One of Many last Nights!

For My last Weekend in Shijazhaung we all decided to have a celebration. We got all the teachers together and went for a Beijing Duck meal in our town. Always a delicious and quite an experience with the chef bringing the bird to your table to be cut and specially slicing off the most tender part of the duck for you to eat first before getting down to business with the rest of it! Afterwards we ended up in YYBB and then Mazzo club once more.

The Sunday after we went to the house of one of the school teachers, called Violet. She has been applying to go to American as a foreign teacher and so needs help and advice practicing her spoken english and also for the interview-which she ensures us will be very tough. So she invited us all over for dinner and said that she would teach us how to make the traditional chinese dish of dumplings!

I love eating dumplings so I jumped at the chance to learn how to make them. I thought I could add it to my expanding repoirtoire of chinese dishes- currently stands at 3 (gongbao ji ding, suan la todou si and rice). I was a little dissappointed when I arrived as everything had already been prepared, all we had to do was physically make the dumplings. But looking back this was a good thing as the dumplings take a long time to make and cook and if we had had to prepare everything as well I think it may have been an even more late evening

Violet and her husband Michael have a lovely home set in a communist compound. Michael is also a teacher but he is currently placed at a country side school as he wanted to go and help some of the less fortunate children. We were joined for the evening by Violet's Sister and her mother who were both visitng and both thrilled to meet some genuine "laowai"!




Making the dumplings was quite tricky. Violet's mum was a real pro and could make the things prefectly in a matter of seconds, we took considerably longer and our attempts were possibly as far off from looking like the real thing as they could be but at the end of the day they all still tasted the same, so who cares! We all made so many that I think Violet and Michael must have had enough left over to last them until New Years Eve!