There was a communist army boot camp outside our window all last week!  All incoming college freshmen across China have to do army training before they start class.  It was entertaining except for when they were shouting at 7:00 am.

 "International Lunch" at my house, Javier made fajitas with beans and mole.  I made sarmale, and of course or chinese friends brought...chinese food.  Really good chinese food. 

 My sarmale!!!! I was so happy to finally be able to semi-easily find most the ingredients I needed for a dish from home!  Well I brought the dill with me because I knew I wouldn't find it here.  The tomato sauce was made from scratch and I had to have the meat hand ground.  Like I said, semi-easily. I couldn't find any sour creme to top them with, and the addition of some smoked pork would have been nice. But I'm not complaining, they tasted like sarmale and they were AWESOME.

It was a good lunch, I really get a kick out of everyone eating sarmale with chopsticks, but it actually worked quite well.  I had them smell my big bag of dill to see if they had any in China, they said no but it did smell smiliar to some ancient chinese medicinal herb.  haha... I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing to them.