Actually, that's a lie; I'm about to go nibble on some chocolate. I've been updating the food pages -- as you'll see, I did a lot of eating out during the middle half of the month! Hopefully there's enough there to keep you guys busy for a couple days while I try to think of something new and interesting to write about...

You may have heard that China likes to copy things made elsewhere, perhaps with a little twist. Well, now they've done it -- they've gone and taken Gumby. Honestly, it's a sad, sad state of piracy when you have to knock off a 50-year-old cartoon (I'm sorry, stop-action) character.

...in a family vehicle?

I met up with some friends of a friend a while ago for dinner. We went to an Indian restaurant that seems to be a popular place for birthday/other celebrations -- I would guess because of a buffet + all-you-can-drink-beer special that draws college students, but the Dancing Man can't hurt.

 Frankly, I was less entertained by the food than the entertainment -- about once every (half-hour? hour?) Indian pop music starts blaring from speakers, shutting down conversation, and this guy (in yellow & green, right) gets on his mini-stage and starts dancing and generally having a blast (this was a more sedate moment; usually there's a lot more jumping and shimmying). Customers are encouraged to join in (or in some cases, efforts are made to drag guests of honor, etc., onstage). After about five minutes, it's back to regular dining.

I learned a number of "Indian" dances while watching, including one that looked suspiciously like the Running Man. It also occurred to me that I would probably be willing to take some kind of pay cut in exchange for a job where part of the description was dancing like this (note: pole dancing does not qualify, thanks) multiple times a day. 

One of my language lessons a couple weeks ago covered some basketball vocabulary. I learned the Chinese versions of Jordan, Shaq ("O'Neill" here, or rather Ao-ni-er, which is about as close as you can get in Chinese), the Chicago Bulls, Washington Wizards, and James Naismith (the guy who invented basketball, in case you didn't know). This turned out to be a fairly useful lesson today when I went to the post office to mail a parcel.  (By the way, unlike in the US, where you're supposed to bring everything nice and ready, here they want to see what you're sending, so you can either bring an unsealed box or they'll pack it for you. Not having found a box the size I wanted, I went for the latter option. Anyway, between the packaging and the paperwork, it takes a few minutes, which should explain how there was time for the following.)

Today I got a very friendly postal worker (oh, don't worry, there are disgruntled ones here, too) who, when he saw that my package was going to the US, asked if I was from America. When I said yes, his first question was, "Have you ever seen Yao Ming?" I told him that while I knew who he was, I'd never seen him play, and that I preferred watching college basketball (NBA is huge here, mostly because of Yao Ming, but basketball had made inroads before he signed with the Rockets, too). My Friendly Postal Worker agreed that he had heard US college basketball was also very good, and continued talking about it. Somewhere in the sentence that followed I was thrown by a word that I wasn't familiar with, and it took me a while to realize that he was talking about... Duke (doo-kuh -- as with Qiao-dan and Ao-ni-er, it has a Chinese transliteration, tones and all, so if you're not expecting a proper noun, it can confuse you. My assumption was that it was just unfamiliar vocabulary, but it was the description "very famous" that caused the penny to drop). I couldn't resist telling him that they had just lost a big game.  :)

So there you go, even in China, they know about Duke. Hm, I wonder how they transliterate Krzyzewski (and is anyone impressed that I spelled that correctly without checking?? Well, I am). It did not occur to me to ask whether he was familiar with my Terps, as we had already moved back to NBA discussion.  For the record, Friendly Postal Worker Man also thinks highly of Gilbert Arenas. And I really hope Zhan-mu-si Nai-shi-mi-si never comes up in conversation.

Well, it had to happen. It's been pretty smooth sailing since I've been here, so I was due for a minor calamity. And so it was that in the space of three hours this evening, I managed to (a) lose my cellphone and (b) break the latch on my washer/dryer. Sigh.

I liked my phone. It was little, it had a flash for taking pictures (vital for capturing those friends'-embarassing-moments-in-the-bar shots), it was tri-band (so I could use it in different countries, just swapping out SIM cards), and most importantly, it was durable (the frame has been cracked since I dropped it on a co-worker's granite patio about two years ago, but it worked just fine). And now it's wandering around Shanghai (in a cab, or with someone who found it in said cab) without me. Sigh.

Fortunately, there are only a couple of numbers in it that I won't be able to recover easily -- all of my US numbers are still safe and sound on my old SIM card, and most of the China ones are either on my email or obtainable from family members. Also, most mobile phone use here is prepaid, per-minute usage, not monthly packages, so I don't have to worry about someone running up my bill. But I will continue to miss the phone. I'm pretty sure I can't install "London Calling" as my ringtone from here.  Moreover, there goes my alarm clock. Should the search for either an alarm clock or a shiny new phone merit a posting, y'all will be the first to know.

It's been a while since the last Q & A...I'd apologize, but I blame you lot.  After all, whose questions am I supposed to be answering?  It wouldn't be as much fun if I just made up my own.   But I've been holding out on yakuza for a long time, so here goes.

How long does it take you to run an errand that would take five minutes in the US?
This one comes from a friend who recently (and similarly temporarily) moved to Italy. I gathered that it was taking her a lot longer to get simple things done there, but never got her to give me the reason for it -- language barrier, cultural difference, or something else.  For my part, I'd have to say it depends.  I don't have that many errands to run (no dry cleaning!), but I haven't had any real problems so far.  The toughest thing so far was finding a place to get my film (yes, my "real" camera is still film) developed.  At first I thought it was a language barrier, but on the other hand, I was carrying around a roll of film with me as a visual aid, so how confused could people have been? It turns out that there actually just aren't that many places to develop slide and/or B&W film here.  I did eventually find one, and had no problems getting everything developed and put on DVD. Finding most things is a matter of wandering across them or asking the right people -- I haven't seen a phone book here yet, and probably wouldn't be able to use it if I were to find one anyway!

Some things are more convenient than at home.  Food, for example, is available everywhere -- on the street, in local wet markets and 24-hr stores, in supermarkets, at indoor fruit stands, in the subway (yes, really... apart from the little stalls in the subway stations themselves, I've seen people selling cherries from baskets in the walkway). 

What's the biggest difference, or what have you found surprisingly difficult to accept?  What's odd?
I don't know that I pinpoint anything as really odd per se; Shanghai's not particularly different from a lot of other Asian cities (including ones that I'm familiar with), so things that might strike someone as strange on their first trip to the continent are pretty normal to me. For example, unless you really live entirely in Western-oriented stores and buildings, you carry your own pack of tissues everywhere; they double as toilet paper and napkins, because those aren't provided in a lot of places. It's just how it is, and it's usually logical, just different. MaxiMe was kind of odd, but that's about it.

As far as what's different, there's always the obvious: there are a lot of people here. As in a ridiculous amount, and they all seem to spend the weekends downtown shopping or otherwise clogging up the sidewalks (I walk fast; clogged sidewalks are mildly annoying to me). Something I just started to notice recently -- you know how babies in the US come with a lot of stuff (or seem to)? Not here -- I've seen maybe 5 strollers in over 2 months, and only one or two of those belonged to non-Westerners. However, I've seen a lot of babies being carried on hips, arms, stomachs, backs (and sometimes like potato sacks), bicycles, and motorcycles.

Things like this make me notice as much what we take for granted in the US as anything about life here. Safety laws are another example (can I get a "T-O-R-T!" from the lawyers in the house?) -- I went to the aquarium in Hangzhou. It's on the small side, but kinda nifty in its own right. It took me a couple minutes to notice what felt different: not all of the tanks were insulated from the public (or vice versa). Yup, the glass on some of them stopped about 5 feet above the floor... a good height for a miscreant teenager who wanted to stick his or her hand in to see what the Amazonian "maneating fish" felt like, I thought. I also felt sorry for the turtles in their big open pond, where they were probably touched inappropriately on a daily basis.

The hardest thing for me to get used to, though (and I kinda hope I don't), is probably the smoking in restaurants. I know it's still legal in a lot of the US, and DC bars only went smokefree a year ago, but man, it was a lot easier for this nonsmoker to accept the other way 'round. This is another reason I don't eat out more often; the kinds of places I could afford are almost guaranteed to have someone nearby lighting up. Most places don't designate smoking and non- sections, and those that do aren't particularly stringent (or smart) about it. You might think that China, or at least Beijing and Shanghai, would be looking at New York, London, and Paris for cues of which way the wind is blowing on this topic, but I'm pretty sure there isn't the least bit of debate about it here. And given the amount of tobacconists I pass on my way to class every day, it doesn't look like it's coming anytime soon.

I have a winner. You don't think I'm going to tell you right away, though, do you?

The good news is that the crackers tasted waaaay better than the potato chips. I could definitely see buying (and eating!) these again.  Phew.  I don't know if there's really any bad news, so I'll just move into the reviewing. For those who don't want the details, just the verdict: I didn't have a singular favorite. They're all reasonably edible, though I probably won't buy Shrimp Salad again. You'll have to scroll to the end for more info.

There were a lot of crackers here, so sampling took place in spurts. I ended up getting Black Pepper as well as the Ma La Tang since it got multiple votes, and I figured it was pretty innocuous, so in all I had eight flavors to get through. The leftovers should take care of any salt cravings I may have for the next, oh, two months.

To set the stage, the crackers are basically a half-size, wheatier version of a Ritz cracker -- crunchier and less buttery (and obviously more flavorful), but not being as familiar as I used to be with the cracker aisle, that's the best comparison I can think of at the moment.

Anyway, the nitty gritty: I was pretty intrigued to see what kind of differences could be manufactured between Tomato, Cherry Tomato, and Pizza flavors, so that's where I started. As it turns out, they're quite distinct.

Tomato -- Pretty mild, in both taste and smell. Salty, but not excessively so. I couldn't truly discern any particular "tomato-y" flavor; if the bag hadn't been labelled as such, I probably would have guessed it was some blend of generic western-spices -- garlic, onion, etc. Remember those veggie crackers (Vegetable Thins, maybe? I don't remember) that came out in the 1980s? That's kinda like what these taste like.

Cherry Tomato -- At first, I thought these just tasted like ketchup.   But then I noticed that the sweet flavor (as I would expect from a cherry tomato) was very familiar, even nostalgic. It took me a minute or so (and another 4 crackers) to place it, but I did: they taste like Campbell's tomato soup, which my dad used to serve me with Ritz crackers or saltines on winter weekends when I was little, which made the flavor on a cracker that much more entertaining to me. They even smell like the Campbell's.   

Pizza -- The pizza flavor was definitely stronger than the Tomato, and discernible as pizza insofar as there were hints of cheese and oregano. Again, though, I didn't really get much of a tomato taste -- but maybe they don't put a lot of sauce on their pizzas here (I haven't had one yet, so I don't know).

Cumin -- My first thought upon opening the bag was "mmm, samosa!"  These chips seemed somehow more wheaty than the others, although I'm sure the base for all of them is the same (all have wheat flour as the first ingredient, too).  They do taste like cumin, I suppose -- not that I've had cumin outside of Indian dishes to really be able to single it out as an ingredient -- but the smell was extremely nutty. Maybe that's just how cumin smells (see: standard Indian ingredient, often overwhelmed by curry and turmeric), but what with my nut allergy, that was a little off-putting to me. I knew it wouldn't be a problem allergy-wise, but it's hard for me to break the Pavlovian response to not eat something that smells strongly of nuts. I kept forcing myself to stick my hand in the bag in a surreal battle of brain-vs-itself.

Ma La Tang smelled like really good barbeque -- not barbecue-flavored chips, but like ribs slathered in thick brown sauce, with baked beans on the side.  Sorry to disappoint, but these chips did not burn my tongue off.  They were indeed spicy, enough so that my tongue was a little tingly after 5 or 10, and if I'd eaten the whole bag, I might have cleared my sinuses, but no numbness from the tasting. They didn't taste particularly like barbeque -- they were, as anticipated, mostly peppery, a 'darker' sort of spice taste, but with an extra something that I couldn't identify. These also had an aftertaste that reminded me of hot and sour soup. I liked the tingling, but not the sourness, it just tasted wrong on the cracker, as if it had gone a little off.

Shrimp Salad -- I was the most wary of this flavor, but it actually turned out to be decent. The bag really does smell like shrimp salad (how do they DO that??), which was a little disconcerting (eau de mayonnaise?), but the chips themselves tasted mostly like buttery shrimp crackers -- these were the least wheat-tasting of the range -- with some onion and garlic thrown in.  They were OK, but a touch too oily and sharp. I don't know that I'd ever have a craving for them.

Hot Welsh Onion -- This bag smelled like Tabasco sauce, and the chips had the orange-red color to match (at right, some Hot Welsh Onions gang up on a Shrimp Salad, which is just slightly lighter than a Ritz). As if I couldn't have guessed from the picture on the front of the bag, this was more of a chili-pepper spicy than the Ma La Tang. While I felt the Ma La Tang in my tongue, I felt this more in my throat -- personally, I think this would be harder to down an entire bag of, but the Ma La Tang is probably a bit spicier chip for chip. If you like spice, I'd recommend you try both, but if your idea of spice is salt, you should probably stick to the tomato flavors. I was wondering where the onion flavor was amid the Tabasco, but then noted it in the aftertaste... more like onion powder than the spring onion advertised on the bag, but hey, it's a bag of chips. At least there's no lime.

Black Pepper -- Alas for its supporters, it wasn't that exciting, which is probably for the best since I hadn't decided whether it should be allowed to win or not.  The pepper isn't even all that notable; I tasted wheat and salt first.  They had a slight hint of vegetable and were pleasant enough, but overall pretty unremarkable.

So what came out on top? I don't have a definitive answer, because I could see choosing different varieties depending on my mood and degree of salt cravings on a given day. I think I'm most likely to go back for the Tomato flavor precisely because it's not overpowering and thus conducive to more situations, but given a serious salt or spice craving, would probably reach for the Pizza or the Hot Welsh Onion. That orange is really disturbing, though. If it were still winter -- and maybe I'll make tomato soup at some point anyway -- I'd totally buy the Cherry Tomato and dunk them in the bowl for old time's sake. Maybe even make myself a grilled cheese sandwich to go with it. I'm probably old enough to eat the crusts, though. Honest.

Two quick notes: (1) some dishes from past meals now up on the Food page, and (2) chips verdict coming soon -- should be posted by Monday morning! I now return you to your irregularly scheduled blog post.

I was passing a group of schoolkids chomping on after-school treats the other day when I realized the true enormity of the task before me, what with trying to find good snacks here. Not that there aren't good snacks, there are also just a lot of bad snacks that you have to eliminate in order to determine the good.

I mean, first there are the sheer numbers: sure, there may not be any deep-fried-Twinkies-on-a-stick, but snacking is truly an art form here. While you usually have to go to a city/county/state fair to find seriously concentrated, heart-attack/diabetes-inducing levels of snacks in the US, here they're everywhere.  EVERYWHERE. 

The ground floor of one of the buildings I walk by (sometimes through) on my way to school every day appears to consist entirely of different snack vendors. This building takes up half a city block -- imagine a large shopping mall food court with no 'real' food or drink, just snacks -- cookies, cakes, chocolates, jellies, stuff in little packages with drawings of fruit or confections. And no tables, natch. I estimate you can see about 1/3 of the hall, not including the perimeter shops that are between the walls of the main floor and the street, in the photo above. My guess on number of individual vendors would be, conservatively, about two dozen. And that place is just the tip of the iceberg.

Second, I'm lacking a team. Think about it -- all of those middle school years are prime tasting ground. Aside from the 13-yr-old's natural ability (and desire) to suck down as much sugar as possible, how did you manage to familiarize yourself with all of the candy in the local RiteAid/CVS/Safeway? Friends, that's how, and their parents (well, that and Halloween). I mean, who ever bought a Chunky or a Baby Ruth? Someone who was allowed to taste someone else's first, that's who. My ability to divide and conquer the candy aisles/shops is severely hampered by my lack of amoebal self-replication skills (and 13-year-old friends, but I'll pass on trying to obtain any of those).

Third, I have to do a lot of guessing. Imagine coming to the US not knowing a Latin-alphabet-based language and plunking down in a supermarket junk-food aisle. Where to start? You know neither what you might like most nor what you should eliminate first. And you have to learn to question what you think you know (or to put it in military terms, a presumed known is actually an unknown unknown which becomes a known unknown, or a known known that makes you aware of known unknowns). I will explain.

Not only can I not read ingredients on most of these packages, I usually can't even read the label (you know, where it says things like "peanut and caramel in a crisp candy shell"). I therefore operate off pictures a lot, but pictures can be misleading. I now know the characters for "sour yogurt flavor" after an unfortunate hypothesis that white creamy filling (not featuring a coconut) meant vanilla.  Ew. And that's just the packaged stuff. All of the snacks (more meal-like than candy) on the street? No pictures. If I can't tell what it is from the outside, my options are to just randomly take a chance, or wait for someone else to order one and see if I can tell what they're eating. I ended up with a red bean paste bun the other day, which, all things considered, could have turned out a lot worse, but it still wasn't what I'd been hoping for. But I've come to terms with the fact that if you're going to try a lot of new stuff, you're bound to end up with some duds; that's just how it goes.

I do systematically eliminate anything having to do with coffee, durian, nuts (of course) and a few other flavors, but there's a long road ahead. I just hope my teeth are up for it, and if anyone has a 13-year-old niece/nephew to loan me for a while, I could use the help.

Let this air at least once before I leave.  I miss Ugly Betty, I really do. Also, this may only be of interest to the TV-addicted among you, but 400 episodes in 5 seasons??  Good lord, I know they don't do long hiatuses here like in the States, but wow.