Yesterday I decided I wanted to do something nice for my kids so we went out and bought fruit. It's kind of funny...in China, while sweets exist, they're not really big on them. The closest thing to dessert that the dining hall has is watermelon and they eat alot of fruit. I had an hour to kill in the afternoon so I decided on Friday that Monday we were going to have, as one of my students put it, "a melon party".
Throughout the campus they have fruit stalls set up with men sitting on the side of the road with fruit set out to sell. Many of the things that they sell are familiar...peaches, watermelons, apples but they also sell things a bit more exotic such as leechys. Leechys are these bumpy little fruits that are somewhat maroon or pink on the outside with a sweet pearl like flesh on the inside once you peel away the thick skin. I've seen them but never eaten them in the states. Too expensive. Here they're not so bad. I actually was in a bar and they were selling leechy daquiris so I had to buy one to try it. Not bad actually.
Anyway we went down to the market and bought about seven watermelons. About four guys came with me from the class and it was fun to watch them pick through the watermelons trying to select ones that they thought were ripe. They do it the same way we do in the states by thumping them. When they selected one they would throw it across the stall to the woman whose husband would put it on a scale and weigh it. All in all I paid about a dollar a melon. We also got about 25 peaches. We got less because not everyone might like peaches. We then loaded up the watermelon in bags which we hung from the handlebars as we pedaled our way across campus on our bikes.
Originally I had been planning on doing this in the class room but then realized what a really bad idea that was. I asked my students where we should go and they recommended the dining hall. As a result we all met outside the dining hall at 2:30 pm and proceeded in side to cut the melons up. It was a mess. Juice went everywhere. The staff who was cleaning the hall just worked around us. I thought that at any moment they would approach us and ask us what we were doing and why we were making such a large mess. They did not. I told my students that if we had done the same thing in the United States we would probably be in a lot of trouble at that point.
I think the difference may be in dining hall construction. Chinese dining halls are not terribly cheerful places and have an industrial air about them. They are dimly lit primarily from florescent lights although there is some natural light coming in through the windows. Tables are plastic and the chairs are bolted to the tables and cannot be moved. The ground is tile of some sort. I think this construction may make clean up very easy. The Chinese tend to spit alot on the tables and the way they're made makes it very easy to just wipe the tables off.
So my kids tore apart the watermelon. I was amazed. I wasn't planning on eating any of the peaches because they had skins and hadn't been adequately washed in my mind and I don't want to get sick. The Chinese idea of washing fruit is to run a little water over it. No soap seems to be involved. Anyway I turned my back and when I turned back around there wasn't a peach in sight. I saw a bunch of them eating them but I don' t know if they ate them all or they dissapeared into bags or what. It's easy to dissapear a peach but much harder to do it with a watermelon.
I cut the first one but I did such a piss poor job that they took over almost immediately. I wasn't paying attention but they consumed four watermelons before I started counting. We ended up with a few left over which was ok because I would rather have too many than not enough. They would spit the seeds and throw the rinds on the tables. I reminded them to be neat because I felt bad for the cleaning staff. I have pictures of kids with huge piles of rinds in front of them. It was so much fun.
Throughout the campus they have fruit stalls set up with men sitting on the side of the road with fruit set out to sell. Many of the things that they sell are familiar...peaches, watermelons, apples but they also sell things a bit more exotic such as leechys. Leechys are these bumpy little fruits that are somewhat maroon or pink on the outside with a sweet pearl like flesh on the inside once you peel away the thick skin. I've seen them but never eaten them in the states. Too expensive. Here they're not so bad. I actually was in a bar and they were selling leechy daquiris so I had to buy one to try it. Not bad actually.
Anyway we went down to the market and bought about seven watermelons. About four guys came with me from the class and it was fun to watch them pick through the watermelons trying to select ones that they thought were ripe. They do it the same way we do in the states by thumping them. When they selected one they would throw it across the stall to the woman whose husband would put it on a scale and weigh it. All in all I paid about a dollar a melon. We also got about 25 peaches. We got less because not everyone might like peaches. We then loaded up the watermelon in bags which we hung from the handlebars as we pedaled our way across campus on our bikes.
Originally I had been planning on doing this in the class room but then realized what a really bad idea that was. I asked my students where we should go and they recommended the dining hall. As a result we all met outside the dining hall at 2:30 pm and proceeded in side to cut the melons up. It was a mess. Juice went everywhere. The staff who was cleaning the hall just worked around us. I thought that at any moment they would approach us and ask us what we were doing and why we were making such a large mess. They did not. I told my students that if we had done the same thing in the United States we would probably be in a lot of trouble at that point.
I think the difference may be in dining hall construction. Chinese dining halls are not terribly cheerful places and have an industrial air about them. They are dimly lit primarily from florescent lights although there is some natural light coming in through the windows. Tables are plastic and the chairs are bolted to the tables and cannot be moved. The ground is tile of some sort. I think this construction may make clean up very easy. The Chinese tend to spit alot on the tables and the way they're made makes it very easy to just wipe the tables off.
So my kids tore apart the watermelon. I was amazed. I wasn't planning on eating any of the peaches because they had skins and hadn't been adequately washed in my mind and I don't want to get sick. The Chinese idea of washing fruit is to run a little water over it. No soap seems to be involved. Anyway I turned my back and when I turned back around there wasn't a peach in sight. I saw a bunch of them eating them but I don' t know if they ate them all or they dissapeared into bags or what. It's easy to dissapear a peach but much harder to do it with a watermelon.
I cut the first one but I did such a piss poor job that they took over almost immediately. I wasn't paying attention but they consumed four watermelons before I started counting. We ended up with a few left over which was ok because I would rather have too many than not enough. They would spit the seeds and throw the rinds on the tables. I reminded them to be neat because I felt bad for the cleaning staff. I have pictures of kids with huge piles of rinds in front of them. It was so much fun.
