Slice of Life - Lunar New Year

 

The Slice of Life Challenge was created by the people over at the blog Two Writing Teachers. The challenge is to write about some part of your day and share it each Tuesday then give feedback to at least three other bloggers.

I'm back. I had forgotten about Slice of Life until I saw someone's post recently and then I remembered how much I enjoyed doing it back in 2015 and 2014. It's been a long time since then. We've moved to a different state and now I work at two schools instead of one. A lot has changed, but a lot is still the same. 

One of the things that has changed is that I am part of a rather unique group of people here in California. We meet weekly for language classes that are taught by volunteers. Many of those teachers are also learning another language and attend one or more classes too. I attend a Korean class and a Spanish class. 

Besides classes, we also have occasional celebrations. This week we had a dumpling making class instead of language instruction. We spent the afternoon making a few hundred dumplings along with other food for our Lunar New Year celebration. 

I was given a lesson in dumpling folding by a friendly professor from China who was in town to visit her son. Another woman who spoke both Chinese and English taught me how to make the vegetarian dumplings that she was making. She had used the water she squeezed out of parboiled spinach instead of using plain water to make the wrappers so they were naturally green. Another person who teaches the Japanese class showed me how to make gyoza nice and crispy when pan frying them. We were making dumplings for many hours, but there was also a lot of conversation in a variety of languages and it was a delightful way to spend an afternoon. We always had between 10-20 people working and the atmosphere was lively and upbeat with Korean music flowing around us. My Korean teacher likes music and is generally the DJ during such events. 

The time spent together making the food was almost more rewarding than the delicious meal we finally got to eat. It was a lot of fun and I am thankful for a community of learners and teachers that share their knowledge, talents, and time with each other. I never imagined there would be so many cooking lessons along with my language classes. I've volunteered in the kitchen many times now and I learn so much and sometimes I get to practice my Korean at the same time.