Language partner et al

Now that I am wrapping up, I have been thinking of all the people to meet and wrapping up things.
Taking pictures is on my to-do list and I just realized that I did not take a picture with my language partner when I met her for the last time ! That prompted me to write a blog about her and other related things.

Earlier in the semester, my room-mate found me a language partner. One of her Korean friends, wanted to improve her English and I could definitely benefit from learning some Chinese. It started off with good intentions with a focus on language but then deviated to culture and food. Which I am not complaining about. Either way, made a good friend.

I had never realized that teaching English would be difficult. Never having had to "learn" a foreign language (minus Mandarin which kind of failed), teaching someone ended up being more difficult than I had imagined. Luckily, my friend had a Korean-Chinese-English book to follow. It was an interesting layout. My friend knew how to read and write English but had a decent vocabulary but it was the grammar and sentence construction that was mainly lacking. I personally hate grammar, I remember Wren & Martin as one of the prescribed books in middle school, but never ever used it. So using this Korean-Chinese-English book was interesting. It was divided into use of verbs and adjectives mainly.

The verbs started with give, take, go, come etc. And then usage of each verb was illustrated by sentence formation. When we got to the verb "come" - all the sentences were he comes, he came, he is going to come , he will be coming etc etc and this whole time I was trying not to say that's what she said and crack up laughing at the lack of imagination with the sentences. And then for adjectives, it was the same process. So teaching was more grueling than I anticipated but as a solace, our meetings were usually over coffee/Korean food/hot pot so the calories helped with the learning.

At the end what helped the most was just talking to her in English. By the end of 4 months, she carried on a conversation with less pauses. If we were more disciplined, I think it could have been a lot better. But it was nice to have a buddy here. She tried to teach me Mandarin but my vocabulary level of < a 2 year old's and inability to understand the script made us give up. She did help a bit with pronunciation. However, I had less motivation to learn the language knowing that I was returning in January.

Before coming to China I had wondered if I would want to move here, but now after spending 5 months here, I have realized that I would never move to China. I would be totally open to doing a 1 or 2 year short term project as part of a job, live in the expat area, have more cash etc but not a permanent move. I guess I am going to be content with survival Mandarin for the rest of my life :)

On a side note, this is what my friend and I had for dinner at our last meeting. A whole grilled fish swimming in hot spicy sauce :D

Food in Macau

Usually food doesn't warrant its own blog post, but a day in Macau meant highlighting its food.
I have also noticed, that if I travel alone, I end up eating more maybe because
 a) There is no one to judge me
 b) No one to discuss with on what to buy/when to eat
 c) I can eat when I am not hungry just because something looks good

So it may be biased that Macau gets a whole food blog post, but whatevs, the food was delish.

Since I knew I had to take a ferry, I decided to not eat breakfast. Things churning around in tummy is no good while on sea. But I did buy some fresh mango juice for the 30 minute walk to the ferry. After enjoying the mango goodness, I refrained from eating till I safely arrived in Macau and the ground was steady. Soon after reaching Macau, my first treat for myself was an egg tart ! Brought by the Portugese to Macau, the Macanese version is a slight deviation from the traditional pastel de nata but at 3HKD a piece it was a treat. Wiki'ing it later, I found out that it is ranked #16 on CNN go's most delicious foods !



For lunch, I decided that the place with the longest line has to serve the most delicious food. I ended up with a porkchop burger and milk tea. The milk tea was great with the dry burger though the burger itself wasn't too bad. My hands were too greasy to take a picture, so here is one shamelessly stolen from google.



I continued my walking tour with nai cha  in hand. After exploring more of the city, I was ready for some snacking. To my surprise, there were vendors offering free samples of different kinds of meat jerky and cookies. And there were rows of shops doing the same thing. Also, people were especially nice about offering samples to me compared to the mainland Chinese people. I guess it was the brown skin combined with the skinny girl look. I don't know if I had worn my panda hat,would I have gotten more cookies.

The famous Macau almond cookies were buttery, crunchy deliciousness. I do prefer the American style chewy cookies, but the almond cookies being crunchy and hard reminded me more of my ever favorite Danish butter cookies (speaking of which I hope Costco has available the big box for sale when I go back!). After my free snack time, I started to head back towards the city. I was heading back to the city center where I saw this food cart hot pot esque place.

From what I learned, observing from my strategic "next to the cart but not a customer" location was that you pick out what you want and place it in a plate. Then the lady cooks it in a boiling soup. But she has a different soup for seafood and a different one for meat. She uses only a pair of tongs (+hands) for cooking and then serves it steaming hot. She also believes that hairnets and gloves are over-rated when everything is going to be boiled at the end. The portions were huge and I believe it was only 15 HKD.

Instead of a giant hot pot thing, which would require mad skills to consume with chopsticks, while standing and people jostling you, I went ahead with another bun variety because all that observation made me hungry. However, this one was better than bun #1 and was actually a pan fried stuffed buttery bun filled with chopped pork, scallions/cilantro and something else which I couldn't figure out. Again, greasy hands = stealing picture from google. Washing that down with another milk tea, I headed to the casinos.

After a couple of hours at the casinos, I finally was at a huge food court, under the fake blue sky at The Venetian. Keeping in mind to have time to digest the food before ferrying it back, I decided to eat at the food court rather than near the ferry terminal.

After walking around, I saw a sign for original Macanese cuisine. I ordered the baked seafood curry rice and was delighted to see some cheese in it. It was very similar to Goan food, which was not a suprise considering the Portugese influence. However, they did not have any milk tea to offer and I had to go settle for water, though to their credit it was cold water (which is a rarity in China).  I am glad I ate my fill because with the queue, it took me another 2 hours before boarding the ferry. 

  

It was a fun filled delicious day. I think I succeeded in eating most of the things Macau is famous for :D
Though I will miss quite a bit of the Eastern food, I can't wait to gorge on cheese and chocolates when I get back !