Wow what a week. Classes began on Monday and so did the pile
of homework. The Chinese classes are
challenging and require a lot of out of class work but the teachers are very
interesting and so is the material. In
fact I really enjoy the nine hours a day I spend in classes and working on Chinese
homework because I know that each new character or grammar pattern I learn
brings me one step closer to that far off dream of fluency, well I hope it’s
not too far off.
 |
| Jew's Ear http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/471459 |
The kitchen I share with my roommates is quite sparse at the
moment so my roommates and I have been eating out a lot. I enjoy this because I don’t have to cook and
also it increases my chances of experiencing something new. This week the “something new” was Jew’s
ear. What is Jew’s ear you may ask, well
I was asking myself the same question the first time I saw it on a menu. Jew’s ear, Auricularia auricula-judae, is a type of fungi that is used in many Chinese dishes
and is quite delicious. Now at first my
curiosity was sedated with discovering that Jew’s ear was a mushroom, but then
time and time again I kept seeing Jew’s ear on the menu and I started to wonder
at what was the history of the mushrooms namesake. Was the mushroom’s naming the result of anti-Semitism,
coincidence, or some unfortunate mistranslation. Finally my curiosity got the better of me and
I did some research. The etymology of the Jew’s ear mushroom is as follows. The mushroom got its name from the folklore
that after Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus Christ’s disciples, hung himself from
an elder tree because of the guilt he felt from betraying Jesus Christ the ear
shaped mushrooms grew from the elder tree as a piece of Judas’s spirit and a reminder
of his betrayal. The original name for
the mushroom was Judas’s ear but was then shortened to Jew’s ear. I apologize for
the long explanation but I found Jew’s ear very interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auricularia_auricula-judae
Another exciting thing I did this week was get my first
Chinese haircut. Now I did not know what
to expect, I had heard and read many “horror” stories about getting a haircut
in China, one author said that anytime she left a hair salon in China not
crying was a win. With those encouraging
stories under my belt I brushed up on my hair related Chinese vocabulary, asked
for a recommendation, and set out down the street. I arrived at the barber shop it’s entrance
flanked by two 1950s style barber shop poles and entered. The interior of the shop was simple, a long mirror
with equally spaced chairs facing it flanked one side of the room, while the
opposite mirror less wall was covered in pictures of models with ridiculous and
impossible looking hairstyles which almost distracted the costumer from the
peeling wallpaper and exposed pipes that persisted throughout the shop. I was greeted by one of the stylist and after
I enquired about the price, 20kuai which is only $3.15 U.S., I was ushered to a
washing stand where my hair was washed and my head massaged. Next I was taken to a chair where I told the
stylist with my limited Chinese and some hand gesturing that he could do as he liked 随便你(Suíbiàn nǐ) with
my hair, just not to short and to shave the sides. The haircut had begun “there’s no stopping now”
I thought to myself as I saw the stylist grab the just used unclean razor from
his coworker, the razor moving from one head of hair to mine in little more than
a second. The buzzing of the razor came
to a stop and I looked up into the mirror expecting the worse only to be pleasantly
surprised with a great looking fohawk. I
got up and paid for the haircut and while doing so heard the only word of English
uttered during the entire event and that was a very enthusiastic “Helloo” from
the man behind the register. Getting a
haircut in China has been one of my favorite experiences because not only did I
get a great haircut, seriously I will be returning to that shop in the near
future, but I was placed in a situation where I was the only one who knew any English
and so was forced to really on my Chinese.
That’s all for now
Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment