The Art of Mystery Meat

In my previous post I said I was going to upload a video of the dinner show we saw - unfortunately my internet won't accept that so no video :(

Some Updates:

New food that I have had the stupidity of trying (none of them were very good this time):

-Cold Potato Jello – it is completely see through and is made from vegetables and potato starch. It wasn’t necessarily bad, it just had no taste at all but a very weird consistency.
-Chicken Feat
-Pig Feat – I’ve had pig hooves here before but this was much different and very chewy

China Trust:

China is an extremely trusting and honor based society. The bus is the perfect example. There are two types of buses in the city – ones with a lady on board who goes around and collects the fare for the ride and ones with card reading machines and drop boxes at the front of the bus for you to either swipe your bus card or pay in cash. For the latter type, payment for your ride is based on the honor code. There has been numerous times where I and other Chinese people have gotten on buses that we could have simply not paid for. But no one does that. Everyone either forces themselves to the front of the bus to pay or participates in what I call China Trust. If you get on the bus through the middle doors and it’s really crowded, instead of pushing your way through, you hand your bus card or money to the person next to you and it gets sent up to the front of the bus. Then the hope is that if you sent your card that it makes its way back to you. Everyone does this and as far as I can tell it has never failed. No one tries to skip their payment for their ride, no one steals other people’s bus fares or cards, the society works on trust and hopefully no one takes advantage.

When the weekends turn into work days:

A common phrase that we use is “it’s China” which typically means that everything is changing from minute to minute and nothing has a set schedule. It is very common for your fellow Chinese teachers to come up to you at 4pm and say there is a dinner they want you to attend at 6pm. So planning things with your friends has to always be a little flexible for China time changes. Well since they don’t plan things too far in advance, when a holiday comes where the students have school off the school has to make up those days somehow. In America we just tack days on at the end, but in China they push through and have school on Saturdays and Sundays to make up for the vacation days. So my school has a four day vacation starting today so we ended up working from last Monday till yesterday, eight days in a row. The work wasn’t too bad but I felt bad for the students. They are in school from 7:25 am – 10:00 pm, and had to do that for eight days. Luckily they are used to this system, and despite being a little stir crazy were able to make it through the long week in anticipation for the four day vacation.