"Taì lěng" - Too cold!

Hmmm... I'm not sure what happened to the city of "eternal spring" but it's snowing/sleeting in Kunming!

Don't be jealous of the weather, it's currently less than 10degrees in Eshan, Yuxi where I am and I don't know where all that sunshine went! The hot water here is solar powered and there's no central heating so we've been boiling up water to take bird baths and wearing many, many layers at once.

This week has been great, if a little nippy. Over the weekend some of my grade 1 students came around and we went to the market with them to buy ingredients to make jiǎozi - dumplings! It was a really great day and we had some of our older students come around later in the day to help us eat all the dumplings since they have classes on Saturday morning. We made over 200 dumplings and had more people than I could keep track of filtering through our little apartment sampling some of our very numerous dumplings.

 

 

 Shopping at the market in Eshan, we definitely saw where our meat came from (maybe it would've been better if we hadn't!). 

It was brilliant with stalls selling fresh tofu, spices, nuts, noodles, meat and vegetables from the surrounding villages as well as hot, ready food such as roast duck, pancakes and Chinese bakery goods! The place was buzzing!

 

Pork, spring onion, corriander, chilli, salt and freshly made dumpling skins - everything you need to make jiǎozi (dumplings!).

 Freshly made jiaozi, made by about 10 different sets of hands in our living room....

.... to be boiled in our tiny kitchen!

 

I think we had 20 people in our living room at one stage picking at freshly made, slippery jiaozi!

 

This week I've been teaching a "restaurant" roleplay and have had students come up with foods, put together a menu in pairs before doing a little roleplay followed of course by a very loud whole class game. And I can assure you, with 60 students, these games are VERY loud! Still enjoying teaching and next week I think I'm going to task myself with getting all 720ish of my students to pick their own english name before writing a little acrostic poem about it. Fingers crossed it works!

 We've starting getting to know our Chinese colleagures much better now and on Tuesday, we went to have hot pot with the whole english department - excellent to have something boiling AND spicy at the start of our freezing week! The hot pot was accompanied by a couple of bottles of báijiǔ (35%!! rice spirit) which is what all formal toasts are done with here... definitely a warming dinner. 

 Yin/Yang hot pot - one side is very spicy!

I'm sorry for my lack of blogging, but although I didn't have internet (and sometimes electricity...!) in Fiji, at least when I did get to a town the internet was fast and reliable. We technically have internet all the time here but it's a bit temperamental and very, very slow. More posts and pictures are due to come.

P.S - I've finally started Chinese lessons!

I've been here almost a month and my vocabulary has expanded by only a few phrases, the key ones being:

 "Dui bu qi, wo de Zhongwen bu hao" and "Wo bu ming bai!"

"Sorry, my Chinese is very bad" and "I don't understand!"