th

Thanksgiving in China

Well, we have just finished Thanksgiving here in China a few weeks ago. But not Canadian Thanksgiving, U.S.

Thanksgiving! It is action quite funny that Greg and I as Canadians would host American Thanksgiving. The best

part is that we were able to purchase a turkey and even pumpkin pie filling. One of the other teachers from

school came to our home at around noon on Thanksgiving Day and we worked to prepare the meal. This ended

up taking us about five hours. We made stuffing, mashed potatoes, veggies and all the fixings. When dinner

time came there were eight of us, two Canadians, one Chinese and five Americans. It was great! Everyone

raved how good the food was and how much they had missed Western cooking here in China. A good time was

had by all. I must admit that their restaurants here in Nanjing that serve Western food, but it is usually loaded

with Chinese spices. As you can guess the food never tastes quite like it does back home. So even if you can

afford a good steak most times it is laced with the Chinese spices.

Now I will tell you the great things about this journal entry. I am not typing it. I am using voice conversion

software and a microphone to dictate this entry.

If the sentences seem a little stilted this is because I'm trying to pronounce each word clearly for the software to

understand. As the software learns my voice structure overtime I hope that it will become much easier for me to

dictate. I am probably the worst typist in the world. Even though my specialty is computers I never learned the

proper way to type on a keyboard. When I was in grade school only the girls who took a secretarial course

learned how to type. It was below the status of most other students to learn typing. Today it’s called keyboard

skills and everyone takes it. My archaic method of typing is called the hunt and peck method, or seek and ye

shall find. I think I'm getting a cold. I just sneezed and the computer thought I said " going home on Saturday ".

What a joke! The only keys I use are " back space " and " delete ". It even will do the punctuation for me.

I guess this means that from now on I have no excuse to update My Journal on a more regular basis. My excuse

before has always been my poor typing skills. As Dad would say " you have no more excuses ". From what I

can see this program is actually learning every time I say a word or correct a word on the screen it adds that

word to the dictionary and does not make that same mistake again.

My Journals

China Pictures