Colombia!

Colombia!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Huŏguō 21 December 2013 Mingyue (bright moon) Charcoal Hotpot (huoguo)


I'd been put in charge of organizing the staff Christmas dinner/Secret Santa gift exchange.  We had a generous budget of 2000 RMB.  My Chinese still isn't good enough to make reservations over the phone, so I had to ask one of my awesome coworkers to do it for me.  Only two of my coworkers couldn't attend--one was ill, the other was on annual leave.  I have to admit the Secret Santa thing was kind of exciting.  I'd drawn my boss, a lovely Filipina lady who is Catholic like myself, so I grinned as I tied a red "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" ribbon onto her gift bag.  I'd gotten her a lovely tropical plant and a seaweed mask, which I thought was fitting for an islander.

Saturdays tend to be a bit rough for me sometimes.  I usually start at 10:40 am with three classes in a row.  The good thing is that I'm usually done one or two hours before most of the other teachers.  Two of my American coworkers joined me down at Mingyue for a quick "pre-game" beer while the staff took their time prepping the table for two large hotpots.

There were these big ceramic bowls with sort of metal chimneys sticking up in the middle--like a volcano or something.  Full of charcoal, the chimneys had waves of heat and tiny trails of smoke coming out the top; the water in the ceramic bowls was at full seething boil.  One bowl was the spicy one, and the other one was flavored with milder stuff.

We trooped out to make our own dipping sauces; there was a buffet of ingredients:  chili sauce, vinegar, scallions, Chinese parsley, chopped nuts, sesame seeds, sesame oil, sesame paste, garlic, etc.  Literally 30 small salad bowls full of different things to create your own potion.  I'm a fan of sesame oil, so I loaded up on that, among other things.

I know it sounds obvious, but the hotpots were REALLY hot by the time we returned to the room.  They made our faces turn red.  In broken Chinese, I asked my coworkers to name many of the ingredients, cold and/or raw on their plates waiting to be cooked.  It was fun to throw in thinly sliced beef or pork, prawns, lotus root, yam, winter melon, pre-cooked quail eggs, and lots of other stuff--and then fish it out!  It was like camping, in a way, which I adore.  Just trying to get the eggs, for example, out of the boiling, oily water with chopsticks took more skill than eating should have to take.  We giggled or groaned, trying to help each other.  Eventually, we all had to get plastic Chinese soup spoons, and even my Chinese coworkers used them. 

I begged forgiveness for peeling the shells off my prawns with my fingers--after two years in Micronesia, the idea of eating seafood with a utensil was impossible, but I didn't want to offend my coworkers--who somehow managed to neatly nibble the prawns out of their shells with delicately-held chopsticks.  Every 20 or 30 minutes, a restaurant staffer would enter the room with a huge steaming kettle of water and add some to the bowls, making clouds of steam that evaporated quickly. 

I may have been on my second or third Budweiser (which I usually can't afford) when it was present time.  None of my Chinese coworkers celebrated Christmas, but they'd sure gotten into the spirit.  And they'd gotten some great deals.  Our Secret Santa budget had been 50-60 RMB per gift, and some of my coworkers showed up with huge tote bags full of stuff.  I really don't know how they'd done it--other than the fact that they were locals, of course. 

Another of my coworkers had made a silly paper crown for an American guy who sits next to me in the office.  It had come down to Thai food or hotpot, and he'd successfully pushed the vote for hotpot.  "We have an announcement--the King of Hotpot, everyone!"  We laughed, and the coworker who'd made the crown videoed the King's speech with her smart phone.

My gift was a solid cube of soap from L'Occitane that smelled like linden.  It was from the lone Brit in our office, who would be leaving the next day.  So far, two foreign teachers had left and two had replaced them; the local turnover was higher, with four out and four in.  That's just in the six months I've been working.

I still haven't made any solid decisions about my future here.  My contract is up in July 2014.  I hate the pollution, and there is a painful awareness of just how many people 20 million is when you must push your way through them on a daily basis.  But I've met and/or seen Chinese, American, Irish, Italian, Kiwi, Canadian, Indian, and German ex-pats, just to name a few.  I love the diversity.  There's a Chinese man I met who's been teaching English to Maori children in New Zealand.  I've seen a beautiful Chinese woman speaking German on her cell phone.  I've listened to Johnny Cash and Enya while eating lunch at a restaurant named Southern Belle with an Aussie and a Brit from my Chinese class.  I love knowing THE WORLD EXISITS--something that we don't really KNOW in Spokane, I'm sorry to say.

At the same time, I long for crisp blue skies; for an all-day chat with my sister over a cinnamon roll from the Rocket; for the purr of my cat next to my ear as he sleeps; and for the absence of constant construction noise.  Everywhere I've been, everything I've seen--nothing compares to the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, it's mountains and its trees, its clear streams and quiet hiking trails.  I can't imagine living in Shanghai forever, that's for darn sure!