After a long day at the park and a few sent off to the hospital. I invited the ones who ended the trek with me over to my apartment and told them I would cook for them. After I said it I did a quick count and realized I just invited 13 people. Oops. They're so little that sometimes you forget how many you're dealing with - and I just wasn't thinking. The plan didn't work out for that night so we decided on Tuesday night. I texted one student to ask how many were coming. She checked and said about 13. Well.... 18 showed up.
I made two big things of spaghetti noodles and 2 cans with another pouch of sauce and put about 1.5 lbs of ground beef in it. (alot of stuff from the foreign foods store). Well, I tried to hurry because they had class at 6:30 and in the process accidentally burnt some of the noddles. Although that didn't matter. Monica, (one of the other team leaders) warned me that they look small but sometimes they just show up and eat like a grown man. I laughed until it was true. I put the food down and went back in the kitchen to get the rest of it. I was talking to one student who said she's smelled this before. In elementary school she had a foreign friend whose mom invited her over to eat with them and she made this stuff too. By the time she had finished these statements all the spaghetti was gone. They were scraping the bowl. (9 grown adult Americans ate about half this amount the two weeks before.) The girl I was talking to didn't get any food (neither did I) but she shared someone else's that they had dished out and were chomping on.
They loved it. They went to town. You can see Yvonne taking a picture of herself (semi-typical of Chinese girls) with the spaghetti. They were impressed and thought it was delicerous, despite the slight burnt taste. I think the spaghetti sauce covered it up.
After the cake they were already late for their evening class (which is just mandatory independent study in their classroom from 6:30-8:30 every night) and with others already out of the class preparing for the culture festival they decided just to skip it and stay here longer. They played a few games, in Chinese, and did a few like dance type things. Not sure what it is, but for a culture that's so into saving face, they like public humiliation for fun a lot (dancing and singing in front of the group as "punishment").
It was a really good time and a lot of fun. They even cleaned up most of the dishes and such. The only bad part was that when they left.... I was still hungry.
