It has been a number of weeks since I last posted. I promised that I would post a video of life in St. Andrews, where I am studying at university, so here it is. It is not a great video, but it will give you an idea of what life is like here. If you can’t see the video for any reason, leave a comment and I will put the file online so that it can be downloaded.
Last week I started into the new semester. I have lectures only one day a week, but I have a lot of study to do for the rest of the time, so it is not quite as easy a schedule as it might sound. Unfortunately, my Chinese teacher has had to go back to China and temporarily withdraw from her studies, which means that I am without a teacher at the moment. It is a real pity as she is a superb teacher and I don’t think that I will easily find another teacher like her very easily. I will probably have to try to teach myself from a book, or something like that.
A couple of friends and I made a Chinese meal just under a month ago and I thought that I would post a video of that here. We began the day at 10 o’clock in the morning and travelled to Dundee to look for ingredients in the Chinese supermarket. Having returned to St. Andrews, the early afternoon was taken up with looking for extra ingredients and things for the meal in various stores in town. In the mid-afternoon we started cooking and cooked solidly until just past 7pm. We made dim-sum dumplings, spring rolls, long soup, chow mein, egg-fried rice, boiled rice, Chinese sausages with pak choi and a number of other dishes. The meal was very tasty, but it was the cooking that was the real experience.
I hope that you all have a great Chinese New Year’s celebration!
哇噻！ This blog has been quite active over the last few days. It makes a change from the last few months, I guess! Hopefully I will be able to post a video about life in St. Andrews in a few weeks time. However, in the meantime I would like to give links from which you can download the videos that were in my post and in Mark’s post. I hear that some of you were unable to access them on Youtube.
We have had a wonderful Christmas holiday so far, with a number of visits from friends and relatives and many special meals and memories. Over the next few days we will probably post a number of short posts, reporting on a number of the things that we have done over the break.
The couple of weeks before returning from university were very busy. The first week I had an important essay to work on and two presentations to prepare and give. The second week was busy with studies, but was more filled with cooking! I helped prepare two full Christmas meals, the first one for twelve people, the second for nine. I really love cooking and entertaining friends. There are few things better than eating well with good friends. Every Sunday we have a traditional roast meal (roast chicken or beef, for example, with roast potatoes, gravy, carrots, parsnips, served with fine wine), usually preceded by a special soup and followed by a dessert. It takes a lot of time to prepare, but it is one of my favourite times of the week. Over the last week of term, I had to make a lot of extra desserts, cakes and pies. I think that I probably made five separate batches of mince pies over the week and a lot of triple chocolate brownies. When I return to university I am hoping to learn some Chinese cooking. If any of you have some nice traditional Chinese recipes, please send them on to me!
I travelled back from university by bus on Saturday the 16th. I didn’t sleep at all the night before, but I wasn’t too tired. Just before I returned home, my Chinese teacher showed me how to set up my computer so that I can type in Chinese characters. Lots of fun! I just need to learn a few thousand more of them now.
I don’t know what it is like in Chinese, but in English about 20 words account for upwards of 30% of our speech (perhaps we really are just boring conversationalists!). I hope that this is true of Chinese as well as that is a reassuring statistic, if ever I saw one! I might utterly fail to understand approximately 70% of what you are saying, but it would be nice to know that, simply by learning 20 words really well, I would be able to nod in understanding to 30%+ of what you say!
Learning Chinese has been a lot of fun so far. My Chinese teacher is simply superb; she puts so much time and effort into preparing and giving our lessons. She is also incredibly generous and even cooked us an absolutely delicious Chinese meal a few weeks ago. On top of all of this, she is long-suffering enough to cope with my interruption of her disciplined revision schedule with questions on MSN and via e-mail about how to say certain things in Chinese!
Despite my being a little apprehensive, the bus journey really wasn’t that bad. It took several hours from Dundee to Manchester. Last year when I returned for Christmas it took me almost eleven hours by train, but that was largely due to problems on the line. In Manchester I met up with my brother Jonathan (Jonathan is doing a linguistics degree in Manchester University and so he often goes up there during the week) and we took the train from Manchester to Stoke-on-Trent together. Jonathan is also studying Chinese at the moment. We are at about the same level and were able to practice together. Mark seems to be interested in the idea of learning some Chinese, but I think that he needs a little more persuasion before he actually does so. (Go on, Mark, you know that you want to!)
Returning home is always strange after an extended period of absence. While all of my family and most of my books are here, I don’t quite feel at home here anymore, although it is certainly great to see people again. The day after I returned home, we had a number of people over for a Sunday lunch, including Laura and Emma, who really are almost like little sisters to us sometimes!
Mark arrived back on Monday the 18th (if I remember correctly). Over the week running up to Christmas we had a number of activities taking up our evenings (films, special meals, etc.) and I tried to do a little revision (without much success) during the days. I had a bad cold throughout that week, so I didn’t manage to get anywhere near as much work done as I had hoped to. Fortunately, the cold didn’t detract from most of the enjoyment of the week. Perhaps one of the highlights was going out for a special meal in Chinatown in Manchester with Peter, Jonathan, Jonathan’s wife Monika and her sister Jessika. 好吃！
On Christmas Eve we had a number of relatives over to visit, which was very special. We ate a big salmon between us and were able to spend time together again for the first time in over a year. We have some wonderful cousins, and it is always a lot of fun to meet up with them again! Unfortunately, our cousin John had not yet returned from France, where he is working at the moment.
Over the Christmas period many of the rooms of the house have special decorations. Our front room has a Christmas tree, covered with twinkling lights, tinsel, baubles, stars and chocolate. All of the presents, wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper, are stored beneath the tree. There are lights around some of the walls and special Christmas candles. In our front room we have some special Christmas plants as well. In other parts of the house we have streamers.
Over the Christmas period we eat a number of very special foods (not good if you want to lose weight!). We eat mince pies, Christmas puddings and Christmas cakes. Over the last couple of years Jonathan has decorated our Christmas cake. He is very gifted at it and the marzipan on the cake this year is absolutely amazing, showing a number of different scenes from the Christmas story!
Christmas Day is perhaps the most special day of the year. Our Christmas Day usually begins earlier than other days. When we were younger we weren’t able to sleep for most of the night before, because we were so excited! Christmas morning starts with opening stockings. Each person has a stocking (like a very big sock!) stuffed with little presents, things to eat and other surprises. Opening one’s stocking is always a lot of fun!
At about 9 o’clock we eat a special breakfast together. It has become a family tradition for my mother to make a Swedish tearing — absolutely delicious! After breakfast we usually each open one present. This year Mark, Peter and I put together a big hamper full of presents for Jonathan and Monika. It had a number of special foods and chocolates, some ‘smellies’ (special shower gel), something nice for them to drink and a few books that we knew that they would enjoy.
After breakfast is over we go to a meeting of our church, which is always very special. Christmas is one of the most joyful times of the year for Christians and our church is like an extended family for us. It is always wonderful to be able to share joy with others.
In the afternoon we eat the Christmas meal. Traditionally, the Christmas meal consists of turkey, served with roast potatoes, carrots, Brussels sprouts, stuffing, gravy and other things like that. There are few things as satisfying as a well prepared Christmas meal! Following the main course, we move on to desserts. The traditional dessert for a Christmas meal is Christmas pudding, served with white sauce, but we usually have a number of other desserts along with it.
This year we had about fifteen people in the house over Christmas Day, from a number of different parts of the world. Correy, the friend who first invited us to go over to China, was with us for the day as well. After the Christmas meal is over and all the washing up is completed, we start to open the presents. Each year we have a ‘postman’ (usually Peter) who gives a present to each person in turn. By the end of the present-opening the floor is generally covered with wrapping paper! Each year friends and family are incredibly good to us and give us some very generous gifts. It is very special to know that people really care about you. Christmas reminds us of how much we are loved, both by God and by others. This year Mark and I received a very special present each: knitted scarves from Gillian! We have worn them a number of times since and they are very warm and cosy.
After Christmas, life slowly returns to its usual pace. The turkey is soon finished and the many cakes and desserts are gradually eaten. Those of us who have exams coming up start to work on our revision. The next few weeks are going to be very busy for me. I return to university in St. Andrews on January 4th and have important exams on the 10th and the 13th. There is a lot of work to get done between now and then.
After Christmas we still have some special celebrations. Last night we went around to Jonathan and Monika’s and ate a special Korean meal — ramyon, kimchi and bulgogi! Tomorrow many of the family will be traveling down south to visit relatives (I am revising). I will end this post with a rather silly video that Mark and I made two days ago. It shows some of the Christmas decorations in our house and some of the strange things that we get up to when we are bored in the early hours of the morning!
Wow, things are quiet here! No one has posted for so long. C’mon people, write something!
I thought that I would post very briefly to say that I started Chinese lessons yesterday. I will be having three hour-long Chinese lessons a week and I don’t have to pay a penny, which is superb. Last night we started straight into things. The lessons move very quickly through the material. We started to learn how to pronounce the four types of tones and the different initials, which was quite fun. I also learnt some basic greetings. I have another lesson this evening.
Life is good here, although a number of my friends are feeling ill at the moment. So far I have not caught ‘fresher’s flu’ (the flu that goes around after you return to university), but I am not sure that I will finally escape it.
Hangzhou was the first Chinese city that either of us had visited and our impressions and memories of the city are especially piquant. In some respects it is not easy to distinguish our impressions of Hangzhou in particular from our impressions of China in general. The distinctive charm of the city only began to become apparent to us once we had visited other areas of the country.
Prior to coming to Hangzhou, neither of us knew very much about the city. Mark had seen some pictures of Xi Hu from a friend’s visit to the city and had been struck by its beauty. As our reasons for visiting Hangzhou were not primarily those of tourists, we were more than pleasantly surprised by the remarkable loveliness of the city. Half expecting the dull drabness of a modern city, we had not anticipated the colourful gardens, parks and hillsides. Nor had we expected the wealth of historical interest that we discovered in the older buildings and streets and in the fine Zhejiang Provincial Museum.
Our favourite part of Hangzhou was probably Xi Hu and its surroundings. We spent a number of days exploring the lake and some of the sites around it. During our stay, we took a boat trip on the lake and visited some of the lake’s islands. It was wonderful to see so much beauty in the centre of a modern city. On the same day as we took the boat trip, we went to the top of Leifeng Pagoda, from which we were able to look out over the lake. Later on in our stay we also had the opportunity to visit Cheng Huang, from which we enjoyed a marvellous panorama of the whole of the city and the surrounding hills. We were quite surprised to discover that both of those buildings had only been rebuilt in recent years. One usually expects such buildings to come from an age other than our own. The buildings did not merely possess an imposing exterior; the artworks that they contained were equally worth the visit.
Much of our time was spent in various parks and gardens within the city. We especially enjoyed Liu Lang Wen Ying and the Hangzhou Flower Nursery, which both had outstanding displays of natural beauty. After visiting the Flower Nursery we went on to Guo’s Villa, which was wonderfully serene and peaceful. The villa and its gardens were quite unlike anything we had ever seen in Europe or America.
So much of what we witnessed in Hangzhou was totally new or foreign to us. Perhaps one of the strangest things for us coming to China was adjusting to the life of the Chinese streets. The rules of the road that we were accustomed to in Britain no longer seemed to apply. The car horn, which is seldom used in Britain, seemed to be used quite regularly. Crossing the road was also always an experience; one was never quite sure if the cars would stop for you! We were further surprised to see how lively the streets were. In Britain most shops close at about 5:30pm, so it was interesting to see so many people on the streets in the evening in the streets around our hotel. Exploring the various streets was a lot of fun.
The housing in the city was one of the first things that struck us. It was quite different from the housing in most British cities. In Britain most people live in separate houses, rather than in flats (with the recent trend being towards detached and semi-detached rather than terraced housing). In places within the city we were also able to see a degree of poverty that we had never seen before, something that was all the more stark when it was seen in the light of the many signs of economic progress and new wealth in the city. We began to become more aware of the affluence of our own society.
Qinghefang Old Street was one of the first places that we visited in Hangzhou and we also revisited it on our last full day in the city. The liveliness and colour of the street made it one of the highlights of our time in Hangzhou. The various stores offered a wealth of diversions and exotic wares; it was especially fascinating to watch some of the craftsmen at work. Qinghefang Old Street was the first place where we had to get used to bartering. In Britain one rarely barters for goods as one seldom finds items without a set price. Bartering made the acts of buying and selling into a sort of game, a game which we grew to enjoy, although I get the feeling that we generally ended up as the losing party!
On our first trip to Qinghefang Old Street we sampled some of the various foods on offer in the snack street. The English descriptions of the foods on offer in the various stalls were extremely helpful as we would have been utterly incapable of identifying many of the foods without them. We tasted rabbit’s head and frogs’ legs for the first time and enjoyed a few more familiar dishes.
During our stay in Hangzhou we had the opportunity to try many different types of Chinese food and also to sample some local delicacies, such as vinegar fish and Song soup. The chance to experience so many new foods was one of the most exciting things about our trip. In virtually all the countries that we had visited before coming to China, the food that we tasted was quite familiar to us, so the rich variety of new tastes in China added an exciting new dimension to our holiday. Seeing so many familiar international brands and fast food restaurants was also a strange experience. The fact that KFC and McDonald’s food tastes the same the world over seemed strange to us when we considered that almost all of the other food that we were tasting was so new to us. The predictability of fast food had never seemed so boring!
Despite the many interesting sights that we saw, the thing that we will most remember Hangzhou for is the warmth of the welcome that we received from the many people that we met. The hospitality that we received and the many friends that we made served to make the time that we spent at Hangzhou particularly memorable.
