Above:The Baha'i House of Worship of Asia. Below:Life and times of your fellow World Citizen, Kolya

Chinese Meals and Things

One day, one of the English teachers invited me to lunch. Actually, he invited me to breakfast but on a Sunday I often prefer to get up a little later, and lunch or dinner generally seemed like a better idea to me. The initial date was postponed for unknown reasons. However, a week or two later we rode our bicycles to his apartment although we were a little late since I have started to have a movie morning (having no time in the afternoon or evening) every second Saturday, so as to make use of my steadily increasing library of DVDs by watching them with others.
His flat is small, smaller than he would like it to be but he took out a loan to buy it, although he has hopes to sell it eventually and get a larger place. But I presume that most Chinese don’t live in anything larger than this, or not by much. There was, I think, a toilet but no bath or shower. I think most Chinese still use public baths and many also use public toilets. (I’ve been told there are people there who can be hired to scrub your back, which is why many still like to go.) However, there is a small newly rich segment of the population who have been moving in to big, fairly (or very) luxurious flats or, occasionally, houses. His apartment, though, only has three rooms as far as I can tell. A small kitchen just inside the front door, his son’s bedroom which doubles as the dining room via a folding table. And the living room/TV room/parent’s bedroom.
His wife had clearly put a lot of effort into the meal, preparing many different dishes as is the custom for special dinners, but not much in the way of staple food like rice etc. I'm afraid though, as has been the case with many Chinese meals I’ve had here in northern China since my arrival, I did not much like most of the dishes, except for the eggplant dish. They made me some fish and chicken but I'm not much of a meat eater and am more fussy with meats than I am with food in general. I mostly like chicken when it’s been de-boned and cooked in some kind of yummy sauce or perhaps breaded and fried. Nevertheless, I did manage to fill myself up. I was humbled and appreciative of his wife’s efforts, in making so many different dishes, it showed the kindness and friendliness which seems to abound in China.
One time I was eating in the canteen (Incidentally, the English word canteen happens to be very similar to the Chinese word for canteen which is canting. But in Chinese pinyin C’s are pronounced like ts or the German z. Canting also means “dining room”-- not only the kind found in institutions, as with the English Canteen.) for breakfast and there were boiled eggs. Chicken eggs and duck eggs. (Sometimes they also serve small, mostly light blue, eggs—sparrow perhaps?). Anyway, I was given the duck eggs, perhaps because the chicken eggs were all gone or perhaps the server thought the duck eggs taste better (actually I think the chicken eggs taste better). And someone asked me what they were called in English, and so I said, “eggs”. That did not seem to compute at first but it wasn’t clear to me why there was a problem. However, I guess in Chinese they don’t just say “egg” they always differentiate and say, “chicken egg” or “duck egg” etc. Presumably since more types of egg are eaten here. Whereas in the west we generally stick to chicken eggs and so we don’t bother to classify the word egg, even when now, in my case, I had duck eggs on my tray and not chicken eggs. I told them, “eggs are eggs”.