What's the best way to brighten up a weekend where too much time was spent on school work???.... a visit with my good friend Hannah and her Grandmother (whom I call Nai Nai - means Grandma in Chinese)). Those of you who have been following this blog for a while have met her before. She is quite crafty and sews or makes many things. I always enjoy spending time with her this time we discussed what she could do with some different pieces of fabric - well the pieces that I convinced her to not give away to me as this was her common theme of the afternoon.. "Here you take this - I don't know what to do with this." Then I would kindly say, "Well, I'll tell you what you can do with it because I can't take all of this."... and that's how it went... She is incredibly generous and I ended up leaving with a few pieces of fabric for my current sewing project and two plants.That was last weekend. This weekend my roommates and I had the honor of visiting with Ma Ayi. This wonderful lady used to work at our school and has
been in our community for many years. She is currently fighting cancer and no longer works, but I ran into her at a birthday dinner about two weeks ago and we had a wonderful conversation. Five days later she came to school with two boxes of food she had made for me - curry jiaozi and little pumpkin pies. They were both AMAZING and when I called her to thank her we arranged to get together and cook together sometime. So last night my roommates and I went to her house and we made dinner and visited with her and her husband. It was a lovely evening and we had wonderful conversations (all in Chinese) about what Tianjin was like when they were little, her husbands job at the water purification plant, the current drought, and on and on. We did manage to make the jiaozi (I would call them meat pockets as they are not really the chinese jiaozi that is common) and she had made an apple pie for us that was the best I've 
had in China.
It has been quite a pleasure to be able to spend time with these wonderful people.
2 comments:
How wise for your school to arrange such visits. Thanks for covering it so well in this post. Anywhere one lives on planet earth there are institutions which when visited, make our problems seem minor as we contemplate on the hopelessness of it's occupants.
Dad
Oh, I'm glad your Chinese is good enough to have a conversation like that! I talked to a lady in Chinatown today, and I told her that Florida is my guoji (international) instead of my guxiang (hometown). (???) So bad!
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