After lunch, we drove to a culinary school, which is a vocational school/college. Once inside the building, we were brought into a small room in order to participate in a tea ceremony.
The ceremony was held by female students at the school while their teacher supervised. There were two main girls that conducted the ceremony while other students passed out cups and poured the tea. In the photo below, the girl on the left read, in English, a brief history on tea and what types of tea we would be sampling. We tried four types of tea. While her English was articulated and loud, she sounded robotic, even when she was not reading off of the paper. The girl on the right would prepare the tea, pour the tea, et cetera. She was very elegant and graceful in her moves. It was as if she was as elegant as a beautiful swan. It was inspiring to watch.
After the tea ceremony, our delegation was split into two groups to go to the kitchens and prepare different dishes. In the group I went to, we made roses out of dough. We were first under the impression that they were edible; however, they were not. You could either make yellow or red roses. Now that I think of it, I find it interesting because red and yellow are both auspicious colors in Chinese culture.
The roses were actually difficult to make. I am not physically artistic and crafting a rose from modeling dough was frustrating. First we had small blocks of dough that we had to roll out into flat, round pieces. Of course, I was the one unfortunate enough to pick out the driest blocks of dough, and had to start over with new dough. But once I had dough pieces with enough water, the process was much easier.
After rolling out the dough pieces, you had to pick one and roll it into the center of the rose. Then, you had to place other flattened pieces around the rolled ones, expanding it until it looked like the flower part of a rose.
When the rose flower was as thick as you wanted it, you would add a leaf to it. The leaf was rolled out flat like the other flower pieces. You would use a toothpick to make the indentions to look like a leaf. Then, when complete, you would stick the toothpick into the rose and voila! Rose is complete.
Our two groups then switched rooms. The next activity we had was to make dumplings! ....pork dumplings.... As a vegetarian, I decided to watch as the other delegates made dumplings from scratch. While watching the other delegates make the dumplings, I spoke with Phoebe. Turns out she is also a vegetarian!
While in the dumpling room, I was shocked to discover that there were two Chinese boys, approximately my age, goofing off. They would playfully slap each other on the back of the head, would argue over who would collect (and who would cook) the dumplings. It was childish and completely unexpected, but it also proved a point: People are people literally everywhere you go. Westerners typically have the assumptions that Asians are studious, hard-working students who make straight-As and never enjoy themselves. But that's not true! Stereotypes are just stereotypes. People of any culture can stand outside their stereotype. That's what makes us human: we are all different from society's expectation.
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