National Day: Happy 60th birthday to the PRC!

Thursday morning started off with a bang, literally - people were setting off firecrackers in the street, which woke me up waaay too early considering we had stayed up late chatting with Azita and Joseph the night before. Amy had deviously invited Azita to see their apartment, planning to have an early surprise birthday celebration.

Azita making a wish on her chocolate “peanut” cake (made by Holly)

Anyway, I stayed in for the morning to avoid all the craziness outside, but around 1 PM, I hopped over to the ferry terminal to pick up Jessica L and Jessica M, two of the Hong Kong ETAs who had come to visit for National Day. We met up with Brian and Mari as well, then headed out to explore what Macau had to offer on National Day.

The first stop was Tap Seac Square, where there were plenty of Mid-Autumn Festival decorations, but there was also a huge open-air concert/carnival going on, with things like mini-car driving and an inflatable obstacle course for the kids (oh, Richfest memories!) I was especially amused by this moonbounce that is supposed to resemble the Guia lighthouse and fortress:

Ta-da!

Between Tap Seac and Senado, we also found this charming side street with cobblestones, Portuguese-style buildings on both sides, and these mildly freaky pinata-style bunny lanterns.

Look into their eyes, I dare you...

They're even creepier up close

At Senado there wasn't much for National Day, besides the big gate that's been there for a while, but we also went up to St. Paul's and saw some more Mid-Autumn Festival decorations there, like this massive lantern:

The top part spins!

Of course, by now I've been to Senado many times, but I still manage to find something new and/or amusing on every visit. This trip's highlight was the sign advertising one of the street shack eateries across from Lemoncello gelato...possibly the least appealing translation EVER:

Eww.

For dinner, we opted to try some Portguese food in Taipa Village, where there are lots of supposedly good restaurants. Our first choice was unfortunately super-crowded, so we ended up at Pinocchio, which opened up their second floor because there were so many diners. The restaurant had a cute menu and nice facility, but pretty mediocre food and absolutely awful service. We asked four times why we didn't get a basket of bread (as everyone around us was), with four different responses:

1) Let me check with the manager.
2) You have to order soup to get bread.
3) We ran out of bread!
4) It's coming, it's coming!

When we finally got our food (we were one of the first tables seated and one of the last to be served), it was pretty disappointing. I had ordered the pork chop rice, thinking it would have a savory sauce soaking through the rice similar to what we had at Fat Siu Lai a couple weeks ago, but instead it was a bowl of rice, with a pan-fried pork chop on top (that was at least 1/3 bone), slathered in ketchup (of all things). Ick. After scraping off most of the ketchup and cutting out the bones, I ate it because I was hungry, but it was still barely palatable.

They need someone to be their conscience

To make up for the bad dinner, we tried to go to the Altira hotel to watch the last night of the international fireworks festival, but the view wasn't that good (too much reflection from the glass) and Austria just failed. As Jessica M. said, "I was expecting the Alps [in fireworks], or at least the von Trapp family!" What we got instead was a rather bad show with awkwardly long pauses (so long that we thought the display had ended twice before the actual finale). It was so clearly the worst of all the entries we had seen, we figured that either Austria had been paired with China on purpose, or they had been paid off or something.

As might be expected, China went all out for their National Day fireworks display, with massive bursts that went even taller than the Macau Tower! All in all, quite an impressive National Day celebration =D

Typhoon #2: Ketsana

I'm currently trying to dry off in my apartment after wading through the pouring rain brought by Typhoon Ketsana. It hit the Philippines pretty badly, and is now heading for Vietnam. The name was submitted by Laos, and the Chinese translation (by the Macanese government) is 凱薩娜. The first character means "triumphant march" (as in military music), the second is just used as a surname (sa4), but the last character, depending on how it's pronounced, can be either a character used in a name, or it can mean "to move, shift." However, it's a phonetic translation rather than a literal one, so I wonder what "Ketsana" actually means in Laos.

Tracking Ketsana

It's a pity that the weather absolutely sucks, because today we had a visit from a group of NYU students studying abroad in Shanghai as part of Stern's "Business and Political Economy" program. They have a long break for the National Day holidays, so some of them are touring HK and Macau. We met a few on Saturday at the Fulbright retreat, then today they came to talk with Austin's and Susan's classes in the morning, followed by lunch in the library cafe and something of a casino tour. I have to say, for anyone interested in international business, the program is pretty awesome - you study abroad in London and Shanghai, plus they're getting a trip to Buenos Aires next spring.

As for my classes, I still feel like I'm trying to cram a lot of material into my students' heads, but with repetition and reinforcement, it's getting there. A good example is vocabulary - they're very good and memorizing definitions and such, but I've been trying to teach them different ways of learning new words, e.g. playing Freerice.com, looking for roots and related words, etc. Today while we were watching a Youtube video, one guy commented that the narrator's voice was very boring, so I taught them the word monotone, relating it to monogamy (a vocabulary word they already learned from the reading).

I'm also trying to get them to actually use the words so they become part of their working vocabulary, e.g. asking questions using those words, or having them write sample sentences. As much as it sounds like busy work, it's a better test of their knowledge than multiple-choice questions. After grading her first reading comprehension quiz last week, Susan realized that Chinese students are incredibly good at guessing the right answer for MC and T/F questions, but looking at their short-answer responses, they might not have any idea what the book was actually saying!

As for my own lessons in Chinese, we're going to have US Consulate-funded classes starting in a few weeks, with just us ETAs. I'll be in an "intermediate" group with Susan and Amy, although if I'm really going to make major progress, I may have to follow Susan's example and hire a private tutor. There are plenty of students from mainland China, even from the northern areas (so they have more standard accents), so it shouldn't be hard to find someone. I'm not quite as ambitious about my language study (Susan's aiming to take the HSK), but even with just the intermediate lessons and my own self-study I'm sure I'll be better by the end of this year than I was before, even at the peak of my Chinese school knowledge =P

Fulbright retreat fall 2009

This weekend I went to the Fulbright retreat, which was generously organized and funded by the Hong-Kong America Center. Susan, Amy, Holly, and I got up suuuper-early Saturday morning to catch the 7:00 AM Turbojet, where we hopped around the MTR and finally made our way to the Peninsula Hotel to meet the HKAC shuttle to the Kadoorie Institute Shek Kong Centre, way out in the New Territories. While on the bus, we met a few new faces: Lindy (a HKIE graduate who had interned at the HKAC last summer), Jarlene (a Penn State senior interning at the US Consulate in Guangzhou), and Mari and Brian (two Grinnell graduates who are teaching at MUST as part of the Grinnell Corps).

About an hour later, we arrived at KI and promptly jumped into the program, with a welcome from Glenn Shive (the HKAC director) and a talk from Edmund Ko on the transition to the new 3-4-4- secondary/tertiary education system in Hong Kong. After a delicious lunch (I especially remember the huge mussels, well-seasoned beefsteak, and chicken curry), there were more talks about general education (What does "liberal arts" actually mean?) and the challenges of revamping tertiary curricula in HK toward a more American-style education.

The gate of the Kadoorie Institute

The more interesting part of the afternoon was "opening the circle" for small-group discussions, with all sorts of different topics proposed by the various participants, so nothing felt like it was forced. One of the main rules was the "Law of two feet" - go where you want to go, leave if you want to leave (and join another group). Thus, no one should complain about being stuck somewhere they don't want to be =P

The accompanying poster

Dinner was quite an elaborate DIY affair: there were some pre-prepped foods, but most of the cooking (aka grilling over fire pits) was up to us. It was rather smoky but a lot of fun, nibbling on everything from purple yams and skewers of vegetables to grilled pork chops and meat/fishballs. Dessert was fresh-cut watermelon and a variety of moon cakes, the newfangled "Snowy" ones as well as some really good, traditional white lotus paste ones. The rest of the evening was left open - some people went to sleep early while others stayed up to chat. A bunch of us ETAs ended up playing Bananagrams, a game rather like speed-Scrabble, not going to bed until past midnight =P

Breakfast the next morning was a rather interesting mix of Western and Asian food: I had some scrambled eggs with mushrooms and a muffin, but also a small man tou and some cooked veggies. Another interesting addition was cherry tomatoes - they seem to treat it as a fruit rather than a vegetable, so there was just a big bowl of them next to the apples and bananas. Probably the best part: pomelo juice!

My breakfast - everyone keeps commenting on how my plates always look colorful!

The morning's agenda was a few more open circle discussions, then we "closed the circle" by talking about what we'd learned, whether it was favorite restaurants in HK or ideas for getting our students to participate more in class. It's nice to know there are lots of people who also want to travel, take cooking lessons, and do other cool stuff this year =)

After another yummy buffet lunch and a quick change into casual clothes, we took two buses down the road to the Kadoorie Farm, which is no longer just a farm but a huge botanical garden and nature preserve. Because the hills that make up the farm are extremely steep, we mostly traveled on the buses, getting off at various points to walk around and take (lots of) photos. Selected shots are below - the full set is available here via Facebook.

Map of Kadoorie Farm

Not sure what you're supposed to try to do with this plant...

The Kadoorie Brothers' memorial pavilion

A cheerfully burbling waterfall (of which there were many)

Statue of Kwun Yum

These leaves were HUGE!

The final part of the retreat was dinner at the Wesley Hotel Garden Restaurant in Wan Chai, hosted by the US Consulate. My table was definitely the "youngest" one, with all three of the HK research grant recipients (Neil, Reggie, and Brian) and most of us ETAs. Dinner was banquet-style, with courses coming out in rapid succession so that we were all stuffed by the end of the night. Some of the dishes were meh (the abalone was super-chewy), but others (like the lobster noodles) were absolutely scrumptious. With such rich food, I was very glad to finish off with more fresh fruit: melon, watermelon, and dragonfruit (the pink/white thing with black seeds):

More cherry tomatoes too!

Dinner ended fairly late (around 9 PM), so by the time I got to the ferry terminal, I had to wait for the 10 PM Turbojet, so I didn't get home until nearly midnight. All in all, a very fun but quite exhausting weekend...now time to sleep and get ready to teach again tomorrow!

Bunnies everywhere!

Starting last Saturday, I've been seeing a lot of these little guys around:

They seem to be made of wire and fabric - there's also a magenta pink version. At first, I saw them near an advertisement for some sort of children's amusement park, so I thought perhaps the bunnies were the mascots, and they were providing extra-visible publicity for the park opening or something. Today on the bus to work, however, I saw this at the top of a building:

I didn't get to photograph the whole thing, but it has a bunch of animal/vegetable figures interposed with the Chinese characters for "Happy Mid-Autumn Festival" (中 秋 節 快 樂). Therefore, I realized that the bunny statuettes are also supposed to be part of the Mid-Autumn Festival decorations, representing the white rabbit that is supposed to be the pet of the moon goddess. At the New Century bus stop, they even have some that are playing instruments, like this one:

Reminds me of Kevin (-:3

For whatever reason the bunnies are there, they made me laugh in the middle of a crowded morning commute, so it's all good =D

Agenda for this weekend: Fulbright retreat at the Kadoorie Institute in HK!

Mooncake mishap

Tonight after work, Susan and I went to get mooncakes at Sanmiu, the local grocery store. We needed to get at least two boxes as gifts, one for the security guy who has been super-helpful, and one for the UM Chinese teacher who went to Zhuhai to get textbooks for us even though we didn't end up taking her class.

After we picked out two boxes of white lotus paste cakes with egg yolks for them, we were super-excited about getting a box for our apartment to share. I recognized one box from mooncakes I've had in the US, but it was more than twice as expensive as any of the others! We didn't want to spend too much money, so we decided to try one of the locally-produced brands (but not the cheapest one). Susan is not a huge fan of red bean and I've had a lot of red bean-flavored stuff here already, so we opted for lotus paste again. The box looked promising, with a pretty cover that even featured the Ruins of St. Paul:
Susan wanted to try one of our mooncakes for dessert, but when we opened the plastic wrap, a very...inauspicious scent came out, a salty sort of oily smell. She cut it open, only to find a bewildering mess of chunks rather than the white paste we had expected.

Ick.

Turns out we didn't get lotus paste...we got "Five Nuts" filling instead -_- The ingredients list only shows lotus seeds, but we also spotted what we think was walnuts and sunflower seeds (not sure what the other two nuts should have been). There was an egg yolk inside, as promised, but it wasn't that great either.

The label we didn't see until too late

We're not sure what to do with this box of undesirable mooncakes, but on the bright side, if I avoid eating them, it'll be better for my cholesterol (the nutritional information on those is scary!) Maybe I'll just get one red bean cake for the Mid-Autumn Festival, then get a box when it goes on sale post-Festival =P