61st Anniversary of the Founding of the PRC Banquet

So, Jess and I along with Jon, Jacob, Becca and Sammy went to a banquet in Zheng Zhou to celebrate the founding of the People's Republic of China 61 years ago.  I let my class go a little early so we could leave at 5.15 and so I had to teach for four hours in my banquet clothes, hair and make up. 

We got there and it was in a really nice hotel with marble everywhere.  Dinner was upstairs and we were some of the first ones to arrive.  Our early arrival was partly due to the fact that we were able to go through a checkpoint on the freeway where police men were diveriting traffic to a detour and our official banquet invitation got us through on the main road.

We sat down with Jess, Jacob and Sammy out our table as well as Julian who works in the Sias office with Becca.  There were also five Chinese people at our table, one we talked to was a lawyer and his daughter lives in San Fransisco.

The food:
First round of 'cold' dishes:
1. Jellyfish (ate it!)
2. Duck (ate it) with an awesome brown sauce
3. Tofu noodles (ate it)
4. A black fungus that is everywhere in China. (have eaten it before, will not do so again)
5. Veggies: lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions (yay tomatoes!)
6. Sliced cooked beef heart (ate it!)
7. Little whole shrimps in a spicy rub (ate it) with their little black eyes looking at you as you eat them whole.

'Hot' dishes:
1. Roasted chainsaw chicken (when they cut up with chicken into pieces without removing the bones first)
2. Chicken soup
3. Noodles
4. Fried rice (the best!)
5. Shanghai Greens
6. Fried lamb
7. Some weird potato and green pepper dish
8. Something else I didn't recognize but had mushrooms in it.
9. Sweet red bean soup (which was pretty awesome)

Dessert:
1.Coconut mochi balls (pounded rice cakes) with seseme on the inside.
2. Fruit (watermelon, cantelope, dragon fruit)
3. Baijou.  This is infamous in China, it's rice wine that's like 40-60% proof. It can really mess you up if you drink a whole bunch at a time, but they serve little baby shots of it as an after-dinner digestive helper.

Before dinner started there were a few speeches about how much China has improved since the PRC was established and how we need to follow in the steps of Deng Xiao Ping (not the Chairman!) and how Henan is a central part of this process.  We toasted lots and lots of people, us foreigners making a special point to speak with all the other foreigners in the room (for moral support being in a country where we don't understand the language or the food).

We met some folks who were the foreign teachers at Zheng Zhou University and there are only 6 of them.  It looks like they all get along, but I can't imagine having my community that small and personalities that don't get along.  It certainly makes me glad I'm at Sias with the 120 teachers we have. 

We also met a guy named Carl who teaches at a primary school here, he and his wife and their four children have lived here for three years.  I actually ran into him a couple days later at Home Depot in ZZ when I was there on a shopping trip.  Apparently he has a motorcycle that he's been working on.

I've decided that I do like going to banquets.  It gives me something to do and try interesting food (some of it good, some of it not).  There certainly are some down sides to banqueting, like Chinese people choosing your food that ends up with things like jellyfish and tofu ten different ways in weird sauces.  But at this point the pros outweigh the cons and I'm not jaded about stuff like that.

I have a whole bunch of posts coming from my vacation, I just need time to write them!!