A Chinese Dinner

This weekend we were invited to a Chinese friend's house for dinner. This is a very rare invitation because the majority of the Chinese do not invite other's into their homes, rather they invite them to restaurants. There are many reasons why this is so, but the main one is that they do not want to lose face or feel ashamed of their home. We were excited to go to a "local's" home for the first time and experience a real Chinese meal.



The kids had a wonderful time playing with their daughter Vicky, who is 9. She is very quiet and does not speak a lot of English, but you can see it in her eyes that she understands. I've said this before, but children, regardless of where they are from, have the ability to find a common language! It is amazing to witness this first hand! According to Vicky's parents, she had been looking forward to us coming to dinner for over a week. Since she does not have any siblings, her only playmates are her grandparents outside of school.


Our friends absolutely adore our boys! From the minute we walked into the door, they doted on them - they want chocolate before dinner, no problem, a little yogurt, yum, some yogurt candy, perfect, a little soda, that's fine too. They then could not figure out why on earth our boys did not want to eat dinner!!

The meal itself was over the top...I felt like we ate for 3 hours straight. We arrived and had some tea and chips. Then we went to the table and were served 3 different kinds of chicken on bones, pidan (I call them stinky eggs!) with tofu, garden salad, and potato salad with ham. The whole time we toasted throughout the meal, I switched to Coke after one glass of wine, I really wanted to be able to walk when we were finished!! Next course comprised of noodles, sauce (made of beans - really yummy), shredded cucumbers and soy beans. They also served some eggs with tomato, which I couldn't fathom putting anymore food in my belly at that time. Next they brought out huge, baseball sized meatballs with sauce and rice. Then they served a lovely soup and finally, at the very end, fruit platters were brought out!


Oops, I forgot, they also served a beautiful cake to the kids right in the middle of dinner!!! Can you see Coop's big eyes? He can't believe someone is allowing him to eat cake before he is through with dinner!!


We ended up with a parting gift of a honey pommelo fruit - simply because we asked what it was! They also tried to give us the toys that Eens and Coop were playing with, but we insisted that we leave them at their house - one was from when their daughter was little.

We were pleasantly stuffed when we finally left and the kids were so tired that they actually slept in the next day!! That doesn't happen very often!