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Published: January 23rd 2011
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New Food!
Jujube fruits I think? Zaozi. I attended high school in my hometown and went to college a whole hour away from home, so I had never celebrated Thanksgiving or Christmas without my family. Also I quite liked the tEp fambly New Years celebrations where we usually cooked dinner together and did some stuff like play Risk or watch Star Wars.
This year, Thanksgiving happened in the middle of a work week. There is one other foreign graduate student here, a nice guy from Iraq named Gazal (spelling?) who I recently met when we both represented the Atom/Molecule team during an Institute-wide tug of war competition (we won! prize = shampoo and conditioner, wat). He already got his Ph.D. in Iraq, but had to start over here in China. Maybe we can start an International Students Association (membership: 2). Anyway, there aren't other Americans around so I felt kind of bummed and lonely so I gave Diana a call to see what she and Craig were doing. We went out for fake meat in a restaurant next to a (Taoist?) temple. It was just like the fake meat at that restaurant in Boston with really accurately flavored and shaped tofu/gluten creations. They even managed to have
fake skin on a fake fish. In true American spirit, we ate too much food. Then we went to English corner which they assured me was super awkward and overwhelming. Actually being surrounded by Chinese students and answering the same kind of questions about myself and about America over and over again is what I would call a typical day at work lol. The students were really sweet.
Also one of my favorite parts of the holidays is baking. Lacking an oven, I made 40+ deep-fried apple pies that looked like dumplings and brought them to our research group meeting (our group is huge!). They worked out pretty well! Shortly thereafter, we had our first snow of the season, which made me so happy. I giddily took tons of pictures and also suited up in some long underwear for a long jog in the falling snow. Probably the closest I will get to skiing : )
Then as Christmas approached, I had to maintain the Campbell family tradition of forcing as many people as possible to watch "It's A Wonderful Life." I got the English language movie watching club to download a copy and I promised to make
Christmas cookies for the occasion. Apple pies deep fried really well so I thought I could do sandtarts (a family recipe!) too. Total disaster. They disintegrated in the oil and also I seriously smoked up the apartment. Then I tried kind of steaming them with a bit of water in a rice cooker which was slightly better but also a soggy disaster. I brought my failed attempts and many apologies to the movie-watching session.
Also in December, there were several conferences/meetings. One on precision measurement, some talks quantum optics, and also the people from the government who fund us came in to evaluate us. Several Chinese citizens who are currently professors in the U.S. and Canada attended. One of them even used to be Dave Pritchard's postdoc - small world!! We took the people who came here for the meetings out for super nice dinners every night. One night we had lots of wine and shark fin soup (~100 rmb/bowl) was among the entrees and in total spent 2000 rmb for a party of 12. We also took a two day excursion to some local hot springs. Our group rented several luxurious condos, ate a lot of great food,
and spend an evening dipping in various hot spring-fed pools in the resort. The people who went on the hot spring excursion were just professors, research scientists, our secretary, and special foreign guest me. So I was by far the youngest person there and also the only female besides our secretary, and at one point I got separated from the younger crowd so that it was just me and some 40/50-year-old male professors wearing itty bitty bathing suits running around in bathrobes and dipping in hot tubs and sitting in saunas. I cannot even imagine sitting in a sauna with a group of scantily-clad, male, top American atomic physics professors, so thankfully this happened in China where my awkward threshold has been raised significantly. I assume all of these (not cheap!) activities were paid for on the Chinese Academy of Science's dime, which seems really incongruous when graduate students here get a stipend of only 700 RMB/month. Bertucci's lunches at MIT pale in comparison.
For the Christmas holiday, I went to Diana and Craig's party with a bunch of their students. Their students were really sweet and tons of fun. I liked their English names like "Candy" and "Daisy"
New Food!
Longyan, literally "dragon eye." and "James Bond." We played games and drank beer and Diana's awesome egg nogg and decorated the gingerbread man my mom sent me in the mail. One of the games was kind of like truth or dare but only truth and the questions were like Q: "Have you ever kissed a boy?" A: "No." Everyone: Giggles!!! I think college students here are generally more innocent than American college students. Fairly early into the night, the students turned into pumpkins and had to run back to their dorms before the gates locked, so the three of us headed to trusty ol' Vox. The shopping area near the club was all decked out for Christmas and it was also snowing and very cold so the scene was very appropriate (except for maybe the light-up palm trees). Chinese people don't really celebrate Christmas, but it is a huge shopping holiday with great sales and all-night shopping mania. All the big stores are decorated with trees, lights, Santas, etc.
The next night... well I can only take so much beer and second-hand smoke so I stayed in and embarked on a Christmas cookie-baking project. This time, sugar cookies cut out with the cookie
Agriculture
Just outside of Wuhan. cutters sent from home. Since we do not have heat in Wuhan, letting the dough chill merely required letting it sit in the kitchen for a few hours! Found all the ingredients besides vanilla and powdered sugar for making frosting (people at the store looked at me like I was crazy for asking about those two). Deep frying worked this time (I think the sandtarts failed because of their high butter ratio), but made the cookie too flaky and ill-suited for decorating. Cooking in an oil-greased rice cooker and flipping the cookies with a spatula worked pretty well though! Because of lack of frosting, I made a butter-egg-granulated-sugar paste and tacked on some candies for decoration. Making and decorating 40+ cookies was quite the project, especially because I could only "bake" three of them at a time. I really like baking during the holidays and I listened to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack while I worked.
Then New Years! I usually celebrate New Years with some good friends and/or family, so I wasn't really into going out and getting drunk with a bunch of expats who I vaguely know. It seems like the other students here only go out
Our Room at the Resort
Chinese Academy of Sciences money well spent. and do fun things with their significant others, and if they are single or their SOs are not around, they stay in. (Well that is what people often say in response to, "What did you do over the weekend?".... "Nothing. I don't have a girlfriend so I can't go out and do things. I watched TV in my dorm room." I dunno, I don't quite understand it.) So I invited everyone who didn't have New Years plans to come over to my apartment to play beer pong and flip cup. I think I played these games all of 5 times in my entire college career (especially because some factions in tEp/Senior Haus considered them too fratty/mainstream). I personally find them quite fun and I thought it would be a grand idea to drink a lot of beer and then count down to midnight with the other atomic physics students.
For New Years Day, several other students and I went to Professor Wang's house to fold and eat lots of dumplings. He taught me his technique for doing it. This made me think of our Exeter dumpling making days at Mr. Feng's house, except this time my dumplings didn't look
like crap and also when people spoke Chinese I could understand them : ) Professor Wang's daughter played the zither for us (plucked string instrument). She was very talented and it was cool to see that instrument played in real life, because one hears it all the time coming from speakers at tourist sites.
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Javier
non-member comment
fratty frat frat
so fratty! i'm glad you enjoyed the holidays and managed to have some american traditions! i remember being fairly bummed in geneva when i realized there would be no fireworks on the 4th of july. i hope everything's been going well since!