Dinner Ettiquette

Several students come to visit us on Sunday nights since we arrived late August. We thought we'd do something special for them for Christmas. We decided to have them come to a spaghetti dinner with Elwin and me as servers.

First, Elwin showed them a PowerPoint show on table manners while Shirley finished up cooking. We then invited each of them to the dining room for the dinner. The dining room is a 9' X 12' room with a table and 4 chairs. We brought in an additional three chairs to accommodate all of them. They all sat crowded around the table, and we busied ourselves explaining how to eat spaghetti and the other items. We also politely pointed out etiquette "errors" for them to correct.

Oddly, none of these students are "ours", or, rather, none of them are students we have in classes that we teach. Four of the students were associated with the Leavitts who were in this apartment prior to us. One of the new students came with one of the original four that night. Another two we picked up are younger students; one is a young man who went to pick us up the night we arrived in Jinan, and the other is preparing to go to Australia and is the son of a lady doctor who has been helpful to us on occasion.

We all had a good time enjoying serving and being served. Of course, the Chinese students were kind of uncomfortable for a while as they kept on saying to us: you sit down and we'll serve you.