I want it that way.
Trip Start
Aug 24, 2007
1
4
42
Trip End
Jul 04, 2008
Kaifeng,
China
Friday, September 14, 2007
Kelly and Nancy were waiting for us outside the restaurant and my first thought was - I am screwed.
"Erin," I hissed. "You need to help me with names. I'm only going to know Tianey and Michelle!"
Unlike Erin, who teaches them in Advanced English and has them three times a week, I only teach them writing once a week for two hours
fancy hot pot!
. And there are so many students in the class with most of them having the same generic haircut. It's cruel, actually.I had visions of eating hot pot on a rickety streetside table, circled around the giant boiling pot of spicy water with my students. Instead, we had our own individual room and everyone had their own individual pot. This is very rare because hot pot is traditionally eaten with a giant boiling pot of water in the middle and everyone puts the food in the pot to cook. But the girls wanted to give us individual pots because it's cleaner and also a lot nicer.
The girls, who are all from Henan and not particularly well-off, gave us quite the spread. There was Tsingtao beer, orange juice, a tea whose color resembled urine, peaches, mutton, squash, sweet potato, special beef (I'm not really sure what that is, but I know it definitely wasn't dog), balls of meat, noodles, bean curd, this leafy green vegetable that isn't in the United States but it was something green that wasn't soaked in grease so I was happy.
They kept asking us what our favorite Chinese foods were and we naively thought that they were asking out of curiosity. Everyone in Kaifeng asks this question because not only is that the polite way to greet someone in Chinese, but Kaifeng is very throughout the region for its food
hot pot fud.
. Anyway, after we told them, one of the girls would leave the room and a few minutes later, our room attendant would come with a big heaping plate of whatever we just said. That's how we came to eat some of the best dumplings I've had yet and these delicious flat bean noodles.Yesterday's meal is also the meal that will forever be known as "The meal in which Emily got schooled in the use of chopsticks." I thought my chopstick skills were at a highly proficient level, but apparently not. The area around my plate became so messy and I kept dropping everything that might have been slippery. So I pretty much dropped everything. Everywhere. All the time. But I'm going to blame it on the plastic chopsticks because their grip isn't as good as the wooden chopsticks I've been using. Seriously.
And these girls are a lot of fun. This was my first experience just hanging out with real Chinese people since I've arrived here. Jackie doesn't really count because he's kind of like our long-lost Asian mother who has to help us do everything. It was great to feel like I was finally connecting with locals and not just hanging out in our little ex-pat community. We talked about their hometowns and families as I learned their names. Icy, who is a Kaifengren, invited us to her home for the Spring Festival, and told us about the upcoming Chrysanthemum festival
fancy ktv
. The chrysanthemum is the city's flower and apparently during the month of October, the city is flooded with Chinese from all around the region ("It is a sea of black head!" Cherry told me. "Because we all have black hair, you will only see floating balls of black for a whole month!"). This somehow, made the table break out into a rousing rendition of "Do-Re-Mi" from the Sound of Music. I'm not really sure how that happened. They taught us some Chinese words and "Chinese words with Kaifeng accent," like how the Sanlanchi's aren't really called that but instead are called beng bengs, which means Jump-Jump because the taxis have absolutely no shocks and you bounce around the carriage.
While we were walking towards the KTV, I found out that I'm more entertaining in class than I was aware of.
"Have you ever been to a KTV before?" Kelly asked me.
"Sort of, except it's called karaoke in the US and it's not in a private room like it is here," I told her. "It's usually a theme-night at a bar, so you sing in front of a bunch of people you don't know. And you usually have to sign up for a song in advance during the night."
"Oh," she said, looking kind of confused and wondering why I would ever want to sing in front of a bunch of strangers
shoe buffer?
. "We think you and Erin will really like the KTV. You two are always dancing in front of the class.""Wait, what? I do?" I said as I quickly racked my brain for things I did while standing in front of the class. I know I probably seem really ridiculous, but I can't remember dancing in front of the class. I only do that on the street when people are staring at me.
"Oh yes, you are always dancing," Michelle told me.
Now I'm afraid that since I've been concentrating so hard on speaking clearly and slowly, that I've lost all conscious control of my body and it's creating specific dances for my verbal explanations of thesis statements, credible sources, and bibliographies.
I also found out that my students have intense discussions before class about what type of earrings I'm going to wear that day. The class has even turned it into a betting game. Michelle and Kelly asked me how many different pairs of earrings I own and which ones are my favorites so they can get a leg up on the betting process. Finding out that it was a betting competition, I declined to tell them which ones I was more partial to so I could keep the playing field a bit more even. Erin found out from Nancy in a different conversation that the students also bet on her earring selection.
When we entered into the KTV, I was blown away. Karaoke is not some drunken activity that happens in divvy bars where Old Style is advertised on tap. Workers wore bowties, the lobby housed a shoe buffer, and there's an extensive collection of classy alcohol available for purchase
chinese dance party.
. And the individual room concept is amazing. Our room had this great wall-length couch, a coffee table, a disco ball, a strobe light, another special effect light and a giant TV for the lyrics. KTV-ing with Chinese students our age works out really well with American girls in their early to mid-twenties because the English songs that are really big in China right now, are the songs we listened to during middle school. So the songs are old enough to us that they have that tinge of nostalgia, but it's still recent enough that you ashamedly still know all of the lyrics. Which is why Erin and I could belt out the whole entire Backstreet Boys catalog with the best of them, including some Backstreet songs we never heard of. Also your choice Britney Spears' songs. Erin and I really got into singing this one song and Michelle definitely videotaped us on her cell phone. We're probably going to end up on the Chinese version of YouTube.
And the music videos that play on the TV with the songs are some of the most random things I have ever seen. Some are videos of white couples from the early 1990s, walking around the park in awful pleated pants, angular haircuts and giant shoulder pads while a song plays about people cheating on each other. Or there was my personal favorite video from the 1980s that had a giant watch with changing neon colors. As the watch changed garish color schemes, a guy with a big blond mullet rotated around the watch. The four hours spent in the KTV were probably some of the most entertaining four hours of my life.
When we were leaving, the girls asked us if we wanted to do this again in a couple of weeks and I of course said yes. If this is what it's like hanging out with my students, sign me up.
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