it's the day after one of my favorite american holidays, and i am eating microwaved leftover stuffing and sweet potatoes in my dorm in beijing. i don't know if i can convey how happy this makes me!
in the week leading up to turkey day i was rather homesick [worth noting, "turkey" is 火鸡 huǒjī, literally "fire chicken"]. this is probably because thanksgiving sums up all the things that i am really beginning to want ... western food, english, my home, my friends, and most of all my FAMILY. but i have not always been good about being home for this holiday. senior year of high school, i went to seattle to visit my close friend from camp, nicole, and celebrate thanksgiving with her family and friends at their cottage on orcas island. it was like a dream :) freshman year, tickets home were expensive and traversing the country for a weekend seemed silly... so i went to a friend's home on the chesapeake bay for another wonderful weekend... but definitely cried in a corner once and thought about how i should've made the trek to cali. sophomore year, i reunited with my entire 50-day cabin in montreal, a decision that is impossible to regret.. just like the decision i made to come to china this year.
nevertheless, alliance did a wonderful job of at least addressing the "food" and "good company" aspects of thanksgiving. last week, some of us helped jada, our assistant director, find recipes for sweet potatoes with marshmallow, stovetop stuffing, turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, corn soup, and broccoli casserole, then multiply those recipes to serve about 60 people! she totally went the extra mile by making salad and finding gravy and cranberry sauce. this woman is my hero. we students helped cook, decorate, explain the history of thanksgiving, and put on performances for our teachers, language partners, and other chinese guests.
and finally, a picture of my language partner, liu jing, and me! love this girl. she is so intense and so awesome.
so that was last night. this week hasn't been too eventful, because we were so busy rushing to turn in papers, take tests, prepare for the holiday party, because we are jetting to xi'an tonight on an overnight train. our program is making a 48 hour trip [tragically short...] to the old capital this weekend.
last friday was interesting though, a few classmates and i went to the gigantic capital art museum with our calligraphy teacher, zheng laoshi. he is the funniest old man in beijing. we adore him because he is totally honest about when our characters suck, but he tells us in such expressive ways, e.g. "those characters have evil feelings" or "those characters look like an angry drunk man wrote them! smoother, smoother" or "that looks like korean..." ok, those might not be the best examples, but he really is a master at giving constructive criticism.
here's zheng laoshi examining some cursive script in the museum. it's so pretty... we asked if we could try it in the next class but learned a harsh lesson on how DIFFICULT it is. i think that's when i got the "drunk man" comment.
that night we went to a benefit concert for an orphanage in beijing that specializes in children with developmental disorders. our classmate namgyel volunteers there and sold us the tickets. it was wonderful to do something so fun for such a good cause. but when the managers introduced some of the children and told their stories (abandoned shortly after birth, or when parents became too old and tried to get rid of them), it was pretty heavy. these kids have something, but there are so few places like this in china.
oh dear. i need to be on a bus to the train station in half and hour. more next week from xi'an! xo
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