Easter eggs

Easter was a beautiful day in Shanghai. Before the weekend, however, I shared a little bit of Easter tradition with my students. We talked about how Americans celebrate this day, and that led to one activity I just couldn’t pass up: coloring Easter eggs. This required that I first purchase 130 eggs from the market near the school. I bought 40 one day and 90 the next. I think that the people at the market think I’m crazy. The first day, I had a crowd of about 7 people watching me as I counted out the eggs. The second day, the man that I had purchased from before was not there. When I looked around for eggs, one of the girls saw me and said, “Egg” as she pointed to the next store.

I tried to find the lightest colored eggs that they had. The duck eggs were white, but I wanted to stick with what I knew (and most chicken eggs we find are brown here). The first day, I really hit the jackpot: 40 cream-colored eggs.

My next set of students weren’t quite so lucky. I warned them that the eggs I was used to were white and that the brown eggs might not turn out how we expected. But that didn’t keep some of my students from attempting to dye a brown egg purple. One of them came up to me after she had created a sort of brownish-gray egg. “Purple!—Awh?!” she cried, more than a little disappointed. But most of the other colors turned out quite well.

Then, to make sure that all of the people at the market definitely think that I’m crazy, I went back to buy 15 more to make colored eggs for the teachers. When I walked in, all of them just stared and smiled at me. They must think, “Wow, Americans really like eggs.” I know that few if any of them have heard of Easter.

Desiree