Food Matters

As much as I’m loving each and every minute of the 6-plus hours I’m teaching every day, it’s a strange life to be indoors all day, walk a few blocks to a restaurant for dinner and back to the hotel room. I’ve always loved the remarkable array of food in previous China trips, but somehow these local restaurants feel uninspired. Mostly white rice with unusual vegetables that I can’t even always identify— perhaps cooked green tomatoes or cucumbers and one that I discover was loofah. Yes, the sponge that you use to bathe in its young version is actually edible. 

 

So it was with great delight that four of us stepped out on the town last night and went to a Thai restaurant in a bustling neighborhood alive with night life and filled with a 4^th-of-July-finale number of diverse restaurants. Often my dinner companions speak Chinese only and I just enjoy their banter and constant explosions of laughter. Confirming my feeling that these are happy people with great senses of humor! But tonight a new student who came today was a drummer from Hong Kong who actually studied for two years at the Berklee School of Music in Boston and along with my friend/translator Li, 3 out of the 4 of us could talk in English. I have to confess it was a welcome change. 

 

And the food! One bite of papaya salad and I was in heaven! On it went with shrimp cakes, Tom Yum soup, Pad Thai and other familiar and welcome tasty dishes. In some ways, I’m not that fussy about food and am grateful to take what is offered, but it indeed makes a difference when it tickles both the palette and satisfies the stomach. It is one of the minuses of travel to be constantly at the mercy of whatever happens to be available and one of the great reunions when I come home and am the master of my kitchen yet again. 

 

As predicted at the end of the last post, the “final exam” performances of the four groups arranging a traditional folk song using everything they already knew and everything they’ve learned in four days was simply spectacular. Each group got A+++ without exception! And an added bonus which I wouldn’t have been able to discern for myself is that the four pieces represented distinct Provinces and musical styles. Like just about every place—Italy, Spain, Ghana, Brazil, the United States, come immediately to mind— the fiction of one unified country that is homogenous flies in the face of history, ethnic groups, languages and dialects, cuisines, dress, musical styles, weather, watersheds, bioregions. Extraordinary diversity is the norm, despite an official language, currency and over-riding government. 

 

Today, the last day of this course exploring the many faces of the pentatonic scale in cultures worldwide, will bring us to Uganda, Ghana and the U.S. and we’ll end with a review of the material and reflection of what the course meant to people. Then a welcome one day off before another 3-day Jazz Course with 50 new participants. Although with a predicted 107 heat, my day off may not be the promising welcoming walk-in-the-park day I could use. And this hotel without a pool. So it goes. Maybe we’ll go back to that Thai restaurant!