I decided I'd try and post some of my poems on here, since I liked the first line poem thread so much. I would really like some advice on how to improve. Thanks!
Awww....... I hear that Asian mosquitoes bite a hell of a lot harder than ours do. If a guy from Louisiana is saying you have a mosquito problem.......
I'd also like to thank everyone for getting me to over 500 posts in this thread!
Congratulations!!!!! You're welcome!!!!! Thank you for making a thread worthy of having over 500 posts.
The Chinese take eating to be a very special business...or maybe that's just my family. Since my family is so large, if we go out to eat we have to eat in a large room with a round table. We pour into the room and then the greetings start. Piety is huge in China. The younger have to pay the utmost respect to the elder, and each relative has a specific name they must be called. There aren't just aunts and uncles; there are first aunts on the mother's side, husbands of the aunts and wives of the uncles...it took me a while to remember all of them. Then everyone sits down and a few of the adults go downstairs to look at the different foods, children trailing behind in order to take a peek at the varieties. After the food is ordered, theres small talk until the steaming platefuls of meat and vegetables are placed gently on the rotating table-top. No one is allowed to touch the food until the oldest at the table (My grandmother usually) takes the first taste. Then everyone digs in and the formalities stop. I've eaten many odd things in China. Scorpions fried in oil, snake, pig feet, chicken feet, pig liver, pig ear, and more oddities that I probably forgot about. Once I found myself staring into the eyes of the front half of a grinning crocodile.
Awww....... I hear that Asian mosquitoes bite a hell of a lot harder than ours do.
The closer you get to the equator, the worse.
No one is allowed to touch the food until the oldest at the table
That reminds me of when I used to eat with my mom's relatives in Samoa. Always the oldest people eating first. The kids had to scrape by for anything that was left. Yeah, the adults really massacred the dinner table. The roasted pig would disappear especially fast.
I've eaten many odd things in China. Scorpions fried in oil, snake, pig feet, chicken feet, pig liver, pig ear, and more oddities that I probably forgot about. Once I found myself staring into the eyes of the front half of a grinning crocodile.
What'd you have this year?
ON a good note, I took a pill and thus my eyes are a lotless swollen.
That reminds me of when I used to eat with my mom's relatives in Samoa. Always the oldest people eating first. The kids had to scrape by for anything that was left. Yeah, the adults really massacred the dinner table. The roasted pig would disappear especially fast.
Yeah, but they want us to get fat, so that wouldn't work. :b
WTF!?!?!? They have mosquito bite pills now!?!?!?
Allergy pills, since I was allergic and was all swelled up. :b
And reciting poetry in Chinese is fair for you how?
Today I filled two of my yearly traditions. One was a foot massage. Every year since I was 7 or 8 I've gotten a foot massage, since in China they are so much cheaper than in America. We order the cheapest package (90 minutes) and the five or six of us file into a private little room where we await our massagers. For the females it is usually a male massager and the males, it is usually a female. However, this year my dad ordered that a male massage him since he declared the females didn't have enough strength. Last year I was a massaged by a cute young man who couldn't have been older than 18. He had an adorable smile, and he sure knew how to flatter. I knew he was probably only doing it to get a tip, but I decided to enjoy the treatment as best I could anyway. He would remark on every scab I had, a sorrowful look on his face. "Oh, no...how did you get this one?" "Roller blading." I said proudly. He smiled. "That sounds exciting!" He listened to me chatter about my China trip in broken Mandarin and commented softly on the most exciting moments. I really and truly felt like a little princess. This year my treatment wasn't quite as pampered, but I still enjoyed it quite a lot. After all, I only get one once a year.
The second tradition is a trip to Haagen=Dazs in one of the fancier malls in Qingdao. The floors are covered in sleek white marble, and the stores are only the most expensive name brands. Three years ago on one of my yearly trips I somehow decided to annoy the hell out of the employees working at Haagen Dazs. I gave them all American names like Kyle and Steve and jumped around like a crazed monkey, spilling ice cream on the seats. The following year wasn't much better. Tonight, as I walked into the shop, I recognized one of the faces I terrorized. He looked around in his low 30s, Haagen Dazs hat tilted on his head. I knew I looked different from before. I had grown and lost my baby fat, but I still wasn't sure if he would recognize me or not. I shot a few glances at him as furtively as possible, but he still noticed. He walked over, back straight and carrying his maroon tray. I tried to tilt my face away. "Hello." He said jovially. "You've grown." "Er....hello." I squeaked. All my hard won confidence was being squeezed out of me as I thought about my embarassing trail of destruction. "I wasn't sure if you remembered me." "It's hard to forget a Chinese girl who doesn't speak Chinese well." I smarted at the blow. "Hey. I have improved, you know." He must have noticed I looked cross, so he changed his angle. "You really have grown, you know. You look really different." Since I don't blush, my face usually dramatizes the emotions I'm feeling at the time as if to compensate. Then, as if to embarass me some more, he said "You've gotten prettier too." Of course he said it in a polite way, as befitting an employee to a customer. But I dissolved into an insecure fit of giggles anyway, further accentuating my shame. He snorted. "I thought, you being an American and all, that you would be able to take a statement like that better. At least I can tell you have SOME Chinese habits left." He then left and I ate my ice cream in sulking silence while my cousins laughed their heads off.
