New Stir-Fry Dish

On New Year’s Eve, I made another stir-fry for dinner. This time I boiled these gray noodles that I bought from my local grocery store (not sure what they are called) and used them as the main ingredient. I then stir-fried them for a few minutes along with more rice cakes, tofu, broccoli, fungus, shiitake mushrooms, mung bean sprouts, and spicy bean curd seasoning. In addition, I used more and less the same spices I had been using. It turned out pretty good. Again, this is a spicy dish. Apologize for some of the photos being blurred.

***On a side note, I just finished booking my flights today for the upcoming Spring Festival as I’ll (and most of the country) have approximately a month off from work and will be traveling. This is the time of China’s ‘Great Migration’ and a good time to get out of the country. So hello Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore! Stay tuned for more interesting (hopefully) overseas posts…

2011 Christmas Party

On Christmas Eve, our program held a Christmas Eve party/banquet at the Shenzhen Guest House in Dongmen sponsored by the Shenzhen Public Education Bureau. The Bureau paid for the party as well as our rooms. The party lasted lasted a couple hours and was centered around dinner and a few musical/art performances. The dinner was a little disappointing as the vegetarian options were slim (lazy-Susan style). The performances were a mixture of Chinese and American teacher acts. The best performance I thought was the one by the little Chinese girl who sang Scarborough Fair acappella (last pic). Her English was great but you could tell she had this thing memorized and in typical Chinese fashion, even though she could sing this song in perfect English, in no way would you be able to have a conversation with her in English. We were provided with a gift bag containing candy and little Christmas decorations.  The banquet room was decorated nicely in a Christmas theme.  After the banquet, most of us just hung around the hotel or the nearby shopping area for the night. It was a fun night and a nice gesture on behalf of the Bureau.

The next day (Christmas Day), my contact teacher was nice enough to invite me (and my friend, Laila) to a Chinese Christmas dinner at a local restaurant where we had some vegetarian dishes (in addition to meat dishes) such as tofu, spicy green beans, and shredded potatoes. Afterward, Laila and I went out for a little bit with the intent to watch a few of our colleagues play a gig but we found out it was canceled after arriving.  Oh well, but it was a nice weekend.

Shenzhen Library

About a week and a half ago I went to Shenzhen’s main library which is located in the central (cultural) part of the city. It’s near a shopping mall, park, museum, concert hall, and cinema among other things; all of which I have blogged about before. I had stopped in the library previously for about a minute just to see where it was but I had never explored it. It’s very large, enjoyable, and modern with multiple levels.

There are over 4 million volumes of books, journals, papers, etc. I didn’t borrow any books or anything as I prefer not to pay for a card. They also have computer/internet labs that you can use but I don’t know what the protocol is to use them (everything is in Chinese). I just walked around and at one point tried to take a photo but a security guard stopped me and told me photos were not allowed, but as you can see, I was still able to snap a few mischievously. 

 

I headed to the English area as being in Communist China; I was interested in viewing what they had. To my surprise, they had a lot of books on many, many topics. You can read books about U.S. Presidents, capitalism, literature, theory, sports, music, art, etc. Before coming to China, I had lived in New Mexico the previous five plus years and much to my surprise, I could not believe they had a book on New Mexico baseball. Talk about a small world. The library is very nice and just like so many places in China, very crowded.