Shirley’s Turkey Hunt

A Belated Happy Thanksgiving to Y'all!

Friday, November 21, Elwin and Shirley set out to find their turkey. Surely, China is so big, with 1.3 billion people, there must be some turkeys around here. Gobble, gobble, gobble!
First, we went to the shop with a giant roaster. “If I get a turkey, will you roast it in your roaster for me?” The man with sleepy eyes said: No, we only roast ducks. (case closed). Gee whiz, don’t they think outside of the box?
Next, we went in to the meat market to find our bird. “Do you have any huo-ji (turkey)?” I asked. The chicken lady said we had to go to the chicken store further down the meat market to get it. Simple, we walked and found the next chicken store. The lady pointed to her baskets full of live chickens. She said she only had live chickens, I needed to go to a different market to find turkey. Now the day is shot. We have to wait until tomorrow, Saturday.

Early Saturday morning, I got up to call a lady down the street to see if she would help me find a turkey. She called all her friends and told me I needed to take Bus #36 to the old East Gate, but to get off at 青龙 桥 Qin Long Qiao to find the open market there.
I took off to continue my quest for a turkey. I found the open market and it was a treasure hunt. I immediately was side-tracked…on the ground of this very narrow street, vendors lined both sides with anything imaginable; kitchen supplies, gloves, mittens, hats, socks, scarves, reading glasses, toys, cell phone decorations, quilted pants, jackets, shirts, vests, sheets, aprons, towels, quilts, comforters…then suddenly, Elwin’s voice came to my head (he’s not with me), “focus, focus”.

The warning brought me back to the real world – I’m in the market looking for a turkey. So, I started asking people: do you know where the meat market is? People pointed to all directions…yes, I’m Chinese, I should be able to follow Chinese directions. It took another 15 minutes of walking through seas of people, I finally came to an area where the meat vendors were located.

“Is there any huo ji (turkey) around here?” I asked. A chicken vendor told me to walk further down the road and I should find my huo ji. Another 10 minutes later, I found a chicken house with over 200 chickens in all different cages stacked on top of each other. A nice lady came out and asked me which chicken I wanted. I said I was looking for a huo ji. She said, “look, these are all huo ji’s”. I looked at her in total shock…my mind was racing. Her huo ji, and everyone’s huo ji here meant “live chicken”. My huo ji (in 3rd tone, instead of 2nd) meant turkey. I cracked up laughing. Now, she looked at me as if I was losing my mind. Then I told her the story. She laughed too…no turkey in Jinan.

This was a turkey hunt that was not going to involve any turkeys. After I explained this to my art teacher, with concentrated effort to differentiate 2nd and 3rd tone “huo ji”, she finally understood and thought that was pretty funny. She then told me I should go down to the next town called “Hongye Gu” and should find wild turkeys there. When I presented this to Elwin, he said: “we are not going to Hongye Gu, they may be talking about a peacock”. So, we’ll wait until we go to Beijing next week and see if we could find some turkey dinner there.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A special note: We were invited by President and Sister Lewis to their house Sunday for a delicious Thanksgiving Dinner. Yes, we had our turkey...after many long hunts.

Having dinner at the Lewis'