It doesn’t matter to me where it is! I love shopping. In India we have variety of ranges for shopping. All things you get here. Everything you need. The best I would like to shop is for my children. The list never ends. I just go crazy as I enter the shops to buy clothes for the kids. They are huge in number and I would love to buy them all. Secondly I like to shop for my kitchen! My paradise. India is the best places for all types of spices. I love to shop in India. Every city has something great for you. North you get clothes, south you get spices etc. etc. You can never stop shopping in India. Each day gives you a new range of all things. From dawn to dusk you can shop in India.
In India we have Winters only in the Northern parts of the Country. Luckily I have spent 15 years in the North. Frankly to say sometimes I enjoy winters, but when it is too cold in the night I really long for the summers, since my husband does not allow me to put on the heater, he is a very warm person. My children ofcourse love winters so obviously my choice is also Winters. Another plus point to Winters is that we have Christmas during Winters and it is time to celebrate. My children get vacation and have a blast. During winters I love to sit in the terrance with my sewing. We organize winter parties also in our colony. We go for picnics. During vacation we do some gardening also in winters.
August 15th – as all of you know is the Independence day of India. I feel great to be an Indian and am very proud of it. Today is also the day when Mary was taken upto Heaven and it is a very big day for Christians. So as said, I have 2 things to rejoice and I called my family and friends over to dinner. I have a busy day, and have lot of things to do. I have to arrange the house, help in cooking and the party starts at 8.00 PM. We have also arranged some games for the kids. I went to church today, attended the Holy mass and feel really filled in today after the Mass. The Joy is over whelming. I met a few friends also in the church. Had a great time walking home after mass.
But despite their poverty, these people are honest, and they are kind. As a foreigner who visited the region, I was welcomed with open arms. Feasts were prepared in my honour – eight kinds of dishes, and a freshly killed chicken to honour their foreign guest. And talking with them, you see that these people have a community spirit, and a care for their children and their children’s children; and you realise that despite their illiteracy and their ignorance, as long as China contains people like these, it is in warm and caring hands.
Anhui is the kind of place that doesn’t get much notice in the West. It lacks the glitz and glamour and cultural gravity that draws people to places like Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong; and nor does it have a population of minorities with which to attract attention, as does Tibet. Instead, it just sits there in inland China, being poor. And while Anhui is poor, northern Anhui is poorer than Southern Anhui, and Huaibei is as far north as you can go while still being in Anhui. They are the forgotten people: peasants and townfolk who work hard every day, and if they are lucky, their village will produce one or two people who go to the local university, and who can then move to a slightly richer part of Anhui, thus moving their family up the social ladder.
Shanghai is an amazing city. Huge, modern, sprawling and dirty. The entire population of Australia is squeezed into this one city, which itself has its own unique culture, distinct from both that of China and the West. Walking along these streets, I can go in an afternoon from America to France, and then into China and Japan, should I so desire. Each district contains its own unique style, it’s own unique architecture, and wherever you go, food and clothing and drinks of all kinds of international flavours are just waiting behind storefronts, ready for you to tastes and to buy. It truly is the Pearl of the Orient.
If I had the skill with words, and the dedication to finish writing a novel, I would be a writer in the same style of the great Chinese writers of the early 20th century. Having read the works of Lu Xun, Ba Jin and Lao She, I became impressed not only with the quality of their prose, but also with the progressive and feminist qualities of their works. I feel that if I could write a novel that harnesses the struggle for equality and social change as well as these writers have done, it would certainly make lasting impressions on Western literature. Whether or not I have the ability to do so remains to be seen, but I feel that the only way for me to find out is to try.
At risk of sounding trite, if someone were to ask me what the most important thing in my life was, I would have to reply, “My education.” It is one of those things that one must have before one understands the value of it. Without an education, I would be ignorant of so many of the things that make me happy today – Chinese opera, philosophical and scientific discussions, literature and art. These things have become such an important part of my life that I cannot think how I could ever live without them, and I try to never let myself forget that it was knowledge, and the education that gave me that knowledge which allows me to appreciate these things.
When I was at high school, studying Chinese, I was very close to my teacher. Whenever she set an essay for us to write, I would always ensure that the contents I wrote were interesting and different from those of my classmates, and was always engaged in class. She, for her part, took an active interest in my education, and taught me to find a love of Chinese language and Chinese culture, which is, in its own way, more important than any of the mere facts she taught me in school. In my last year of high school, for my birthday, she gave me a set of chopsticks, as a way of thanking me for my efforts in studying. To this day, I treasure these chopsticks, as a token of my teacher’s respect and care for me.
Some jiaozi, eaten with chopsticks and dipped in a little soy sauce, is a perfect Super Bowl snack. How many other rednecks have ever told you that? Also, my Super Bowl experience was like being at the game, since we had no commercials. Crowd shots and sideline planning shots. But, unlike being at the actual game, we had no obnoxious fans, no queues at the toilets, no god awful stank, and much better camera angles. Much more recently, when the Panthers lost that playoff game to Arizona, and Delhomme had that horrendous day out there, the old underdog lover in me said, “How ’bout them Cardinals?” But now that life is back to normal…GO PANTHERS!!
