Airline Thanksgiving, Rugby, and the Attack of the 22 lb. Fire-Chicken

Happy Thanksgiving from China!  We hope everybody had a great holiday weekend, and I know we have quite a bit to be thankful for.  Most of all (after family, health, etc.) we have our household goods.  The boys have been thoroughly enjoying all of the toys they forgot they had.  Thanks to the fact that the only children's movie we had with us for almost 3 full months was Cars, Stephen has been carrying his toy cars with him everywhere.  He even started naming them after people we've met since we arrived.  His other favorite toy is anything that David happens to be playing with.  David seems to be the more reasonable of the two.  Once Stephen takes his toy, he cries for a little bit just to make sure we know what happened so Stephen gets in trouble, and then he grabs one of the other million toys we have.  Please understand we don't spoil our children.  At times, we have even told Stephen's and David's grandparents and aunts and uncles to stop buying them toys.  Apparently though, a grandparent has as hard of a time understanding that as I do understanding my classes over here.  In some cases they instead hear, "please go buy our son the loudest toy you can find that doesn't have an 'off' switch."  David is particularly fond of a little plastic parrot that he found in a Go Diego Go play set.  He's been carrying it around the house like a little Coco-B-Ware since it got here.  If you get that reference, you get free membership to this blog's premium content.  If you didn't get the reference, you still get access to the premium content, but you have to live with feeling like you didn't really earn it.

Anyway, we pulled off Thanksgiving on Thursday and it went pretty well.  With a few exceptions such as purple sweet potatoes, a pumpkin pie that was more crust than filling, and none of the cranberries that keep the shape of the can they were in, we had a pretty traditional Western Thanksgiving.  We did a late dinner because one of our friends had to work and didn't get done teaching until 6pm.  We were hoping to get some of my classmates involved, but none were too keen on partaking of our fire-chicken.  The Chinese word for turkey is huoji (火鸡) which literally translates to "fire chicken" which makes it sounds awesome.  You would think with a name that awesome, everybody would want a taste, but I think there are several issues.  The first is the majority of my classmates are mostly girls who are 10 to 12 years younger than me.  Secondly, at least here in Kunming, there is very little interaction between students outside of class.  We had one social event in the anthropology department where the Chinese Communist Youth League sponsored a picnic.  Technically I guess that makes it less a social event and more of a socialist event, but it still counts.  Other than that everybody seems to pretty much keep to themselves.  Another factor was that the one class I have with classmates that are more outgoing and who would be interested in having Thanksgiving dinner meets on Thursday afternoons from 2pm to 6pm and the campus an hour outside of town.  I went ahead and played the American Card and took a 4-day weekend, but most other students here don't have that option.  Lack of cross-cultural interaction aside, we still had a pretty good dinner.  I was able to find a store where you could sign up and order a frozen turkey imported from the United States.  Initially I didn't realize it was going to be shipped in from the U.S. so I had visions of a turkey showing up with feathers and all (think the duck from A Christmas Story) so I factored that into the weight.  Everybody else had signed up for 12 to 13kg birds so I took a more conservative route and ordered a 10kg bird.  Turns out the birds were imported from the U.S. and were the same as the ones you'd pick up at any supermarket, meaning we ended up with a bird weighing somewhere around 22 pounds.  Even after giving our friends quite a bit to take home, we still have close to 10 pounds left so it looks like we have a lot of turkey sandwiches in our future.  Luckily, imported turkey is more reasonably priced than cheese so I still feel like we got a pretty good deal.  Additionally I'll get to eat leftovers for quite a while so I get cold turkey sandwiches for lunch as long as it lasts.  The only downside will be having to quit cold turkey once it runs out.

Thanksgiving was so good on Thursday that we decided to do it again on Friday.  Kate got an invitation from some of the families in a mothers' group she attends to eat Thanksgiving with them also.  This was great until a few days after she accepted when she received an e-mail telling her that aside from having to bring a side dish, we would also be expected to pay for a share of the turkey they bought.  Now, these families are all really nice people, and I understand that we're a little better off over here than most American families because of the military benefits we receive.  I also understand that imported turkey is expensive (we paid almost $100 U.S. dollars for ours) and a lot for one family to pay if there aren't going to be any leftovers, but I also think that's the kind of thing you tell somebody when you invite them, not several days after they've accepted the invitation.  It felt a little like the time I took a red-eye flight from Hawaii and found out after I got on the plane that American Airlines was now charging $10 for pillows and blankets.  Much to Kate's dismay, I spent the next several days thinking of ways to offset the costs like charging them because we used imported green beans in the green bean casserole that Kate made.  I also tried to add a surcharge for bringing the casserole in a fancy dish instead of a Tupperware container.  I also checked to make sure that there weren't any more hidden costs such as beverage surcharges or overage charges if we ate more than our allotted weight of turkey.  I also made Kate put everything in one diaper bag so we wouldn't get hit with excess baggage fees and had Stephen stuff some extra turkey in his pockets before we left.  What's more, after we got there, we found out that one family backed out and that we would all have to absorb the cost of the turkey that they were no longer paying for.  I feel like there is some sort of lesson about economics in this that can be juxtaposed with the current situation in the U.S. and/or global economies, but I'm an Artillery officer with a degree in Chemistry who is studying art anthropology in Chinese so I'm not going to be the one to find it.  Overall, we had a very good time with great food and great company, but in the future I'll know to read the fine print so we don't get involved in some kind of crazy pyramid-scheme Christmas party.  Although, how cool would a blog post titled A Bernie Madoff Christmas be?

In an effort to get more local interaction I joined a rugby team.  I played rugby for part of a semester 12 years ago at West Point as part of my intramural requirement so I'm as equally qualified to play rugby as I am to study anything other than Chinese in Chinese.  So far we have had one practice which was the inaugural practice for the team.  The impetus behind our team is a guy from New Zealand who lives here who met some guys from teams in Chengdu and Chongqing who are looking for more teams across China to play.  His hope is to get a club going that will continue to perpetuate through the years and eventually be more Chinese than it is foreign.  So far we have 3 Americans, 1 Irishman, and 1 New Zealander.  Somehow, I was designated the team interpreter.  Our first practice went pretty well and after about an hour we had about 50 people standing by and watching us.  One group even brought a bucket of KFC to eat while they watched.  After a while we took a break and I asked a few of the guys watching if they wanted to play too and we got three of them to participate so it was a pretty good first attempt.  My attempts to explain the rules were even pretty successful.  The highlight of the day was when the guy from New Zealand tried to explain that one team member was from Ireland.  After a few attempts in Chinese, he finally gave up and said, "Ireland, you know, oi, deedle di dee, potatoes!" in his best Irish accent while doing a jig.  The best part, though, was the fact that the guy from Ireland just shrugged his shoulders and said, "That's pretty accurate."  I think this promises to be quite the interesting adventure.

Finally, we started putting up Christmas decorations this weekend.  Kate has been busy spreading Christmas cheer around the apartment while David has been going around checking to see which ornaments and decorations taste the most like Christmas.  Stephen has been keeping busy staging epic battles between snowmen, manger scenes, nutcrackers, and a dinosaur he's been fond of for the past several days.  So far the velociraptor always seems to come out on top.  Continue to enjoy the holidays and don't forget to read the fine print!  再见!

22 lbs of Turkey Ready to Start Cooking



Same Turkey Almost 6 Hours Later



David, Stephen, and Jeanne Mei Anxious to Start Eating

Happy Thanksgiving from China!