Judy invited a few of her colleagues from school to share Christmas dinner with us on the evening of Christmas day. She had been planning to cook a turkey but our little oven just wasn’t big enough, so we ordered a freshly cooked one from The Wicker Basket, a local shop/restaurant/bakery which supplies roast turkeys for American Thanksgiving as well as for Christmas. We collected it piping hot while the vegetables, stuffing, etc. were cooking at home or in the kitchen of a flat two floors above us which a friendly Dutch couple had kindly made available.Judy’s home-made Christmas pudding, complete with flaming brandy and silver threepenny piece, was declared by one guest to be the best she had ever had (Peter is writing this bit!). The home-made mincemeat was also a great success. We took some mince pies along to the staff Christmas meal on Christmas Eve, thinking that the Chinese members of staff would be unlikely to eat this strange British invention. Wrong! The pies disappeared almost immediately.
Most of the CDs and videos in the shops here are what we would call pirate copies, so Peter had tried to download a legal copy of a "Carols from King’s" album from Amazon, only to get a message that their terms of use did not allow downloads outside the UK. No wonder the pirates flourish! However, our daughter Philippa kindly downloaded and emailed no less than 25 of the carols for us, so we and our guests have been enjoying them.
Chinese DVDs are full of surprises. We recently tried to watch a British film whose cover was printed in English but whose soundtrack turned out to be in . . . . .. Spanish!! And the cover for "Let there be Blood" describes it as "A biright (sic) and breezy romantic comedy"!!
We have now discovered that we can listen to BBC Radio 4 online quite a lot of the time. We are 8 hours ahead of UK time, so it’s a bit strange waking up to the midnight news and listening to "Sailing By" at the beginning of the working day. Peter thought he would be able to enjoy listening to Test Match Special, but was thwarted by another "Only available in UK" message. Surely many ex-pat Brits would love to listen to TMS far from home? On the bright side, we have become regular Archers fans (Peter heard the very first episode as a boy!).
We plan to spend the first few days of the New Year (Western New Year, not Chinese) in Xishuangbanna. It’s in the same province as Kunming but further south and lower down so we are expecting to enjoy warmer weather there. Unpack those T-shirts and sandals again! Not that the weather here has been that cold. No snow or frost in Kunming, unlike much of China which is literally freezing now. However, we’ll probably experience proper winter weather during our Chinese New Year visit to UK next month. (The Year of the Ox starts on January 26th.)
The turkey is nearly all gone now. The traditional Boxing Day turkey sandwiches and turkey blanquette took care of that.
This will be our last blog entry for 2008. We wish you all the best in 2009.
