The Geeks have sent some recipies!

Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes

A great vegetarian side dish. Good with white rice. Adjust egg to tomato ratio depending on preferences.

Serves 2.

Ingredients:

2 medium tomatoes
2-3 eggs

Salt to taste
4 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp scallion, shredded
1/2 tsp fresh ginger, shredded
1/2 tsp sugar (optional)
1/4 tsp chicken powder (optional)

Directions:

1. Drop the tomatoes in boiling water for 30 seconds. Remove when the skin starts to crack, drain, and peel. Cut in half, squeeze out the seeds, and chop coarsely.

2. Beat the eggs with the 1/4 tsp. salt.

3. Heat 2 tbsp of the oil in a wok over high heat until the oil surface ripples. Pour in the eggs and cook, stirring constantly, until thickened. Remove from the wok and place in a dish.

4. Add the other 2 tbsp of oil to the wok and reheat until very hot. Add the scallions and ginger and stir-fry for a few seconds. Then add the tomato, the remaining salt, optional sugar and optional chicken powder. Stir-fry about 30 seconds. Then, return the scrambled eggs to the wok. Stir to blend, remove, and serve.

Thai Cashew Chicken

Great over white rice or noodles. A good recipe to use with left over raw veggies. Almost anything can be added in.

Serves 2-3.

Ingredients:

2 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - cut into bite-size pieces

1 ½ tsp canola oil

1/2 large yellow onion, chopped

3 ounces broccoli, chopped

1/2 large yellow bell pepper, chopped

1/2 zucchini, chopped

1/2 yellow squash, chopped

4 ounces fresh mushrooms, quartered

1/4 cup unsalted cashew nuts

Sauce (mix together a before cooking)

3 tablespoons ketchup

2 tablespoons oyster sauce

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/3 cup chicken broth

1/2 teaspoon white sugar

1/2 teaspoon Thai garlic chili paste

1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter

Directions:

1. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat, cook chicken for about 5 minutes until juice is clear.

2. Add onion and broccoli, and cook for a minute.

3. Add mixed sauce.

4. Add other veggies, and cook for another minute.

5. Mix in cashews just before serving.

Mongolian Beef

Great over white rice or noodles.

Serves 2.

Ingredients and Preparation:

1. Make bursting fragrance

3 cloves of garlic sliced into thin wafers

Small piece of ginger minced into tiny pieces

(if you like hot food) 1 small red hot peppers cut into small pieces

2. Prepare spicy flavor juice

½ cup of water

3 tablespoons of soy bean sauce

1 teaspoon of sugar

1 teaspoon of black pepper

1 teaspoon of cornstarch

3. Preparing meat

½ lbs. sirloin beef cut into thin slices

Mix well with 1 tablespoon of soy bean sauce and one teaspoon of cornstarch. Put in a bowl.

Great if left to marinate overnight.

4. Preparing vegetables

Two heads of scallions sliced diagonally into slices 2" long and 1/3" thick

Half of red bell pepper (not hot) cut into strips about the same as the scallion slices.

Stir Frying:

Step 1: bursting fragrance

Pour 1/4 cup of vegetable oil into frying pan. Wait until oil is at boiling point (some thin white smoke comes out) throw in the "bursting fragrance."

Step 2: adding meat

Several seconds later after the "bursting fragrance,” pour the beef mixture into pan. Use a spatula and turn the contents inside the pan until the meat is about 80% cooked. Turn the heat to low and take the beef out and put aside back to its bowl (keep the liquid part in the pan).

Step 3: adding vegetable

Turn the heat back to high. (Optionally) add a tablespoon of vegetable to the pan. Wait until the pan is hot again, and throw in the vegetables. Stir fry the vegetable for about one minute, and then pour in "flavors/spices juice." Then continue to stir fry a few more minutes till the vegetables are 90% cooked.

Step 4: mixing

Pour back the beef mixture and stir fry some 20 seconds or so.

Shrimp Fried Rice

Best with day old left-over rice.

Serves 2.

Ingredients

1/2 cups uncooked white rice

3 cups water

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1/2 cup chopped white onion

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 1/2 cups cooked medium shrimp, peeled and deveined without tail (frozen ones ok).

1/4 cup chopped green onion

2 eggs, beaten

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

4 tablespoons soy sauce

1/4 teaspoon sesame oil

Directions

1. In a saucepan bring water to a boil. Add rice and stir. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Set aside and allow rice to cool.

2. Heat a large skillet or wok for 2 minutes. When the skillet or wok is hot, pour in vegetable oil, garlic and white onion. Mix well and cook for 3 minutes.

3. Mix in cooled rice and shrimp and cook for another 3 minutes. Stir constantly.

4. Mix green onions, eggs, salt, pepper, soy sauce and sesame oil together in small bowl. Make “crater” in center of rice and pour in egg mixture. Cook for another 4 minutes, stirring continuously, until eggs are cooked and everything is blended evenly.

* adding a little chicken powder, chili powder and/or cayenne pepper to the egg mixture can add flavor

* ground beef can be substituted for shrimp

Shrimp and Three Peppers

Chinese Japanese Fusion Dish

Serves 2-3.

Ingredients

3 Bell peppers, one red, yellow and green are pretty

½ Red onion

½ lb frozen shrimp

1 teaspoon chicken powder

½ teaspoon salt

cooking oil

soy sauce

wasabi mustard

Directions

1. Thaw shrimp

2. Clean the peppers. Cut peppers and onion into thin pieces.

3. Mix soy sauce and wasabi, to taste, in small bowl

4. Put oil in pan, heat then fry onions.

5. Add shrimp until they turn a cream color.

6. Add peppers, fry a little bit, then add chicken powder and salt. Mix well.

7. Serve with sauce mixture and white rice.

Once again from a non-Chinese Location

I am so sorry that our February trip is taking us well into April to tell about. I am bad at blogs…

Part 3 In Changsha or mei you ba shi
In Changsha things started to go actually wrong. We were scheduled for a few days in Changsha which we were to leave by bus for the sacred mountains. In the meantime we visited a really cool museum on the history of the province. The day before we were to leave we went to the bus station to buy tickets. The bus station was cold (in fact this winter was one of the worst China has seen in eighty years.) and crowded there were hundreds of people. However since the ceiling was at least twenty feet high the people did not make it warm up. We were waiting in huge lines to but tickets. Finally we were got to the window and luckily they had someone with good enough English that we could get our tickets.

The next day we went to the station to leave town. I stayed with the bags while Meredith went to find out where we should get the bus. The first person Meredith found told her in Chinese 没有 mei you which means don’t have (you can omit subjects in Chinese). She assumed that meant that there were no more tickets so she showed the person her tickets. He responded 没有巴士mei you ba shi (Don’t have the bus). However due to the limits of our Chinese further explanation was impossible. The Chinese person went and found a co-worker who spoke some English who was able to explain that indeed there was no such bus it was canceled because of the terrible weather.

So we extended our stay in Changsha, well beyond any thing we could find worth doing. In addition the winter was hitting chang sha hard. We kept hearing 没有 everywhere we went. McDonalds even ran out of beef!

Eventually however we went to the Changsha airport to get on our flight to Hangzhou the next stop on our journey Hangzhou. The Changsha airport is tiny. We had found one of three restaurants in the whole airport and ate some dumplings. We still had a couple of hours before our flight and it had been announced as delayed so imagine our surprise when two men came up to us, “You are going to Hangzhou? You must get on a plane now!” And so we did. We ended up in Hangzhou about the same time we were originally supposed to leave Changsha.


Part 4 The Hangzhou Hustle.

The final stop on our trip was Hangzhou. It was not planned to be, but that’s how it went. As I said we arrived early. Of course our luggage did not. Normally lost luggage, while sad isn’t that hard to deal with. We however, are in China with only a basic level of Mandarin… We notice that a lot of other people don’t have luggage either (presumably they also got bumped flights) so we follow them when they go to the lost luggage people. When we get to the front of the line they have an English speaker ready. We give them the number of our hotel, our cell phone numbers etc. They say we’ll get the luggage late that night.

So far so good. So we get on a bus to a downtown area where we can catch a cab for cheap to our hotel since a cab from the airport would have cost 120 RMB-ish. When we get there we see plenty of cabs, many unoccupied. But they won’t pick us up. Some show us signs in Chinese but we can’t read it. Eventually someone from the company that runs the bus hails us a cab, took her three tries. This became a pattern for us. We never hailed a cab on our own in Hangzhou. Fortunately our hotel was right next to the train station so there were a lot of buses.

We ate dinner at a little place near the hotel that kept serving us dishes with little to no regard for what we ordered, including some kind of slimy shrimp with an upside down glass of tea in the middle of the plate. We went back to the hotel and went to sleep. We were awoken by a phone call, Meredith shouting, “It wasn’t me!” the second she opened her eyes. It was of course the hotel telling us the luggage had arrived none the worse for wear. We also decided since Meredith’s respiratory infection was getting worse to go back to Shenzen when we left Hangzhou, and booked tickets at an internet café.

The next day we saw the West Lake, the main tourist attraction in Hangzhou. It was gorgeous. We even managed to find the (active) Daoist temple around the lake. It was a good day. We wanted to go to dinner at a restaurant recommended by the guide book. we got our hotel to hire us a cab and went. We gave the cab driver the name in both pinyin and characters. The cab driver took us to a place about the right distance but that was not at all the place we had asked for. We ended up eating at McDonalds.

There was nothing particularly interesting about our trip back to Shenzen. The adventure was over.

Here is an example of Engrish (Chinese people incorrectly generating bad English) from the back of the box of Dr. Who DVDs. I will not that although I do not reproduce it here if a word is too long to fit on one line it breaks mid word to the next line with no punctuation e.g. spa
ce =space! I have however maintained the idiosyncratic (to say the least) punctuation and capitalization.


Doctor Who back:
“Doctor Who” stories around with magic power, vertical space, the shuttle universe. dominate the time aliens “Dr..” Dr. appear on the surface of the earth usually were not the slightest bit, but is saddled with the mission of protecting the planet. The original had been calm and peaceful global crisis, many of the planet from outer space invaders have abundant resources of the earth which are hostile, often waiting for an opportunity to conquer, If not, Dr. critical juncture in the helping hand extended, I believe that mankind has long been an alien prisoners of war. Accompanied by Dr addition to seeing him fitting into public telephone booth time machine, there are a courageous people on Earth wit Rosa. Dr. Rosa cooperation with the excellent traveling in the universe of endless space than going through a period of exciting science fiction journey.

Another Trans-Oceanic Post

So We haven’t posted in a really long time. The real problem is that living in China takes up enough time that it becomes difficult to take the time to write about living in China. However it is time to put in the saga of the Spring Festival Travel Debacle!

Part 1: Yes we have No Trains.

Our original plan was to spend much of our 6 week holiday traveling to various places in China by train. We wanted to travel in China because well there’s a lot of it and we wanted to see some while we were here. We wanted to travel by train because 1. Trains are cool, and 2. Trains are relatively cheap. Keep in mind that we developed this plan with the advice of our Program Coordinator who has lived in China mostly for the past five years.

It turns out that over the Spring Festival Holiday (which is in fact in the middle of winter, don’t interrupt) you cannot get train tickets. You see, the tickets are available to students before they become available to the general population and since Spring Festival is the biggest travel period in China, by the time the tickets would be released to the general public they are already gone. This is aggravated by the fact that we are talking about physical tickets not a computerized system, so there may be that ticket you want somewhere, but you are unlikely to find it.

We found this all out the hard way of course with Meredith and our Program Coordinator James, trying on multiple days to find tickets for multiple routes with a perfect batting average of .000.

Part 2: The Journey To Changsha

This is actually the least eventful chapter in the Saga but must be included for posterity.

Our flight did not leave from Shenzhen but from the nearby city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province. We got there via a bus that goes directly to the Guangzhou airport.

At first it seemed normal for a charter bus in China, with something innocuous on the TV screens. But about an hour and a half into the three hour ride it took a turn for the bizarre. The screens started showing weird sexual stuff. Not mind you explicitly pornographic material, but girls gyrating around, sometimes even around poles, in skimpy-outfits.

Now the nature of the content would have made it very strange already in the setting of a bus to the airport, but there was plenty of weird in the contents themselves. After all the one scantily clad male in the video was carrying a bicycle above his head. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried. We’re still trying to figure out how anyone did make this up. Somewhere someone thought it would be sexy for a man in a speedo to dance holding a bicycle over his head. The mind Boggles.

Once we got to the Guangzhou airport things were more or less like you would expect. No doubt this is so we’d be put off our guard for when we entered Changsha.

Hello agian, finally

Wow. We’ve been busy and it is now the beginning of December! Long time, no post.

We have seen some crazy stuff here in China: There was a doaist musical band at the airport made of both men and women wearing traditional, matching outfits and carrying all kinds of instruments (Chinese and Westerner by the looks of the cases). There was also a poodle sitting in the top part of the luggage trolley outside the airport. There is a “kind reminder” that dogs are not allowed inside, so it was being very polite and waiting outside. We’ve seen lots of cute children, the cutest of which was a kindergarten class from Hong Kong returning from a field trip to Shenzhen at the boarder crossing. They all had matching blue or pink sailor suits and little yellow backpacks and id holders around their necks. Since they were from HK, they spoke very good English. Finally, many products sold are packaged with a “free” item to entice you to buy them. Bread came with a single serving of jam. 7-up came with a reusable makeup bag. Liters of milk come with a single serving of other drinks. And today, a jar of jelly came with a rubric cube displaying the company logo and jam flavors. Weird.

We have eaten some weird stuff, but most of it is pretty tasty. Octopus didn’t agree with me and neither does the yogurt milk or sour milk, but we’re not sick of rice yet. Since we cook ourselves (because our school’s cafeteria food is no appetizing), we can make almost anything, with a little patience and luck. Banana pancakes in the wok turned out ok, as did a pumpkin pie in the new toaster oven. We have very limited cooking possibilities given limited space and utensils, but we’re making due.

We’ve been to some cool places in and around Shenzhen. Since we are so far out in the boonies, anywhere else seems cool. There is a really nice park in the city of town called Litchi Park. There is a lake there and Patrick has promised me we can rent one of the boats there sometime to paddle around in. You can feed the gigantic gold fish there or just sit under some trees. There are some really great restaurants in the downtown area too.

We have also been to Hong Kong two times thus far. We always seem to eat our way through the city and see some interesting sites. We went to an awesome exhibit on loan from the British Museum at the HK Museum of Art in October. We do shopping in HK, for prescription drugs, shoes and books in English. We found a restaurant that was offering a Ruben sandwich for about 26 USD. Many things there are out of our price range, but there’s plenty to look at, for sure.

We have been teaching and next week will be our 13th lesson. We have a lot of students, and we’re just now learning their names. Over 500 each and we only see them once a week. We know the really bad ones and the really good ones. Most of them have “English” names, some of which are real English names (Mary, Sam, Tom etc.) some are from Japanese comics (Mikato) and some are just weird (Pizza, Harry Potter, Michael Jackson). Most of our classes are really good. There are 40-55 kids in most classes, which is the hard part. Even the bad ones are much better behaved than American students, but having twice as many people in the class at once is difficult.

We teach about 13 classes a week, which are 45 minutes long. The actual “working” part doesn’t take that much time. We only plan one lesson a week, which usually needs some small revisions after the first few classes. We have been doing an English Corner one bevening a week which is supposed to be a time for students to come and chat. One of the Chinese English teachers got the wrong idea at the beginning of term. He thought we were teaching an extra class and required all his students to come. Luckily we’ve been able to give him the brush off. Anyway, we also hang out in our office sometimes and answer students’ and teachers’ questions. The teachers give these city wide English tests that are made by a Chinese person somewhere. They have weird fill in the blanks because which have more than one answer, but the answer keys are very specific.
Would you give me a _____ in your boat? The answer is “ride” but you could also say “lift.”

The hard part about living here is getting all the daily stuff. Everything takes a long time to do. We are really far away from the downtown part of the city. Our school is one of the most isolated in the city. There is a Chinese grocery store that is 15-20 minutes away that has great veggies and fruit, household supplies and such. This kind of store doesn’t carry fresh milk or sandwich bread though. There is a Wal-mart in our district, in the downtown area, and a Carrefour, which is French chain. They are about 30 minute away directly when we can catch the school bus after school or maybe 45 on the public bus. We take Chinese lessons twice a week in Lou Ho, one of the central districts of Shenzhen. It is nice to have a free ride down there, which takes about 50 minutes when the school takes us. There are a lot of great restaurants in the area and good shopping.

After school we sometimes go shopping or hang out and watch DVDs. We’ve made some friends who work at the private school behind ours, Isaac and Rain. They like playing card games and cooking. We miss all our friends and family at home. We hope you guys continue to keep in touch, especially with the holidays now in full swing.

Trans-Oceanic Bloggoblaggin

Preface:

So we are finally trying this blog thing, despite the “great firewall of China.” Patrick’s brother Dylan is going to be our webmaster! If you would like to respond to us directly, please email us at jagger_meredith@yahoo.com or patrick_ley@yahoo.com rather than posting on the blog itself. We can’t access the posts, but when we get back, it will be nice to see what it looks like.

Chapter 1:

We had training in Beijing from August 2 – August 21, 2007. This was very challenging because we were supposed to be doing three things, on top of dealing with jet lag and culture shock: 1) Beginning intensive Chinese classes 2) Taking “Teaching English as a Foreign Language” (TEFL) classes to learn how to manage Chinese students and teach them effectively and 3) Practice teaching during a summer program for students at Peking (Beijing) University who ranged in age from 5 to post doctorate. There were three sessions. I got to start teaching the first week, before I had had any useful TEFL classes, which was a big shock. Luckily I had a very excellent class of college level students who were great. I also practice taught with some “juniors” who were about twelve.

We only got two days “off” during this time, one day to go to the Great Wall and one day to go to the Forbidden City. The Great Wall was first, and that was good because if we had been any more tired, we wouldn’t have made it. As it was, that has got to be one of the most strenuous experiences of my life. Patrick got sick from exhaustion, but made it up to the top!!! The area was very natural and we saw some cool lizards and butterflies. The Forbidden City was beautiful, but we didn’t get to see much of it. They are doing massive renovations for the Olympics and there were a lot of people there. Patrick and I went to a clock exhibit, which did cost a little extra, so I don’t think anyone else from our group went. There were clocks there from the European powers which had been gifts to the Emperors as well as Chinese made ones. They were all so intricate. One had a British man doll that could write eight different Chinese characters. Therefore at the time he could write more Chinese characters than we could. But already we know more than him and we will keep getting better while he never will ha ha ha ha ha! umm…..yes. One was a golden chariot pulled by Elephants that actually moved.

Chapter 2:

After Beijing our group all came to Shenzhen. We spent two days at a beautiful hotel while everyone got their paperwork finished and returning teachers met up with us. The hotel is apparently run for top level Party members and was very posh, including an Olympic sized swimming pool, fountains etc. They called it five stars. The lobby and recreation areas were, by American standards. The rooms might have only been three or four star worthy, but we didn’t complain, at least not about that. I had a horrible first day there, however. We got in from the airport at 2 AM. I had to be back up at 7 AM for a physical, where I was poked in all manner of ways (EKG, chest x-ray, ultrasound, eye test, dental exam and having blood drawn). I finally was allowed to eat a meal around noon and was told I could go rest, except two minutes after I was in bed, they came around and told everyone that we had a meeting. I then got dragged off to the police station in my district for an “interview” to make sure that I wasn’t seditious. Well in theory, in practice the interview only consisted of re-filling out forms we had already filled out. After getting back to the hotel, still working on about four hours of sleep, I had to fill out forms and then fill them out three more times because I kept making errors. About 7:30 pm we had photos made for the police forms and mine was definitely not attractive. The upside was that the next day I was totally free. I had nothing I had to do. The activities of forms, medical exam and police were supposed to be spread out over both days, but I got them all at once.

Part 3:

We signed the contract with our school on August 23 at a big ceremony at the hotel. We were then driven to our school, which was a big shock. They were very nice, but we had some issues with our accommodations. Since then, everyone has been very nice, but after talking to some other program teachers at different schools, our contract teacher has been less helpful that maybe he should have been. We are going to address some of our concerns to him on Monday.

Our students are fairly well behaved and have good English skills. We think we are at the best high school in the district, but it is definitely not any where near the best in the city. The first two weeks of teaching have gone well. We have also gotten to explore the city some. This week, our lesson is on pirates, arrr!

We have lots of pictures from Beijing and will post more when we get a new camera. The one we brought was in a bag with a water bottle that didn’t have the lid screwed on tight enough. We were able to get the photos off it, but the lens was damaged.

Contact Info

Email Meredith: jagger_meredith@yahoo.com

Email Patrick: patrick_ley@yahoo.com

Skype: meredith.jagger

Meredith’s Cell phone: 15820437382

Landline: 27516873

Patrick’s Cell phone: 15820437384

Landline: 29706794

Office Phone: 27512212-8519

All the above phone numbers are for domestic Chinese calls. To find out the international codes from your location, please visit http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/dialing.html.

Mailing Address:

Meredith Jagger OR Patrick Ley

Bao’an Senior High School

Bao’an Education City

Bao’an District, Shenzhen

Guangdong Province

CHINA

518128

We have been told that for packages, using the US Post Office will work better. It takes about 16 days for letters to get to us (that is with a sample size on 1 thus far).

Wish List

• Handkerchiefs or bandanas

• Panty hose (5’10” and 175 lbs) in skin tone, for Meredith only 

• English magazines (like National Geo, Smithsonian, Cosmo)

So We are in China. Today is my first time at a computer since we left. I can't always get everything in English so I may be slow to update/respond.

Until we get to Shenzhen we are being worked like drafthorses. Classes even on Sunday! It's fun though. i can't wait til we get to Shenzhen though where we can start settling in to a real routine and get to what we started out to do.

AHHHHHHHHH!

Packing to go somewhere for a year is a nightmare! This isn't really a surprise but we're nearly at our wits end. However a day after tomorrow we get on the plane. We have our passports with visas for entry into China.

Today we left our apartment in Tennessee for good. It'll be a year before we see our friends in Chattanooga face to face.

We're really going to miss cheese so we've been eating as much cheese as possible.

In other news Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for all is a fun video game. OBJECTION!

That's all for now.