Hot Plates and Home

              My Chinese co-fellow Hanxiong and I have begun to really make ourselves at home in the teacher’s dorm at Dazhai. We have our rooms arranged more or less to our liking and everything from previous fellows cleaned and made our own. Importantly, we also got our kitchen set up this weekend and have begun cooking our own food for many of our meals (so far this has meant Hanxiong cooking and me cleaning, but I will nonetheless say “we have begun cooking” with the assumption that that will alter as time goes by).

               For me there were three elements key in making the dorm home. First, the floor is made of (rather unevenly) poured concrete that seems impossible to clean fully, so buying soft puzzle tiles normally used for the floors of children’s play areas was essential to allow me to be comfortable in my living space. Second, internet is now available in our rooms, making Skype and blogging available to me at a speed and convenience that help make the room home. Finally, I hung a tapestry and many posters and pictures that helped me claim the dirty, white walls for my own. All in all, it is a good place to live.

               Buying and cleaning all the bits and pieces necessary for the kitchen also helped make the school as a whole feel more and more like home. When the fourth and final TFC fellow (a third year fellow – someone who decided to stay on past the two year program to try to achieve more) arrived at the school, we were finally able to sort through the closet of things left by past fellows to help furnish our own rooms and, more importantly, our kitchen. There were many things, from a refrigerator to pots and pans to a hot plate all waiting for us. It was less like the picking of gleaming appliances from well-ordered and clean boxes that I had, for some reason, imagined, and more like the dusty, hard work of rehabilitating things left in a drafty shed after a dust storm. Simply put, there was plenty of cleaning to do. Hanxiong and I spent a weekend washing everything and drying it the strong, high-altitude sunlight.

               One of the appliances most in need of our attention was a hot plate left by one of the previous fellows. While originally a fairly good hot plate, it had not been treated well. It looked like it had been used often and perhaps cleaned once or twice by a person unable to use more than 5 or 10 pound of force due to a recent back surgery. Anyway, it was filthy, with a thick layer of dirt and grease obscuring the brand and controls from view. I spent a good half hour scrubbing away at it with soap and hot water from our newly purchased electric kettles. Finally, it was clean. Hanxiong and I decided we should probably buy a new scrub brush after we tossed the one I had just used to clean the hot plate, but it was worth it. It was as good as new. We let it dry in the sun for an hour to make sure any water that got inside it while cleaning it was completely gone, and then we excitedly plugged it in to see what we were working with.

               But it didn’t work. Once we plugged it in and turned it on, the letters “EO” flashed on the small screen accompanied by a consistent, annoying beep. Heat did not accompany any of this, leaving the hot plate cold and lifeless. I assumed it stood for “ERROR,” and that my time spent cleaning it had been spent in vain. We played with it for a good ten minutes to no avail, and making both Hanxiong and I prepare ourselves mentally for spending the money to buy a new hot plate the next day.

               The next day was market day in Dazhai (it happens every five days, bringing dozens of sellers of appliances, vegetables, meat (mostly pork with one or two fish sellers), fruit, clothes, and most anything else you can imagine to the streets of Dazhai), so Hanxiong and I left around 11:00 am to buy needed appliances and food. We came back around 2:00 pm with a new rice cooker (the one left by the previous fellow was literally held together by string), a new hot plate, and a backpack full of a fish a many vegetables (we went out again later to get a huge bag of rice). In the end, we had gotten a good deal on a relatively good hot plate and rice cooker, and we had only spent about USD$65 on them both. We were happy with our purchases and excited to make food for ourselves for the first time. Thus, when we got back, we almost immediately wiped down the new hot plate, plugged it in, and tried it out.

               We were disappointed and confused to yet again see “EO” pop up on the hot plate, presumably meaning that this hot plate too was experiencing an error. I sighed disappointedly and unplugged it. It must be an issue with the electricity, which was probably good in terms of what it meant for the other hot plate but bad for what it meant about us cooking anytime soon. I nonetheless decided to check the instructions booklet that came with the hotplate. I turned to the page explaining the different error codes and found that what it actually said was “E0” (number 0 rather than letter O). Beside the code was an explanation saying that “E0” meant “无锅” or, in English, “No pot.” Hanxiong and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

               We now have two hot plates.

My room more or less how it looks now. You will notice the puzzle tiles on the floor. The room used to be part of a larger room that is now divided into Hanxiong's and my bedrooms and our shared common area/kitchen. The rooms were divided using a thin metal wall that make it so Hanxiong and I can easily shout to each other through the wall asking if the other is hungry or want to play chess. Nice for communication. Bad for privacy.

Hanxiong and I had to get copies of our keys made at the market. Here you can see the very simple key duplication process taking place in front of a woman reading another woman's fortune.

Fresh tomatoes from the market. Cheap (60 cents per kilogram) and delicious!

The excellent first meal that Hanxiong prepared for us: Steamed fish, tomatoes and sugar, and tomato fried egg with rice. I was and continue to be impressed by Hanxiong's cooking. 

Hanxiong posing with his meal.

The sky on a clear, moonless night in Dazhai. Hanxiong, who is from the large city of Tsingdao in Shandong Province, was absolutely amazed by the number of stars in the sky. It was beautiful.

I left the shutter open around ten minutes for this shot of the stars over the surrounding mountains.