No, it is not time for your monthly Ebonics lesson. The title of this entry is based on my bus riding experience. “Hoe Be-in Lie” is the phonetic pronunciation and means “Move on back”. I immediately thought of the children’s song and knew it had to be the title for today. Anyone who has ridden a bus here or who has had the misfortune of getting on the wrong bus in San Francisco and gone straight to the heart of Chinatown will understand.
Despite several attempts for Candy and I to make plans for dinner and to go to the bookstore to buy my books to learn the language, we have been forced to repeatedly cancel. So, I suggested that do it over lunch. While it is not ideal, we made it work…sort of.
Candy and I met around 11 for lunch and went to her home. I got to meet her parents, who had come to her apartment, and made lunch with them. Her mom taught me how to make jiao zi (dumplings), and we steamed some and boiled some. It’s pretty easy to make: insert filling into wrapper, brush the edge with water, fold in half, and press the edges to seal. Making the filling, now, that may be another story with mixing the ground meat and chopping the veggies and such. I would imagine it’s sort of like making a good burger, so not too bad.
I was a little disappointed that we did not fry any jiao zi. Oh well, that gives me an excuse to go to Beijing Jiao Zi another time. My preferred modes of preparation of jiao zi is (1) fried, (2) steamed, and (3) boiled. The boiled ones are kind of slimy and are hard to pick up with chopsticks.
Candy and her father went with me to the bank and then on to the bookstore. It is strange to see English in the foreign language section of the store. Anyway, we looked around and found my language books for my lessons with Candy. She had to leave before I could find a book for my Saturday class to go back to campus, so her father stayed with me. One problem, her father doesn’t speak English. Anyway, he stood by me, watched to see what kind of books I was looking at, and then began to recommend some to me. Finally, I found the one that I wanted to use and we bought it. He rode all the way back to campus with me on the bus. These buses get really crowded and at one point we were separated, but as soon as some people got off, he came back to get me.
This evening we had E.C. again and more of the teachers came with us. We decided to go downtown to have bar-b-que before hand. Smithfield’s it is not and probably for the best. Imagine southern, vinegar based BBQ with an Asian flare! It makes my stomach turn just thinking about it. It is really just grilled food, and it’s tasty. You go up to a stall and pick out the meat, veggies, tofu, etc. that you want and hand the sticks to the man in charge. They place it on this skinny grill and cook it up. You have to watch or they will douse the food in spice – like turn it red with spice.
English Corner was in a new place this week. It was rather disappointing since there were 7 foreigners and only 2 locals. Apparently, there is a ghost festival that started this week and most people were at home to burn paper money and such in honor of their dead ancestors. We saw a lot of little fires burning along the way home.
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