Student Canteen... Yum or Yuck?

Date: January 7, 2015

Mood: Accomplished

Weather: Overcast and Cool

Listening to: O sole mio by Andre Rieu

Reading: How to Be A Husband by Tim Dowling

I decided today was going to be a good day. Can't stay upset about things, so only way to go is ahead to bigger and better things. Or at least ahead to a new day full of opportunity. It was a good choice.

Today being Wednesday I had no classes to teach at the school, my day off for this semester at least. Which means that Wednesday is my big, hard and heavy school day with the monkeygirls. They, of course, do school the rest of the week, but with as much free time as I have on Wednesday is makes it really easy to tackle a lot with them and to upload any files they need sent back to their teachers. For instance, today I spent several hours side by side with my 6^th grader overseeing her work in Language Arts (poetry) and Science (intro to Chemistry and The Periodic Table of Elements... ugh). It was all stuff she was able to do on her own, but she likes me to sit with her and double check her work.

Little bit, my 3^rd grader, is working on finishing up a book she is reading for her Language Arts class. She doesn't do book reports, per say, but she has to write a short synopsis of the books and then give her opinions and recommendation (or not). It's a good thing she is turning out to be a bookworm like her mama and big sister. And it's fun for me cause I get to read along with her. Sometimes she reads a few pages and then I read a few pages; sometimes she just reads it aloud herself. Either way though I get to enjoy the stories along with her, and that's a-okay with me.

Due to the regional administrators meeting that has been taking place here on campus this week (Finally found out that's why all the extra people are here.) our usual teacher's canteen is still closed for us on site staff. So, once again we were relegated to eat lunch in the student's canteen if we didn't want to cook at home. I usually really enjoy the lunches we get at the teacher's canteen, and look forward to the opportunity to not have to cook. After skipping lunch yesterday because of the relocation, I decided today I was just going to suck it up.

First though we had to decide where exactly we were going to eat as the student's have two canteen levels they can eat on- both offering a different variety of options. What was being offered on the first floor didn't initially look that appealing, but after a quick and careful consideration of the second floor menu I quickly voted to head back downstairs. I ended up having choy sum, tofu, and some kind of carrot/celery pork mix with rice. It was actually pretty good. They also had a red bean and coconut milk blended drink thing we got to try. I'm ordinarily not a red bean fan despite its popularity around these parts. Yet, while it isn't something I'd want to drink every day, I really found this combination to be quite delicious. 

(Back to the upstairs canteen for just a sec.. I can't tell you what our selections upstairs were because I honestly haven't the vaguest idea. Usually I can make a fairly well educated guess at what it is even if I don't know for sure. However, whatever they were serving up there today was indescribable, and NOT in a good way. haha Our, local China born, department boss decided she was going to eat on the 2^nd floor today, and rumor has it she ended up not eating most of her food due to the awful quality. That's gotta say something if the local teacher was disgusted by it. Right?! haha Makes me feel bad for the students who eat on that floor [yuck] and even more grateful for our regular teacher canteen- occasional lurking rat and all!)