grilled cheese

i believe some people would call this a "great american day" in the tonghe international apartments. this evening, sarah and i fixed a fabulous american feast of grilled cheese sandwiches, campbell's corn chowder, and jello chocolate pudding for our precious chinese roommates, sue and yanan. needless to say, finding the ingredients for this meal was a little bit of a quest, since none of the items are found in a normal chinese kitchen. but the search was totally worthwhile, on account of our precious roomies, who we are going to miss like CRAZY when we depart in a week and a half.

i truly believe that sarah and i are the luckiest out of the entire alliance bunch, 对不起 other roommates! sue and yanan are best friends, in their junior year together at the shanghai university of finance and economics. they have been so warm and excited about us from the start. at the welcome dinner, yanan pounced on sarah and gave her a huge hug (we weren't exactly sure about physical contact in china but there it was!). within the first two weeks, they took us to fudan's best xiaolong bao restaurant and showed us what to order since there is no english menu. yanan also took sarah to the SUFE pool to swim one afternoon, and skyped with her parents. "happy birthday xiaoxue mother!" is perhaps one of the most endearing things i have ever heard.

sue and i have had our share of adventures too. she came with a bunch of us on our day trip to the zhujiajiao river town and saved our souls in countless ways. she took sarah and i to the SUFE night market for amazing xinjiang roasted meat skewers and half-watermelons eaten straight with a spoon. she are both busy but usually catch up in the room every couple days, and often run errands at the mall together, coming back with a huge bag of sugar-roasted chestnuts to share. like with any good girl friends, i think the best parts of our relationship are food and gossip. we love to chat about the kids in our program, our own activities, and differences between life in china and america (most often, differences between college student male/female interactions! ha). i feel so lucky that she takes the time and energy to have those complex conversations with me - it has to be like talking with a 4 year old. she is great at speaking slowly and clearly and using words that i will understand. and she tries to only laugh at my pronunciation when she knows i am laughing too ;) like when i told her that i was craving "locust noodles" or my "chair hurt" all day *see below.

it has also been a pleasure to learn more about sue - her family, background, hometown, etc. sue's parents are from jiangsu, an eastern coastal province adjacent to shanghai. but they moved far inland, to western guizhou, where she was born and raised. sue explained that her parents, like many successful people from the most developed eastern provinces, moved west to be part of that region's development. so her mother works in the hotel industry, and her father works for a defense company that does contracts with the chinese government. it was hilarious to tease sue while she tried to explain that her father's work is confidential, but he doesn't have a "license to kill!" obviously, sue is an only child. but we often talk about her younger cousins, because they play the role of her brothers and sisters. i pointed out, and she agreed, that later generations after the one child policy do not even have cousins their age to interact with.

anyway, that is sue. back to grilled cheese :) the girls LOVED it. and to my delight, they liked it even better with ketchup, which is my fave. sarah and i loved watching them because they had clearly never seen so much cheese at a time. cheese is not really big here. yanan is so cute too, she came after we had finished cooking and assumed that we had made corn chowder from scratch. girl, we are americans. can + soup concentrate + water = dinnertime. last but not least, the girls died eating the jello chocolate pudding. they were stunned by the chocolate flavor... chocolate is another thing that you rarely see here, and if you do, it's a watered down form that americans don't really enjoy. in fact, the jello pudding can't even be purchased here. apparently some american student's parents sent the powder by care package last semester, and they never got around to making it. so it was just sitting in michelle's office. ahhh, the delights of cultural exchange.

it was a dream evening, and now i am writing this ridiculously long post to avoid studying for two exams tomorrow and preparing for a presentation the next day. but the memories are worth recording, right?! tomorrow's morning test is an exit exam, to compare our language level at the placement exam with our level after 7 weeks of intensive study. the afternoon test is our pm class final exam, yikes! friday's presentation is a song and skit by each class, performed for everyone and 王老师，the head teacher. our's features a chinese rendition of lady gaga's "bad romance"... it should be highly entertaining.

if i did not have an epic, cross-country journey to look forward to on the 9th, i would be freaking out about leaving shanghai in less than two weeks! but right now, i am indiscriminately excited. until next time, 再见！

* maja = locust = majiang = sesame
weizi = chair = wei = stomach