Monday's homeschool was a trip round the older streets of Simao. Lesley made a ticklist booklet and Freda and Edie's job, clipboards in hand, was to spot as many wells, adobe houses, temples, and "old things" as they were able. On a diversion to Fuxin Market we ended up having a lesson in food production too! The Chinese are fanatical about their meat being fresh, so in a Chinese market you don't see fillets of fish on ice or neatly packaged polystyrene packages of chicken breasts or drumsticks - far from it! Fish are bought live, as are most chickens.
Once you've bought your chicken, you either carry it home by the ankles to despatch it yourself or take it along to the "chicken slaughtering shop" - there's one at every market. Here, for a small fee, your fowl will be killed (knife to the throat), plucked (boiling water speeds up the process), gutted and returned to you whole in a plastic bag along with offal, proto-eggs and a small bag of watered down and salted blood. The blood is an essential ingredient of the soup which will be prepared...
So a good educational experience for the girls! Actually they're pretty well aware of where their food comes from already. Only last weekend, on a visit to Lao Yang's grandad in the countryside, Freda had to hold the chicken's wings while its throat was cut. Then she and Lao Yang got stuck into making the soup. Later she ate honey from honeycombs(still reeking of smoke from the collection process) gathered by grandad from the forest. But that's another story...
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