence of a certified health professional.

10 minutes and you know about China

I saw that a friend posted this video on facebook about China, and thought some of you might find it interesting.  It covers A LOT of information about China in ten minutes.  If it's too long with too much information - maybe just watch a few seconds, pause it, then come back to it later for a few seconds more...

Dear Jimmy....

I recently started teaching English at an elementary school here in our city to kids after their regular school hours on Monday and Tuesday afternoons.

My Monday class is a class of 20 kids with mixed levels of English, and an age range of 8 to 12 years old.  My Tuesday class (best class in the world) is a class of 7 year olds, who have only had a year of English.  For the first forty minutes of class each week, I take over and teach the kids something - which is actually really challenging for my Monday class because some of them know how to cuss in English, and some of them can't even spell their English name.  So what do you teach kids on different levels that'll keep them all focused?  I still don't know.

After my forty minutes of teaching, we switch to computer time, where all the kids get a netbook, log onto a website, and do 40 minutes of watching videos and responding to questions about the videos (all in English).  On Mondays, I just sit at a desk waiting for the time to pass.  On Tuesdays, I'm up the whole time helping the kids understand what's being said during the program, and helping them learn how to use computers.

A couple of weeks ago, Aaron and I got an email from Virginia (soon to be Virginia O'Hare), who is a second grade teacher in Memphis, with letters from her second grade class to Aaron and I asking us about ourselves and living in Asia......and the fertile crescent - like half the letters asked about the fertile crescent...they must think we live in Mesopotamia.

Ms. Skelton and Mr. O'Hare

So I had my classes write them letters back.  Here are two favorite letters we received from Ms. Skelton.

Here is a letter from one of my students, who insisted on having a boy to write back.  I gave her a letter from Demarcus, and told her to write him back.  She wrote him, gave it to me and told me not to read it.  So I did, when I got home.  

Who is this Jimmy???  She got a letter from Demarcus!

This ATM location: no longer accepting debit cards

Ask yourself this simple question: why remove the ATM when you can just fill it in with concrete?

Pulled noodles

There is a lot of delish-ers (delicious) dishes we enjoy here, that you can't find at Chinese restaurants in America.

One of them is 兰州拉面 (Lan Zhou La Mian, pronounced kinda like Lawn Joe La Me-An) which are noodles made by one of China's minorities (they have 56 people groups in this country).

The noodles are made fresh at the restaurant, thrown into a hot beef broth, and topped with onion, cilantro in some places, soy sauce and chili pepper - though the last two you add yourself to your preference.  They definitely help you warm up on a cold day.

Also, they come with the free entertainment of watching the guys make the noodles.  It's pretty amazing.  In fact I want to learn how to do it.  Forget about pasta makers.

Here are a couple of videos showing how it's done.  I didn't feel like editing them, so hopefully you can tell what's going on.  1st video- stretching out the dough, prepping it for making it into noodles.  2nd video - using his fingers to separate the dough and make noodles.

In the event of an emergency...

Make sure the little guy can breath. Pollution is such a killer...

let's get physical, physical

People like to keep fit here.


And they keep fit by putting in what appears to be child playground equipment in every neighborhood.  Only this is for adults.


Grown women in skirts.  Guys in suits.  People who want to multi-task, such as spinning a prayer wheel while feeling a deep burn in their quads. 


Though these are grown men and women, as my husband put it when talking about the equipment,"It brings out the kid in every adult."


Besides the playground equipment available in every neighborhood, here in China you will find people gathering every morning to do tai chi (a martial art) and morning aerobics, and every evening to do couples or line dances at night, as well as roller skating for the kids.

Check out the video to see them dance 'til they can't dance 'til they can't dance no more, as the music factory of C&C tells them to.


Oh, and I included a little footage of a performance we stumbled upon back in February.

I'll let you guess how it smelled...