Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Gift box

The Chinese love to give gifts. At Dylan's farewell dinner, one of his friends gave us all heavy weight things that looked like huge hat boxes. I opened the thing, but I could not identify its contents.
There were shiny packages, items wrapped up in green straw and things resembling colored rocks.

Bonnie solemnly informed me that the mysterious items inside could all be eaten. The things in the little pink packages are weird little cakes; the things in the straw are composites of rice and red beans; and the rock like objects were duck's eggs. I sampled one of these oval shaped treats and decided to forgo the pleasure a second time. Ditto for the little brown cakes. I decided to regift this lovely package to the downstairs staff. The attendant nodded briefly when I gave it to them.

When I came back after supper, the desk clerk tried to give the box back to me. These folks can only say "Hello" and "Thank you" in English, and my Chinese is also quite limited, so it took me awhile to persuade these nice ladies that they were being treated to duck eggs.
Once they figured it out, they were delighted. Bu Xie. (Literally-- no need to thank)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Haha!!! That was great.

What does tomorrow mean? It is 5:30 pm here, but at home it’s 5:00 in the morning. I leave Weihai tomorrow and make a stop in Beijing. ...