Lemon Meringue Pie, and its eventual cost

I just have to smile at my husband.

He is the one doing the shopping (an excuse for getting out of the house) whereas I prefer staying in my cave.

What gives me the giggles is that without penny-turning-me being around when he goes shopping, every time he comes back from buying groceries / vegetables / drinks, he comes back with some gizmo for the kitchen.

Today he went out to get potatoes and carrots, came back with those PLUS an electronic scale for it "will help him bake better banana breads". Just opened a cupboard now and found an electric mixer he bought two weeks ago. When I asked him about it, he told me it is so he can bake more fluffy cakes. Go figure.

Add to this the fact that winter is approaching and I wanna get back into making meat pies and also with us having been back here for almost a year the BIG desire is rearing its ugly head again: BOEREWORS. What is more South African than Boerewors? As we obviously can not find pies nor boerewors here (nor Mrs Balls) we have to make them ourselves. This all means that as soon as we get back from India we will have to invest in even MORE machines ....

Won't Mau be happy to go out and buy those ;-))).

Buying more gadgets means that our kitchen is definitely getting too small, meaning we will have to move - soon.

Won't Mau be happy, again!!!

Teaching Addy to fish and subsequent emails ;-))

Last week we had this emergency email from our "oldest" god-kid, 10 year old Addison.

He said that he was off to Hong Kong with his family in a few days and that Adam, his dad, had organized a trip on a fishing boat for them because he (Addy) wants to learn to fish. However, he has never fished before and nor has Dad, so the gist of it was "could you please come and teach me how to fish before I go?".

Of course, yesterday on our off day, we went to the A-Family so I could teach Addy how to fish. These are the photos as taken by Mau.

At first we were treated to what Anna, Addy and Anson's mom, believes is a South African meal ;-)). Pasta and home-cooked tomato sauce (as taught to her by Mauro), pizzas from Pizza Hut and hard to find, expensive lamb chops (prepared as taught to her by me when they visited us in South Africa) . 

Then we got down to the serious stuff. The 1st thing was to teach Addy how to set up his rod, align the eyes, thread the gut and then also how to tie loops for adding sinkers and hooks. This we did in the comfort of an air-conditioned apartment.

After this we went outside (and I forgot to put on my slops so for the next 2 hours the very, very hot bricks underfoot had me dancing around). First thing was to show him how to release the reel and then how to cast without getting a crow's nest ... note how attentive he is. What an inquisitive, quick mind he has.

He thought I was the superstar for being able to cast the line (weighed down with a nail clipper for he did not have sinkers yet, but did buy some today, as you will see below).

Within ten minutes his young mind had it sussed, he had the rod in his hands and he was casting his own line into the gold fish pond outside their apartment ... and enjoying every second of it. For the next one hour and 50 minutes, with me hopping and dancing around in the background, sweat pouring off the both of us, he cast and cast and cast and cast and .....  !!!!!!.

Finally we got back to the aircon! Mom Anna had cold, refreshing and sweet as only in China watermelon and dragon fruit set out to beat back the terrible heat. Then the boys got onto Google Earth and flew around the planet in seconds, visiting Hong Kong, New York, London, South Africa and Varanasi in India where we are going in 5 weeks.

Upon us leaving, I left instructions with him and dad to go and buy stronger gut, heavier sinkers and bigger hooks with a barb today.

Subsequent to the last paragraph, these are the emails we have had from Addy today. These should give you an insight to it all. (Do take note that Addy has this thing of using "me" for "I" ... something fashionable amongst his peers at the moment so for now we are accepting and playing to it).

From Addy:

I bought gut, a hook and a sinker today but….. Me don’t know how to change it. Do u un rap all the gut and get a new one on there or what me don’t know!!! Ahhhhhhh!!!

Addison

From Mau to Addy:

 Hi Addy!

Me spoke to Uncle Jay and him is typing this answer for you ... over to he. Him is speaking now!

1.Take all the old gut off the reel. Throw it away. Now your reel is empty.
2. Take the end of the new gut on the spool and tie it very tightly around your empty reel.
3. Ask your dad to put a chopstick through the hole in the spool and hold the spool for you ... but he must hold the spool TIGHT so there is no loose gut (you wanna get the gut as tightly as possible onto your reel otherwise you will have the problem we had yesterday with gut going into the bottom of your reel).
4. You now reel the gut TIGHTLY onto your empty reel ... your dad holds the spool on the chopstick tight and you hold the gut as tightly as possible with your finger when reeling it on . MAKE SURE IT IS TIGHT ;-)))))

Then you go get on that boat and you go catch your fish and you BBQ it .... and remember NOT to say "Yuck" at anything - not at blood, not at snotty fish, not at killing the fish. Be a brave boy and just say "Yuck" inside your head!!!

Love
Uncle Jay

Hi Uncle Jay,

I have got the new gut on the reel!!>  YEAY!!!!

Ok me won’t say YUCK.

Love

Addison

P.S. is 4 one KG sinker enough??

From me to him

Hi My Boy

Me is very proud of you for getting the gut onto the reel. You are SUPER!!

Now, surely you do not mean that your sinkers are 1kg each??? One kilogram is 1 000 grams. A kilogram is about as heavy as  your computer / 4 of your shoes /  5 pizzas. Maybe you meant 100 grams (1/10th of a kilogram)?

You will not be able to cast 1 kg, my boy, and I have never heard of a 1kg sinker before  ......also, me thinks 1kg will break your rod into 25 (or maybe 35)  pieces ......  but if it REALLY is one kg, just drop it into the water ...  hold on tight so you do not fall into the water too ..... and use one only at a time ;-))))).

Have fun, empty the sea, BBQ them all and take loads of photos and email them to us.

Love

Uncle Jay

Ten minutes ago from him to me:

Hi Uncle Jay,

I don’t know it says it is 20 lb so....

yea

Love,

Addison

and my response to him:

Aaaaaahhhh, now I understand, young man.

That means the gut can hold a fish of 20 pounds (not kilograms) without breaking.  Twenty pounds is about 9 kilograms, meaning about 9 of your computers or about 1/5th of you.

If the fish is heavier than 9 computers, the line MAY break and it may swim away with your lovely food.

A 9kg fish will feed all of you: mom, dad, you and Anson and will still have enough left for little fatty Anson AND big fatty Uncle Jay to eat for 4 more more days, so that might be quite a good fish

I think the gut you now have is strong enough ... unless you catch a shark or a whale!!

Love you lots

Uncle Jay

Supplies or Surprise; Fun or Fan?

Fun, funny and interesting are words that always confuse our Chinese students - and did I have a good laugh today when trying to explain these three concepts!

Why the confusion?

Quite simple. In Chinese they have only one word for our two separate ideas of "Interesting" and "Fun" (youquu de). Their closest translation for our "fun" is "to play with an open heart (to play nicely)" - a sweet idea but  not exactly what we mean with "fun", is it?

An example of a common error, demonstrating this confusion, is for them to say that playing football or computer games is interesting (because they do not get the concept of fun).

The way we explain our concepts of fun vs interesting in a way that they will understand is to say that interesting comes from the brain. It is also mostly a once off experience. For example, I read an interesting book and I learnt something I did not know before. Next time I read the same book it is  not as interesting as I already KNOW this. John tells me an interesting story (from which I gain new knowledge or insight) but if he tells me the same story 5 days in a row it is no longer interesting. In fact, it becomes boring.Thus "interesting" is also the opposite of" boring" (boring is a word they understand, so this always helps).

Fun, on the other hand, is from the heart and happens again and again and again - the reason we do it so many times is exactly because it is fun (play football, kiss, play computer games ...).  We do explain that the two concepts can overlap, but normally only for the first time.

"Funny" we simply explain as humorous, for humorous is a word they understand and know because it is longer than "funny" and when they use their little electronic dictionaries, they always choose the longest and most difficult option to use. Humorous it is then, not funny.

So, now having explained this all to you, let me get to my own "humorous" story from class today.

As a lead up to the explanation above, I asked my rather advanced students if they know what the word "fun" means. One lady piped up, saying that she knows. I asked her to explain.

Her answer: "You are a superstar, so I am your fun" .......

I fell off my chair laughing.

Obviously she meant "fan" but the double-entendre simply got to me in that unguarded moment.

My next lesson is going to be on the importance of vowel recognition ;-)))

Turning 50!!

How did I get from that to this in such a short time? Been a hell of a ride thus far but if she knew what I know now, she'd also try and make the most of this very, very short time we have here.

The biggest gift she may receive is the one I received years ago from Mauro: true love. And that really is all we can wish each other on our respective journeys, isn't it?

(Taken after she bumped me old sunglasses all askew ... but if she likes it, I like it ;-))   )

Open letter to the small town of Steynsburg, South Africa: Why back to China?

Many of our friends have asked us why we decided to return to China ... I am sure many less intimate friends have silently wondered the same question from the sidelines.

Well, basically, since shortly after shaking off the euphoria of seeing Africa's beautiful blue skies; breathing her sweet air; again being awed by her billions of stars at night; re-acquainting ourselves with her motherly smells and comforting sounds and for the first time in a long time again feeling part of a culture we know and understand we started discovering that our feelings were mostly not reciprocated - from neither friends nor, sadly, from our closest family. Superficially everything was OK, but deep down there was sooo much animosity that even we, in our euphoria, could not pretend to the opposite for more than 6 months.

Somehow a gap had developed and somehow the bridges seemed to have collapsed beyond understanding and repair during the 5 preceding years that we were away. Somehow we seemed to have changed (grown?), somehow most people we knew before seemed to have remained where we left them when we got on that first plane out of SA. 

For the 1st 4 months or so we were ensconced in our idyllic home, on the outskirts of town, isolated from the inherent, in-bred Ugly around us. The two business promises that convinced us back were broken in this time but still we did not suspect the real motives. When we devised a new plan to make a living, with the sole aim of doing good and helping out the poor of our community where we decided to make our home, we were happy and, thinking well of ourselves, we went into this with gusto, especially after numerous locals stopped us on the street and promised support.

The whole situation changed the moment we emerged from our little house on the outskirts of town and actually started doing what we spoke to locals about for the preceding 4 months.

Suddenly we were people from outside, suddenly we were (said to us to our faces) "the Sinners on whom God shall have no mercy and whose business we will not support". Suddenly we were people who were trying to close down older, more established businesses whilst we were really just trying to ask a fairer price for our products, thus helping the many poor people in town. Suddenly and out of the blue a best friend and business neighbour, in his drunkenness,  started shouting horrible, below the belt abuse at people entering our new business at night  ....

We were robbed and broken in to more than once a year, we were told to "Go back to Europe where shit like you belong" ... Our animals were harassed when we were not at home and people would drive by in the middle of the night shining their lights into our bedroom and waking us with their hooters. During the day,  people we know would walk and drive past us, or stand in front of one of us in queue and and when we greeted them would not even acknowledge our existence.

In the end we could come to no other conclusion than that the source of the revulsion the community felt for us, living quietly on the outskirts of town and doing nothing but an attempted good in a poor town, was the fact of our sexual orientation.

We did not want to believe that in a country like SA, with a most liberal constitution guaranteeing our status as a same-sex couple, people could behave like this.

The evidence, however, proved us wrong.

That is why we returned to China. She is a so-called communist state with all that might entail in the minds of the unenlightened, brainwashed and paranoid, but she is a place of true freedom where we live safely, happily and above all openly as a loving, single-sex couple, where people accept us for who and what we are and judge us only on what we bring to the betterment of the local community.

One thing I have to add, and there with admit my own skewed preconceptions, is that the one group of people in Steynsburg who accepted us fully, showed us true friendship, opened their homes to us and supported us all the way were the ultra-conservative farmers. To you guys, thank you. You have taught me a lot about taking off one's own blinkers!

An absolute disgrace the world should know about!!! If this carries on our South African kids will become mere silhouettes and eventually simply be mirages floating around in a world that has left them behind  ......

This parent, like millions of other parents in my country of birth,  will walk miles daily  taking her little one to and from school. The callous government she voted for in her uneducated bliss however, treats her and the millions of other uneducated, poor like her with utter corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, CORRUPT contempt.

Shame on you my government. Shame on you!!  Shame on you my fellow South Africans for allowing this. I am terribly ashamed and angered way down to my deepest soul, as you all should be!

You have done soooo much damage and I am not sure if it can ever be repaired.

Madiba must be crying, as am I. If only that Man could have been our leader for 20 years and not for only 5 .....

www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/Politics/Edcuation-dept-denies...

www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/More-dumped-textbooks-fou...

www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Textbook-dumping-Official...

www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Mandela-bio-among-shredde...

I think that, after years in the wilderness, I might be able to access this again. Let's see.