A Random Story (Halloween Pictures)

This is me being plunged by Jenny. I know that's a really bad toilet costume.

Matt was a mummy

The other day while eating lunch, the table behind us had a soup with a sternoish can of flames beneath it. Deeming it hot enough one of the diners began to use his wooden chopsticks to fish the sterno out. The liquid within it spilled all over the base of the stand and the whole wide puddle of the flaming liquid was now heating the bowl. They pulled the soup off and finally removed and put out the flames in the can. One waiter decided to simply do away with the fire and yank the whole burning stand out of there spilling the liquid all over the table and the client. Thank God the client didn't catch on fire but the table now had a 2 foot stretch of flaming puddle across it. Another waiter thought that a paper napkin would be a good way to wipe at the edges of the burning puddle. This had obvious results. It was both frightening and utterly ridiculous.

Other than that, we threw a great halloween party. It was a tasty international potluck. It was mostly Korean and Chinese food plus Matt's (another Maryknoller) chili and my mushroom cheese sauce on bread. I dressed up as a toilet and had a small (new, clean) plunger, the combo lent itself to some great toilet-plunging dance moves. It was good to party with the people we live and take classes with. My friend Joe (From korea) had a good time putting small wipes of chili on the toilet paper component of my costume, it was really gross looking.

Classes have gone a bit better the last couple of weeks, I'm also getting to know my students better, remember a lot more of their names, and find out a lot more about them. A lot of students have the same names and many students have kind of odd (occasionally unfortunate) names which I won't go into.

This post has been in progress for a long time (I kinda forgot about blogging for awhile), but I've just realized it's November. I have 2 months until the semester break and still don't know exactly what I'm going to do for said break. My idea is to fly to some Southeast Asian Capital, see some of Southeast Asia, then make my way back up to China a little after the new year's craziness has died down.

Anyway, I've been cooking a lot lately (for the fun of it, I'm really not too sick of Chinese food yet, I'm convinced Northern food is better, much less greasy). Great veggies are cheap here (I love the available green leafies) and the mushroom situation couldn't get much better. Making simple soups or curries is pretty cheap. There's really very little in the way of standard ingredients I can't get here and cheese is the only truly expensive item.