Lunch and English Corner

I had lunch with a student today. It is the first of hopefully many times to the student cafeteria to eat, talk, and get to know the students outside of class. We talked about the getting to know you stuff about hometown foods, favorite sports teams, and the weather.

The talk turned interesting when we learned some of the Chinese traditions when it comes to food as gifts/superstition. Turns out that pig's feet are customarily given to new mothers when they are recovering with their baby. Somehow the pig's feet have good nutrition or maybe just some superstition. The mother doesn't get all the feet, because as we know the pig has four feet, so maybe we give the mother two and keep the other two for ourselves. Pig's feet are just too delicious to give them all away.

English corner is always fun to go and get the random conversations about anything. The topics today began on the Harbin Winter sports games for all university students worldwide (read China-wide, or maybe even Province-wide). We quickly ran out of a winter sports talk so we moved on to building a snow cave to survive, to backpacking, to preparing for bears, to hobbies, to student schedules, to pets, to food (snake is good, dog is bad), and then to my favorite topic model airplanes or more specifically model helicopters. He could talk for hours about this. And I even got to watch some videos of his Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift radio controlled drifting car drifting around his model helicopter. And yes a video of the helicopter flying. Not to mention the video of the student dressed in a suit ice skating. You just never know what you are getting into when you head outside in China.