Lunch with the Dragon Ladies

Doncrest Dragon

The Doncrest Public School mascot is a dragon...and today I met up with several mums from the school who happen to be Chinese.  I have decided to nickname them the Dragon Ladies.

We all met up at the library. Sue, one of the mums, had kindly given me a lift to school, she has been a parent helper at the school since her eldest child started there 9 years ago.. for this I salute her tenacity and as Ali G would say, Respect, respect man.

Anyhow, today was pizza day at school and I have volunteered to help out. The kids get a pizza option every fortnight at school for lunch and the School Council (PTA) for the likes of you and me, organise this sale. They get an individually packed slice, a packet of chips (crisps) and a box of juice, all for the bargain price of CAD 4.50, which is daylight robbery if you asked me, but nobody did, so I shall shut up! This does mean that the council does make a profit and all profits go back to the school buying equipment and other things.

What we have to do is set out the baskets for each class, they are the size of laundry baskets, put in the required number of juice and crisps in each basket. There are about 330 orders. The pizza arrives all ready packed for each class, they get a choice of pepperoni or just cheese, we place the huge pizza bags on the baskets and take them to the classes. We only deliver to the junior kindergarten, senior kindergarten, Grades 1 and 2 classes. The rest get collected by the class pizza monitors.  Not a difficult task but because there are over 300 orders, it needs about 3 people to sort out the baskets.

From Jan, 2011, the education board has introduced healthy eating in schools and therefore, pizzas now need to be made with whole wheat bases, and they cannot have pepperoni as they are deemed unhealthy. Crisps will have to done away with as they are not healthy, and so, low fat cheese pizza and juice will be the order of the day. I suggested putting in a piece of fruit for the treat, but this was poo poohed as it will require manpower to pack the apples and also they have a short shelf life. Oh well, I didn't go to the PTA meeting tonight, so I can't complain much about any decisions made.

A knitting and crochet club has been started in the school library.. run by Mrs P with the help of yours truly.  The kids are so keen but we are overwhelmed... teaching complete beginners and there are only 2 of you is neigh on impossible. Fortunately, there is You Tube! There are several videos of knitting tutorials on there, as well as crochet and this can be projected on for the kids to watch and follow, with us giving individual help as necessary.  It's pretty chaotic though, with all these eager little faces wanting to make a Domo lol. I actually brought in some of my finished projects to motivate them.  I did say that it would take some time before they could make these projects but with practice it would be possible.

Back to the title, lunch! Sue, who's like the leader of the dragon ladies said we would be going out for lunch and off we went in 2 cars, to a Vietnamese noodle house. I had the laksa, which was reminiscent of the curry laksa in Malaysia, but a lot lighter. They even had Hainanese Chicken rice on the menu. We had a lovely time chatting. It was a bit chicken and duck. 3 ladies spoke Cantonese and hardly any mandarin, 2 spoke mandarin, all spoke a bit of English, I spoke a bit of Cantonese and even less mandarin. A lot of English was spoken which is good for the ladies as they are living in an English speaking country.  My Cantonese and mandarin is improving as I am trying to speak them more and have asked the ladies to speak back to me in English. Great, huh?

For the first time since I left Malaysia 21 years ago , I have a group of Chinese friends again. I didn't have many in England despite my many years there. I had a few in Trinidad through the Asian Ladies Group which was lovely, but it's even better here. The ladies are keen to learn how to knit and crochet, especially as all their children love Domo, and so, they want to make their kids one.... fantastic!

I got a lift home, and felt very tired, was an early start this morning. The kids came home, I said I was going to have a nap. Dave returned at 4, which is unusual and we napped together, what decadence, we must have needed it as we didn't hear each other snore, which is what usually happens hehehehehe.