My Easter celebration began during my Wednesday night adult English class while I was trying to explain Easter without talking about Christ, virtually impossible. Then my students asked me why we use eggs and why we color them. The research I have done on the subject since then has been rather inconclusive. It is just a bunch of guesses. So I decided against the Easter egg tradition in exchange for something a little more Chinese and therefore a little more exciting.
On Friday night another teacher at my school named Belinda asked if I wanted to come over to her house for dinner with her mother and father and grandmother. We made Easter Jaozi. For those of you who read my Chinese New Year blog, Jaozi are very traditional Chinese dumplings. They are like potstickers, they are made with really thin dough and a variety of meat and vegetable fillings like beef and green pepper or chicken and carrot and then steamed. Belinda’s parents are a bunch of geniuses and used carrot juice, purple cabbage juice and some little green herb (not marijuana) juice to dye the dough orange, purple and green. So we folded the jaozi and they looked like Easter Chinese style. It was far less messy than all of the egg dying I remember and SO tasty. A fabulous Chinese treat. I did NOT however hide the jaozi about the house as I was a guest in the home and could not really imagine making her 96-year-old grandmother scamper around the apartment looking for them.
Saturday morning I went to watch conference at the church. There were about 50 people there despite the fact that it was a rerun. I enjoyed it so much. That evening I tried to go for my yearly Easter mass at the Catholic church here but it was so crowded I couldn’t even get in. I stayed and listened to the priest sing the Mass in Chinese for a while but then I had to go to meet Aunt Ada.
Ada (Grandma Allred’s sister) and Dex (her son, Dad’s cousin) were staying at a very nice hotel right in the middle of Beijing so I went and had dinner with them. They had been to see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and had gone pearl shopping at the pearl market. It was so fun to see family all the way here in China and on Easter no less.
That night we went out bowling and I broke one hundred. I know that claim is rather pathetic to most of you bowlers but…I bowled a 43 a couple of weeks ago. My secret, I just let the ball do the work.
I spent the night at my friend Faye’s house and was able to get to church in 15 MINUTES instead of the standard 2 hour commute to church that I have grown to love and hate. That was my first Easter miracle, then I got two bags of Easter chocolately goodness from a couple of the amazing members of the branch here. Side note: If a person gains nothing else from living abroad other than the chance to see how wards were, in my opinion, meant to function like a close knit loving family then it is all worth it. I have been blown away by how amazing the members of the church are here and how kind and loving they are toward me. So, bags of chocolatey goodness was Easter miracle #2. Conference, as always, was amazing but I was really sad to see Sister Parkin be released. I am sure the next General RSP will be wonderful, but for some reason I really loved Sister Parkin. She just seemed so humble and real to me, like someone whom you could just sit down with at her kitchen table and talk about life and she would be wonderful and understanding and loving and down to earth. More on that later. After church a family from the ward invited the YSA over to Easter Dinner; Easter miracle #3. There was hanging out and general Easter appropriate merriment to be had all day. All in all it was a fabulous Easter weekend and what with three miracles, someone should be sainted.
