Christmas Day

Stewart and I had been talking about the big Christmas Party that was scheduled via our Facebook group page.  We both agreed that Christmas eve was what mattered, and it should be at home with intimates.

The venue for the big party is the Fudu Hotel, an elegant international hotel, with its Shangri-la restaurant..  That is where Rolf is the head chef.  He's the one I finally got to meet and talk with at the Hutang Shangri-la Christmas lighting ceremony, and old German gentleman.  It is to be a six hour event, with games and food.  It cost 288 rmb, and BYOB.  They waived the corking fee.  In US dollars that's about $47.  Maybe it doesn't sound much to you, but by Chinese standards it's a lot.

The other problem with the big party is that the Fudu is in Xin Bei.  That's the far away northern part of Changzhou, turning a six hour event into 8 hours.

My good friend Ann Marie organized the event.  Last week I saw her at a book club meeting in Nan Da Jie. That is the city center, between Xin Bei and Hutang.  We were riding the escalator up to the public toilet, and I said to her, "it saddens my heart to go to a shindig in Xin Bei and meet all these neat people and then not see them again.  I need local friends."  Case in point, I haven't seen Ann Marie in at least two months.

I hope I wrote about the Christmas Lights ceremony at the new Shangri-la hotel Dec. 6, because that was IT for my public Christmas celebrations.

So I decided to have Chrstmas eve at my place.  I told Stephanie about it, and her circle of friends.  That's Danielle who now lives in my old apartment at Mechatronix school; Aoife who is Irish and an adventurer; she travels each week on her two days off to a different city locally.  And josh.  Josh works for Web Kids, a new school down the block with a special kids program.  He is in his twenties, tall, and outgoing.  He was in my shop with Danielle, to whom I gave a kitty, Ami.

Ami is a street cat who hung out in the courtyard at my apartment.  She was tame, not like the other wild cats.  yet no one wanted to take her into their home, so she scrounged for food. She is a gray tabby, about two months older than my kittens.  Often the good folk would put food out for her, their table scraps.  I took her to Dr. White, my vet, and had here spayed.  One day Danielle was saying how she loves cats.  I told her about my loaner cats, and she jumped at it.  She now has Ami, and they are very happy together.

Josh said he loved cats, and would like one too.  So I bought a cage on Taobao, and set the trap early one morning.  A couple hours later I went to work, with the cage filled with a young calico.  She stayed at the bakery until afternoon, when Josh came for her.  It was hilarious trying to get her out of the cage and into a sack so he could carry her home.  He really should have just taken the cage.  We caught her once, but he let her out of the sack accidentally.  She ran all around, leaping up at the windows in the kitchen, throwing everything above the sink to the floor.  I finally caught her, getting some teeth marks on my hand along the way.

So the four of them planned to come over.  I told them I wasn't up to cooking, but I could supply the wine.  We set a price for gift exchange.

They came over late.  Stew never did come, because Jenny and A.J. had invited him to their place.  Jenny's baby is over due.  Aoife (like eva, with an f) turned out to be the cook in the lot.  She brought about five dishes.  Danielle came early, and cooked a pot of brown rice in my steamer.  She served it with a dressing of Pesto from the bottle, a small amount of raisins and halved cherry tomatoes.  It is amazing!

So we ate, we chatted, we did the gift exchange, and then what.  A movie was playing on my TV during dinner, but clearly we didn't want to waste the evening glued to the TV screen.  So I suggested Mexican Train.  Stephanie had played it before, and was eager.

We played a long time.  Finally, at 2 a.m., Stephanie and Danielle left.  Josh and Aoife weren't ready yet.  During the evening there was this exchange between them, after about two bottles of wine, a beer, and just before I cracked open the bottle of scotch.

In a voice of mild curiosity Josh said to Aoife, "I like you."  She returned, in a puzzled voice, "I like you too"  He said, "I really like you, I don't want to but..."

It was sweet.  What I didn't know was that Josh had bought a plane ticket, wiping out his savings, for his girlfriend to come visit him.  She was due in a few days.

The two of them stayed on until 4 a.m.  They spoke about the folks who had just left, and analyzed them as if putting together bits of data to make sense out of phenomena.

I can't remember what else we talked about, as even I had a wee drab of the scotch.  They insisted on cleaning up before they left, hauling things to the kitchen and doing some dish washing.  I was very grateful in the morning, not having to face a mess in the living room.

They wandered out into the dead of the night.  The city is almost quiet then.  I wonder how long it took them to catch a cab.  They don't live in the same neighborhood, and neither of them speak Chinese.  But they were two good friends together, and it must have been a perfect ending to Christmas eve, for them.

I slept in the next day, til 7:30.  It was lovely.  Ricky texted me and arranged to come down from Nan Da Jie for lunch.  I took a shower, shampooed what was left of my hair after a trip the hairdresser last week, and finished the toilet with a dab of perfume, and mascara.  I got dressed in non-working clothes, pulling out my Earth Spirit ankle boots that I had bought in Vermont in 2008.  They were dusty; I took the time to find the boot paste and polish them.

We agreed to meet at the bakery at noon.  As it turned out, both of us were running late.  I grab a taxi (waiting probably ten minutes for it!) and pulled up to the bus stop as the B11 was approaching.  We exited out vehicles seconds apart.

We wandered over to the Maoye mall, where the Jackie Chen movie theatre is.  We had heard that there is a new restaurant just opened, on the fifth/top floor of the mall.  Michael Dent is a Canadian, apparently.  I don't know if I've ever met him.  We found the restaurant, but it wouldn't open until 6:30.  We wandered around the empty mall, Ricky stopping frequently to take pictures.  She was fascinated with geometric patterns, and appreciated the mall architecture.  I led her to the Jackie Chen movie.  We went into the lobby, but there was no western movie playing.  On the door there are big polka dots in dark to fading colors.  She laughed to see polka dots on a door.  She stood inside photographing them, and as if on cue a couple walked past.  it is actually a great shot of two people framed in large dark circles which fade to a cloud at their feet.

We continued our way down to the ground floor, walking down unmoving escalators.  I wanted to show her the Sunshine coffee place, but when we got there it was locked.  We peeked through the windows at the lovely cozy decor.  Then I noticed on the glass that they open at 1 p.m.  I looked at my watch and saw it was 12:50.  We were too cold and restless to wait.  I was hungry for real food.

Just then Stephanie texted me and asked me when I was coming.  Then I remembered that Lasalles had invited me (through Stephanie) to come for Christmas dinner.  We walked from the mall to his house, though I wanted to take the bus.  I am getting so lazy!  It was probably less than a kilometer.

We entered the apartment to find two young tall Chinese guys, and Stephanie.  Lasalles was moving swiftly from room to room.  He was in the kitchen, then greeting his new guests, then to the bedroom or toilet, then back to the kitchen while his Chinese friends played the role of hosts.  They took our coats, and invited us to sit.  Lasalles called me into the kitchen and handed me a package of paper cups and a couple of plastic mugs.  He said, I have lots of tea, here are the cups.  So I carried them ten steps to the table in the living room, and made a cup of pomelo tea for me and Ricky.

We were seated, chatting with Stephanie and the Chinese young men.  One of them was a college student, the other was a violin teacher at the college.  The student had a very expensive digital camera, that we played with intermittently through the afternoon.

Stephanie had already cut up a bunch of vegetables.  They were sliced fine, ready to be sauteed.  Green and red sweet peppers, onions and celantro leaves.  Another pot held sliced mushrooms.  A third dish had chunks of celery.  None of it looked like hors d'oevres.  The small coffee table was cluttered with these things, and with three cutting boards.

Lasalles came in and regalled us with all the wonderful things we were going to eat. He loves the spotlight, and so these presentations or previews of things to come were spoken in parsed melodic phrases.  He punctuated each phrase with a drawn pause ending in a rising tone.  The gist of it, unravelled over about a half hour of these speeches interrupted with his wandering between the kitchen and us, was that he had two kinds of potatoes, and chicken in various forms.  Chicken wings, and chicken for making curry, are two he mentioned.  At one point he talked to the two Chinese guys, and they disappeared out the door.  They came back after almost an hour, with a coconut.  They hovered around a machine on the dining table which was against the wall.  He let the guys do the work while he was telling us again that he had all kinds of tea, oh and there was lots of wine on the end table in the corner.  The guys turned to him holding a plastic pitcher with a couple ounces of coconut juice.  Then Lasalles turned his attention to that project, giving further instructions.  This was the coconut milk that was to be used in the dishes.

He asked if anyone wanted to help cutting up stuff.  I was off kitchen duty, so i kept silent, much to Lasalles' dismay.  Stephanie shrugged her shoulders and said she didn't know how to cook.  Ricky piped up and said sure, I'll help, what do you need.

She attacked a head of garlic with gusto. She layed it out on the cutting board and smashed it with her palm. Then she slipped off the loosened skins.  By and by the cutting board had about twenty cloves of shiny garlic bordering its edge.

It was now 2:00.  We were all starved, having expected to come for lunch. Each time he would make an appearance, we all asked if any of that great stuff was actually ready for eating.

He brought out a pot of boiled potaotes and asked  Ricky to slice them.  He became elaborate again, describing what he was going to do with these potatoes.  He turned his attention to the Chinese guys.  The three of them stood at the table, as our host assigned them another task.  Ricky looked at Steph and me, and we speculated about how to cut the potatoes.  Quartered?  Thick slices, thin slices?  Finally Ricky dove into the task and had them nicely sliced.  Lasalles took them into the kitchen.  About a half hour later, I went once again into the kitchen, and helped him unload the potatoes from the pans into a bowl.  They had been dipped into a mixture of onion powder and black pepper on a cutting board near Ricky, and he must have then dipped them in egg before sauteing them.

I set them on the coffee table, and we pack of hungry wolves made them disappear quickly.

The whole apartment was quite small, maybe 60 square meters.  The kitchen was too small and cluttered to allow two people to work in there.  I suspect Lasalles had hoped that I would be the one doing the heavy lifting, and he would just be giving instructions.  But it was my day off.  I did go in to see if I could do something, but it wasn't possible.  Lasalles, a light skinned Canadian who would have fit in like a native in New Orleans, was a man of large gestures and exaggerated speech.  He filled that tiny kitchen to overflowing.

I dug into the bottles hiding behind a lamp and a green plant on the end table in the corner.  There was nothing recongizable on the labels of the five bottles.  I found one white wine. I asked for a cork screw, which Lasalles was able to find, but then discovered that it was a screw top.  The label said it was a white savignon and chardonnay.  It tasted more like vinegar.  By the look of the labels on the other wines, I suspect they were all of equal quality.

At one point while Lasalles was visiting with us in the living room, I asked him why he didn't buy my bread.  He said I didn't have the kind of bread he liked.  What was that, I asked?  Whole grain stuff, healthy stuff.  Like what?  Anything, he said, with whole wheat, maybe rye.  He said when he comes into the shop the counter person says we don't have any of the things he asks for.  I told him we had a freezer full of fresh baked breads.  All he has to do is ask.  Obviously, it must have been a long time ago that he came in, before we got into this rhythm of keeping the shelves and freezer full.

He tried once, it didn't satisfy, and he never came back.

The two guys got up and started to leave.  We asked them where they were going.  They said that the Christmas environment was lacking, they were going to find some Christmas hats.

Moments later, one of my former Web students walked in the door for a visit.  She stayed a while, and left.  Meanwhile, she pulled from her bag a loaf of my New York Deli Rye and grinned at me.  'Lasalles!' I called, 'look at this.' He was coming out of the bathroom.  He wouldn't look at me.

The other lady, as Chinese always move in pairs, was Zoe.  She is one of my favorite Web students, I was happy to see her again.  I had recently bumped into her at Shirley's new spa.  She is witty, she speaks her mind, often in zingers.

The ladies were expecting to see the two Chinese guys, and were disappointed not to find them.  They stayed for a while, hoping to see them.

Lasalles sat with us, the conversation was lively.  Then Stephanie said, is there going to be any food soon?  We're starved.'

After a while he returned to the kitchen.

The pile of cut vegetables was beginning to dwindle. The Chinese don't' like raw stuff, nor cold.  They watched us nibbling on slices of red sweet pepper and yellow, on celery.  Eventually one of them picked up a celery and tried it.  The other marveled.  the first picked up another, and they had a conversation about it.  Yes, he said, it is good.  it's okay to eat it like this.  They groped for a word....pet...pest...pesticides!

We all assured them that the vegetables had been washed.  A colander of raw spinach had materialized on the coffee table.  Ricky wondered if the roots should be cut off.  They had obviously been washed.  We agreed the roots needed to come off.  She did that.  The guys pointed to it, and said it needed to be washed.  It was washed!  we chorused.  But it needs to be washed again!  The pesticides   So he took them out into the kitchen and washed them again.

And so the talk of food continued.  Finally it was 5:00.  Ricky had a dinner date in Nan Da Jie.  We all agreed she should give travel plenty of time, as it was rush hour and the bus ride would take longer.

We said our farewells, and left.

Down in the street, we agreed it was a fun day.  She was glad that we only grazed, as at least she didn't over eat.  The potatoes had filled me up, too.  We never got to taste his exotic dishes, his two kinds of fried rice and three kinds of chicken, but we were satisfied.