A food festival, my birthday and meeting Nicola Sturgeon
你好Jordanhill! I hope you’re all doing well. April has been a great month with the Scots taking part in a food festival, having my birthday and of course meeting Nicola sturgeon!
Every year the foreign students can choose to take part in a food festival where each country cooks a traditional food from their own country and sells it to the other students. In the kitchens in the uni we only have a hot plate so it limited our options as to what we could cook. We were up for the challenge though and decided to make stovies, tablet and tattie scones. Each country had two tables and we decorated our table with lots of tartan and mini Scotland flags. We also all wore either tartan or a Scotland flag around us! I tried lots of different foods including Thai curry, crêpes, tacos and paella. I think the countries that did the best were the Italians with their pasta and the French with their crêpes and pancakes (no surprises there). The Scots also did quite well selling out all our food and the general feedback from the other students was good. They were quite confused because most of the foreigners didn’t know the difference between Scottish and English food and hadn’t heard of or seen any of our foods before! We also got to see performances from some of the countries like singing and dancing from the Russians and Koreans. I thoroughly enjoyed the food festival and it was a great way to learn about the other cultures within the uni and meet new people. What’s your favourite Scottish dish?
It was my 19th birthday on the 1st of April, my last year of being a teenager! It was quite strange not doing something with my family this year but it actually turned out to be one of my favourite birthdays. My parents had sent over a card and a package with some chocolate and other sweets from home which I was very excited about. We went out at night and while I was out my roommate Cara filled our room up with loads of balloons and people surprised me when I woke up singing happy birthday. Cara had also bought me some presents including chocolate digestive biscuits which she had ordered in especially! I enjoyed eating those with a cup of Tetley Tea. Although I didn’t spend my birthday with my parents I still really enjoyed being surrounded by my friends and had a fab day.
However, the best part of the month was having the opportunity to meet Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland! We travelled to the British Embassy in Beijing where we gave small presentations to her. We talked about the differences between learning Chinese in Scotland compared to China, student mobility and how we are finding the scholarship in general. She then came round each of our tables to have an informal chat with us and took time to get pictures with each of us individually. Nicola Sturgeon was very friendly and was really interested in our feedback. She now wants to put more money into scholarships like ours so we must’ve given her a good impression! After she left we went for dinner with two of the people who run our scholarship which was delicious. We had big tables with Lazy Susans and lots and lots of traditional Chinese food. The day was an amazing opportunity and it was also great to catch up with our scholarship leaders and tell them all about our experiences so far.
That’s all from me from April, I’ll be writing to you all again very soon to update you on my China adventure! 再见Jordanhill!