Additions and BBQ

Okay, got a lot to catch up on so I'm gonna do it in bits. First off, I have a few things to add about long tan park that I forgot about in the previous post. First thing is that when I'm running through the park and the weather is just the least bit nice, basically not raining, there are always people getting their wedding pictures taken. I can't believe that people would be getting married on a monday at around 11am so I figure that these picture sessions are separate from the actual ceremony. Its also interesting to see the range in styles of photos taken, there are the standard husband and wife together with nice scenery in the background, to the painfully corny. I once saw a couple in a pose where the girl was staring off into space while the guy was standing behind her with a sign saying "I'm available", I dunno you may think it's cute, I do not. Another thing with these photos is that typical attire for guys is a white tux. I've seen a few black ones out there but white seems to be the standard. For women in China the dresses don't always have to be white, actually in a traditional wedding I believe the dress would be red because that is the color of luck and good fortune (I will have a whole post dedicated to these types of things in the near future), But I've seen Yellow, and a light pink before, these were pretty isolated instances but yeah, it deviates from our standard of only white. Another comment about getting photos taken in china. It's a pretty big deal to chinese people to get a set of professional photos taken. I guess I'm saying this in a way as it's one of the things you have to do when you become established in a serious relationship. Stephen and his girlfriend recently got their photo's back when Xiao Liao dragged him to the photo studio. I'm sure Stephen would agree with me that the pics are on the corny side and he did it as one of those "bite your lip things and get it over with" things that girls always make guys do. Yeah, any female readers (and male as well i suppose) you know what I'm talking about.

Okay, so that's my bit on getting photos taken in China, and for those who are wondering, no, no girl has dragged me to the photo studio. Just putting things in the clear. So on the 23rd stephen had informed me that one of his students that he tutors on the side wanted to invite all the foreign teachers over to his house for an afternoon of barbecue. The day for this event couldn't have been any more perfect, 80 and sunny. So me laura and stephen hop in a cab and head over to the east side of town. Stephen's student Xiao Long, was studying english to pass a proficiency exam so he could go study business management at a university in the UK (he already had a degree in engineering from a chinese university but he didn't like the subject too much). So I knew that if he was trying to go to university in the UK he had to have come from a wealthy family, Stephen had mentioned this to us as well. Pulling up to his house, to me in my american view of wealth, It didnt look like the family had wealth bursting from the seems, but there were several indicators that I was able to pick up. His family had an actual house that you could walk all the way around, second the house was three stories tall, and large by chinese standards (a footprint about the same size as my house sr year of college). This diverted quite drastically from the typical chinese home which consists of an apartment in a massive housing complex. While having a house to themselves the houses in this neighborhood were essentially row houses with about 10 feet of space in between, the idea of having a yard is still pretty foreign to chinese people, granted if everyone owned property like americans there probably would be no space left in the country! Another thing I noticed is that many of the houses were unoccupied. Xiao Long said that pretty much the entire place was bought out but so many people had bought the houses as investment properties. I was able to distinguish this because the un occupied houses were just cement shells, no floors, windows, appliances or anything. So on to BBQ, and just a footnote about this bit, I'm not trying to judge or obsess about wealth, I just want to give a glimpse into what I experienced with wealth in china and this was the first time i was invited to a truly "upper class" chinese home.

So after a quick tour of the house the BBQ began. Chinese barbecue is quite different from what we would call barbecue, no burgers, no steaks or anything. Instead the meat is cut into small pieces and placed on a kabob stick then placed over a small open fire in a metal box about 1 foot square. While the meat is cooking various spices are added. This is pretty much what happens with the barbecue that you buy from street vendors at night markets, though our hosts said that the way we were cooking it was much healthier, don't know why, probably less oil. So after about 2 hours of just sitting around having round after round of kabob sticks coming through with various meats (no dog trust me) things start to slow down and the family tells us that we were going for a walk, a very typical chinese thing to do after a large meal. So we're walking through the neighborhood and then end up at this pond in the center with a pier and a pagoda type thing in the middle. So we spend about an hour there, Xiao Long's mom took tons of pictures of our group (she was taking pictures all day and i think she ended up with over a thousand, seriously she was taking shots alllllll day). So after hanging out at the pond for a while we wander back to the house and waiting for us is a massive dinner. Having only finished a huge meal just over an hour ago I really couldn't eat much more. Dinner was very good, pretty typical guangxi fare, chicken, duck, uhh some spicy dishes some not, cant really remember everything but I know it wasn't too out of the ordinary. So dinner ended up lasting longer than the BBQ as Xiao Long's dad pulled out a bottle of fancy baijiu from his expansive collection. So when things were about to wrap up (or so i thought) we were asked to go over to the living room where we drank tea for about another hour and a half. Finally at around 11:30 our 9 hour affair wound down and me stephen and william headed home.

yeah, next time I will tell you about my adventures in Shenzhen and Hong Kong!

Also, anyone know how to edit stuff in blogger? I want to make one of my photos my background but I cannot get it to work, the photo now is just one of their stock photos....