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How do you spend your New Year's Eve?


Catherineli
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Kiss the wine??????

I never tried any wine or alcohol in my life but the year 2014 was special for me. I learned many things to equip myself for American life, not just English. I also learned how to cook American food to prepare myself. But the cooking skill is very much hard to learn in China for lack of some ingredients.

But I did learn to make the grape wine from my downstairs neighbor. I made my wine by putting grapes, sugar in a jar. After showering the grapes, I dried them with wind before I smashed the grapes to pieces. Then I placed the liquid grapes into my big jar. The top of the jar is covered with a cloth held in place by a rubber band or just leaving the lid slightly loose. The wine needs oxygen to ferment. I never put a drop of water into the jar as I’m not Jesus and I can’t turn water into wine. lol

In the end when the wine grows high enough to reach the lid, we call "kiss the wine", meaning to welcome the wine lol,

 

Good to know Larry's mom is doing better now! Thanks to God!

Edited by Catherineli (see edit history)
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Kiss the wine??????

I never tried any wine or alcohol in my life but the year 2014 was special for me. I learned many things to equip myself for American life, not just English. I also learned how to cook American food to prepare myself. But the cooking skill is very much hard to learn in China for lack of some ingredients.

But I did learn to make the grape wine from my downstairs neighbor. I made my wine by putting grapes, sugar in a jar. After showering the grapes, I dried them with wind before I smashed the grapes to pieces. Then I placed the liquid grapes into my big jar. The top of the jar is covered with a cloth held in place by a rubber band or just leaving the lid slightly loose. The wine needs oxygen to ferment. I never put a drop of water into the jar as I’m not Jesus and I can’t turn water into wine. lol

In the end when the wine grows high enough to reach the lid, we call "kiss the wine", meaning to welcome the wine lol,

 

Good to know Larry's mom is doing better now! Thanks to God!

 

 

Something like this

 

gallery_1846_633_60293.jpg

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Yes,exactly like this!! but my jar is much bigger than your bottles. There has to be some space in the bottle for the liquid grapes to be fermented and grow. Otherwise the liquid will explore or expand the bottle to pieces.

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I spent New years eve practicing on the expensive new car I bought my wife. I got a good deal on it, I might add.

 

Here's a video of my driving skills, not to mention the bitchin' new car I bought for my dear wife....she wanted a dumb Mercedes, but clever me, I found something much better.

 

 

 

 

 

What the hell, watch it twice I guess??

Edited by Randy W
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I spent New years eve practicing on the expensive new car I bought my wife. I got a good deal on it, I might add.

 

Here's a video of my driving skills, not to mention the bitchin' new car I bought for my dear wife....she wanted a dumb Mercedes, but clever me, I found something much better.

 

 

 

 

 

What the hell, watch it twice I guess??

:roller:

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Yes,exactly like this!! but my jar is much bigger than your bottles. There has to be some space in the bottle for the liquid grapes to be fermented and grow. Otherwise the liquid will explore or expand the bottle to pieces.

 

 

Tell Larry - he's the real wine maker here. I never figured out where all that liquid came from. Just grapes and sugar. It's a good thing Jiaying knows what she's doing! She watches every year for when the grapes become available.

 

To me, it's an adult, grape-flavored Kool-Aid drink - a very nice beverage. I mix in a little bit of carbonated water when I pour myself a glass.

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No religious practice encourages alcohol drinking! Doug, you really don't have to think too much before you refuse to drink with people around. Your wife may well tell you the same. You just don't have to drink on any drinking occasions even if others are drinking at the same table with you. No one will judge you rude in China. I'm not a social person. But I"m pretty sure there is no problem if you don't drink. Many men's physical problems are from drinking and smoking, I think.

I'm glad I"ve learned one more saying, "grease the palms", meaning to make money under corruption. I'm glad I only grease the pan before I put it into my oven with a dough. lol

Well, but Catherineli, the pressure becomes so strong in a business setting that even my wife tries to get me to drink. Now with friends and family there is never a problem, just like you say.

Generally the younger folks in a biz meeting are also breaking the trend.

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...

Oh, I did something special!! To fulfill school assignment, as a city school child, I had to go to the street on New Year's Day collecting horse droppings, cow pie, or anything, even human turd. In the beginning of March our school started the new semester. We submitted the droppings. Then our school campus was packed with piles of piles "road apples".

See, everyone has special experiences! :happydance:

...

Catherineli, I had to come back to this, as it has been on my mind during the day. This is near a subject I frequently focus on. I mean no disrespect. It is just part of my twisted sense of humor.... ...WHAT WAS THE REASON FOR ALL THIS POO??? My gosh, even human...? :D Was it just to clean the streets of the city full of crap? In that time there were many horses around? No city street cleaner people? The city always smelled of poo? Oh so ripe when it rained? I am fascinated, and just have to know more... :D How old were you?

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LOL, most of your wife are of the similar age with me. Ask your wife about it, you'll know they received the same assignment from their school. I was doing the "poo" job on the street in winter from nine years old until I was thirteen years old. The horse dropping collection is a painful memory for the five years at the elementary school in the 1970s. I guess the job was to meet the government requirement to help farming. Yes, the droppings were a kind of fertilizer. The assignment of collecting the street droppings was very heavy. We had to give our school many many buckets of the turd otherwise we were scolded or punished by the school. I feared my teacher a lot so I always tried hard to do the job.

 

"There were more weird assignments from school for me to recall now. In summer, the young school children had to collect elm tree seeds and iron junks on the streets, such as iron crumbs, screw caps, etc. After we gathered enough of the trash, we submitted it to the school. This duty was also a national request for every elementary school in China. Winter holiday also provided an eerie story. In 2012 when I was standing on a pasture of the United States of America, I thought a lot seeing the horse manure. “How I wish I had these poops in my school time in China!” Back to my school days, there was a duration of five years to complete the elementary system. During each winter vacation we had to go to the streets to pick up animal droppings to fulfill our school assignment. My mom raised two chickens in a coop. I was expecting for their droppings everyday as if waiting for gold to be laid off. The beginning of the new semester was the time for us to submit the ordure to our school. Then we would see many big piles of excrement being on the schoolyard. Horse droppings, cow droppings, chicken droppings, sheep droppings and human waste were all welcome to the school. Animal carts clattered in the city every day freely. So we were required to go to the streets to collect the animal fertilizer. Usually we girls went out together to accompany each other holding our buckets and shovels. We were walking and looking with our eyes fixed on the street without missing any corner. It was not easy to see the horse manure on the street because every school student was doing the same. The student population was much larger than all the horses in the area. Cow flops became very luxury cow-pies for us. Rarely did we have such a good luck. The most thrilling moments were when we caught sight of a pile of horse turds from a distance. We would suddenly kick up heels and ran toward the horse dropping to grab. Whoever fell on the way when running was a happy thing for others because the falling meant one rival was missing in the competition of grabbing the horse manure. We all fell a couple of times on the icy slippery street when rushing to the horse droppings. More often than not the manure was still hot and giving off its vapor from the horse body. There was no waiting or frozen minutes before it was valued up to someone’s basket. Indeed, to search for animal droppings on the street was like digging for gold in California back two centuries ago. The English saying “apples in the eye” means something precious. We did take these turds as the precious apples. So the road apples made a sarcastic story in my elementary recollection."

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Dougie it's all true what Catherin is telling. My wife use to have to do these chores as well. She is a little younger then Catherin but the practice was still in place when she grew up too. Not only that but the farmers around Beijing would come in town late at night and collect the contents of the public toilets to use as ferterlizer. An old country outside toilet of my era never smelled like they do I can tell you that. Here is a PDF file that tells a lot about the toilet situation in China in the past as well as today or at least up to 1998.

 

Even though this is an old article it will give you a good look at how this situation is being handled.

http://www.lijiazhang.com/downloads/files/Flush_with_victory_in_China%27s_toilet_wars.pdf

 

(Besides their practical function, public toilets perform definite social and environmental roles. People take their time
there, gossiping, smoking, reading newspapers. The ‘night soil’ left by patrons used to be shovelled into ‘honey carts’ for
use as fertilizer outside Beijing. Such manual labour finally ceased early this year, when the last public toilet in a poor area
too narrow for sewage trucks was demolished for redevelopment. Yet even the night soil itself is looked on with growing disfavour by farmers increasingly accustomed to chemical substitutes.)

 

When the Olympics were held in Beijing they built 1,000 new toilet including one especially for Hillery Clinton when she visited the Great Wall.. They have since built about 4,000 more. But I understand that many of them have fallen into disrepair or are not maintained properly as the article states. Water is a problem and so is the cost of upkeep.

 

Now, Doug I know that I am certainly not telling you anything as many time as you have been to China. You are certainly an old hand and part Chinese by now perhaps. So most of this is for our new members or even some members that have not even been to China yet.

 

Here is the newest uptake on the situation.

 

http://www.beijingmadeeasy.com/practical-beijing/chinese-toilets

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The 3 things all plumbers must know

 

1. Shit flows downhill

2. Hot is on the left, cold is on the right

3. Payday is on Friday

 

. . . except where hot is on the RIGHT, and cold is on the LEFT

 

They hooked up our plumbing while I was back in Houston.

 

I've even seen faucets where the 'C' stood for Caliente (hot).

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