Friday, May 30
Photos: Cooking class moments
The most notable thing about today was that we all had our finals (except Judy and Hochiang, who had it the day before). We all were running on a few hours of sleep and a lot of coffee. It was so hard in that previous sentence to resist the urge to say "a latte" coffee.
Anyways as far as my class (Intermediate 1) goes we pretty much all over-studied for the written part and under-studied for the oral. I personally studied writing for 3 hours when there ended up being 20 words that were all on our previous quizzes. 我不高兴. And in the oral part I literally forgot how to speak, not speak Chinese, just speak in general. Cao Laoshi felt pity for me though and let me restart it. I don't know what the other classes tests were like but I asked Alvin and Seong how they did and they both said "failed" so I think that explains enough.
After the tests we ate food/napped and then we went to the cooking school for round 2. I was once again partners with Hochiang, to his dismay because his skills were nothing compared to my culinary prowess. That is laden with sarcasm, as my mom and dad (hi guys) will definitely pick up on. I was not a big fan of the cleaver we used to cut a small block of bean curd so I simply observed on that part. The next part was slicing it and I happily partook in that, my large, uneven slices definitely added a much needed element of texture to our dish. Our final dish was bean curd slices with vegetables in a pork broth and while I didn't taste any, the students had no complaints about mine and Hochiang's so it was clearly the best (Kim's group didn't add enough salt and Bobo's put in too much MSG - I didn't know there was such a thing).
The second dish we made was an absolutely delicious eggplant one. I was really into cutting the eggplants, because they are surprisingly light, so I failed to notice that my trusty (now not so trusty) cooking partner had gone off on his own and made his own eggplant which left me to fend for myself. Luckily the cooking school students basically did all of the work on this one but I was freaking out for like 32 seconds. In the end all of our eggplant dishes were very good and it led to an interesting conversation about eggplant fights. After that we watched the students make sugared apples, which were incredibly hot and totally worth the tongue burn. The students gave us a really cute gift and the end and then we said our goodbyes.
A group of people went to KTV (kareoke) with their fudaos (Language Partners). I did not attend but johnny got a cake from his so I'm assuming it went well. Judy, Kim and I wanted to go shopping so we went to Xin Jie Ko with Hochiang, Steven and Jimmy, specifically to Fashion Lady. We then went to some traditional Nanjing restaurant for dinner. It was a little expensive but we were able to watch Hochiang eat a half pound of crawfish by himself so it was worth it. Then we walked back to our hotel to sleep and on the way discovered the joy in scaring Kim by popping out from behind trees. 今天很好。
- Conley
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