DANIELLE'S 2010 NEW SKILL A MONTH RECAP
january: snowshoeing
february: baking muffins
march: playing cricket
april: yabbying
may: making damper
june: picking and prepping olives
july: desktop publishing with microsoft office...booooo
august: basic accounting
september: sewing up a hole in a shirt
october: cleaning and cooking mussels
november: a few words of the malay language (is that enough to count? hmm)
december: cooking a roast
now that we are into 2011 and i have a slew of new things on my plate, i'm not sure if i'll be able to keep up with the ol skill challenge. just too much new-ness in general!
at the end of next month i am jetting off to kunming, in china's most southwest province of yunnan, to study chinese for a semester at one of the universities. i am so excited to head back to the middle kingdom, pick up my mandarin and at the end of the study period, find a job that is relevant to my skills, my experience and ultimately what i want to do! i am savouring the thought of long walks in the city, ktv nights, scuzzy eateries in alleyways and exploring rich and diverse yunnan. i am also, and most importantly, excited that the boyfriend will join me there so we can actually stay together instead of being torn apart by our differing citizenships! funny how china has become the middle ground for us, a place where our relationship will be safe for a while and give us enough time to sort out future partner visas for wherever we end up settling, whether it is here in australia or back home in canada.
i have decided that as soon as i arrive i want to start a food blog about kunming. it was something i always regretted never doing while i spent my couple of years in hangzhou - after work, most of my nights consisted of dining in carefully chosen restaurants and subsequently raving about them in text messages.
generally the boyfriend was in tow as we ate our way through the city (and surrounding tea villages), trying the lowliest pork and mushroom dumplings to the loftiest banquets of fish, crab and all things succulent (when i say loftiest i mean within the constraints of an ESL teacher's salary - no bird's nest for us!). we ate mouth-numbing hunanese food - bits of chicken surrounded by an ocean of chillis - hotpots served steaming with lots of beer - pork buns for 1 yuan with a Macca's coffee, hot and cheap before Sunday morning classes - skewers of spiced lamb and little grilled fish being fanned by a Uighur outside our local - rice and vegetables packed into bamboo and cooked over flames - whole chicken baked in famous longjing green tea leaves - plus so many other things that made my experience in china so memorable and most of all, delicious!
i will not make the same mistake this time around. there will be restaurant reviews. there will be recipes for the hapless laowai. there will be suggestions of where to find what. just give me time to get my mind around kunming, settle in and figure out what's what.
anyway, back to the rainy day. library, haircut, post office.
