Last week we had a four day weekend, because the students get a few days every month to go home. We went to Chongqing to see our friend Ya Ya and to spend New Year’s Eve in a big city.
On New Year’s Eve we had Hot Pot for dinner with Ya Ya. After dinner, Joel and I went into the city to wait for midnight. When we got into the city there were hundreds of police blocking off one big area, around a clock tower. Apparently all the Chinese people went there to hear the clock strike at twelve o’ clock – but there wasn’t even going to be any fireworks! Inside the blocked off area was Starbucks, where we wanted to be. After waiting a long time and even asking the police to let us in, we decided to leave and go somewhere else. We couldn’t find another Starbucks close by so we caught a taxi back to our hotel. When the clock turned over to twelve o’ clock, we were in the taxi only a minute away from our stop.
On Saturday, Ya Ya and a few of his friends took us to see “Chongqing Old City”. There’s a big old Palace, with a museum area inside showing many old artefacts, skeletons etc. from around Chongqing.
Before Christmas, we made cinnamon pancakes from scratch. To compliment this lovely treat, we caramelised some apples. We also added a few pieces of sliced banana to each stack.
To caramelise the apples, we boiled them in our wok with some sugar. Once the apples were nice and soft, we drained them out and kept them aside. We then returned the sugar water back to the stove, and left it there to reduce into a sticky sauce, on a low heat.
As we were cooking the last pancake, we put the apples back into the wok for a minute with the sweet sauce.
This was such a treat for us. It was absolutely delicious and so easy to make!
We are spending the New Year in Chongqing. It’s larger than Luzhou and therfore affords us the opportunity to purchase some luxuries that we otherwise forego.
Carrefour the second largest retailer in the world, is successful in China and has numerous stores in the bigger cities. Their stores are massive and stock almost everything. They also have a fairly handy range of imported goods, especially from France their home country. However today, we were most impressed to find French butter in the refrigerated section, as we have looked high and low in Luzhou for butter and haven’t managed to find any, anywhere!
The next logical step was to find some nice jams to complement this creamy unsalted foil wrapped block of pure goodness. So we started on our way to the imported food section, it was tiny! Thankfully they had two imported jams from France made by St Dalfour, a Black Currant and a Golden Peach.
The hunt for some decent bread began, as almost all Chinese baked breads are sweetened with huge amounts of sugar and taste nothing like real bread. And unfortunately due to the yeast added to bread, they also taste nothing like a cake. Suffice to say, it’s terrible tasting stuff.
Success! We found a loaf of proper wholemeal bread, that went wonderfully with our French butter and jams. It was a little slice of paradise to indulge ourselves in the finer things, that one too often takes for granted.
Class 4 have been good all year, and worked hard on the Film review of “UP”.
So I decided to give them a Christmas party! I purchased a few 2.5 litre bottles of Coke and 7up and a 1kg bag of mixed lollies.
They had a really good time and enjoyed the treats. Some of them are quite poor and can’t afford lollies and softdrink. As their families only give them enough money to buy school meals 3x a day.
It feels strange to be working this time of the year.
