I'm always slow getting the food posts up, have you noticed? The latest is from a Sichuan restaurant in Shanghai. Singapore food is coming eventually... probably when I get back to Shanghai ;-).
There's a Japanese fast-food chain that's very popular here in Singapore. It's called Mos Burger, so you can guess what they traffic in. You can get a regular hamburger or cheeseburger there, and I think even a version of Fillet-O-Fish, but there are some differences. Also, they have a large line of non-Western burger-ish items. I chose a burger that was essentially Korean bulgogi in handheld form -- strips of slightly sweet (barbecued? not sure) beef, with compressed rice patties forming the bun, and a leaf of lettuce to top things off. It was pretty tasty, especially for fast food, but it turns out that bulgogi-style beef is a little hard to handle without utensils of some kind, so I had a bit of trouble keeping the whole thing contained without the rice patties falling apart. All in all, though, I'd try it again, maybe with a different choice of filling. There's this funny-shaped pond outside my apartment building. For part of the winter it was dry, so I was wondering whether they were even going to fill it. They did, so for a while it was just a pool of dead water. Then last week as I returned home, I saw a couple of people standing around the pool, one of them holding a big orange bucket. Oooh, potential life forms! Indeed, he was adding goldfish to the pool. Leeeettle tiny goldfish. About twenty or thirty, by my count, in that big pond. They're probably the only beings in Shanghai not worried about overcrowding. Information screen on a Shanghai metro platform. It displays the time until your train arrives, the time until the train after that, the time at the moment, and the all-important Champions League (season-long pan-European pro-soccer tournament) highlights. Usually when I get there, it's only showing ads. A few days before I left Shanghai, China celebrated Tomb Sweeping Day. As you might guess, it's a day where everyone visits their ancestors' gravesites and does some cleaning, weeding, yes, sweeping, and other general upkeep. They also offer up gifts -- usually food, or objects made of paper, which they then set on fire (there's more symbolism to it than I can properly explain). There are also special snacks. These here green things are qingtuan (CHING-twan), little green glutinous rice balls stuffed with red bean paste. They only come out for Tomb Sweeping Day, although I'm sure that once the US has wormed enough multinationals into China, they'll be sold four weeks in advance and shaped into little chicks or brooms or something. Anyway, the green balls start out looking somewhat paler, and end up looking nice and shiny. These are also covered in plastic wrap, I guess to keep their shape for later eating (they were given to me, whereas I think most are bought to be eaten on the spot). I'm not entirely clear on how they get the green color -- I've heard alternately that it's from an herb or a vegetable crushed into the rice flour. It's not artificial food coloring, anyway. They're very sticky, at least the one I ate was. (Unfortunately, that and the not-holding-shape thing also lead to not photographing well.) Tastewise, they were decent -- red bean paste has started to grow on me since I've been here, but I still prefer it in smaller doses. But they were just too sticky. (I'd have liked to try one warm, to see if it still had that problem.) You know how when you eat -- what are they, Jujubees? -- and the remnants are stuck in your teeth for ages afterwards? These are kind of like that, except that Jujubees don't also stick to your fingers. I've left town again, this time to hang with family for a couple weeks in Singapore (there may be some short side trips involved, but if so, more on those after they happen). It's been almost five years since I was last here, which is probably the longest in my entire life that I've been away. It's nice to be back. My cousin, who lives near me, recently took a five-day vacation to Japan to check out the cherry blossoms. Before he left, he offered me some dairy products that wouldn't keep until he got back, prime among them fresh yogurt (or here, yoghurt). This isn't your ordinary supermarket yogurt. It's made by some couple who started out producing it just for themselves, in their kitchen, and you can have little glass jars of it delivered to your door once a week if you order the requisite minimum amount. In addition to being "fresh"and "natural," it's also sour, having no added sugar, sweetener, preservatives, or chemicals. One day last week my language class was moved up earlier in the day, so I took advantage of the free afternoon to run some errands and get me some culture. Mmm, culture, tasty! I went to check out the newly-free Shanghai Museum. I'd heard good things about it, and was not disappointed. It was large enough that I didn't make it through the whole place on this go-round, but I might go back when they have a new exhibit in. The standing collection includes pieces of Chinese sculpture, paintings, calligraphy, pottery, porcelain, currencies, furniture, and minority arts from roughly the last 3000 years. There's a lot to see. This one (right) was not. I also checked out the Ming & Qing-dynasty furniture rooms, and skipped pottery, but made it through most of porcelain (I hit my fill around the mid-Qing era; one can only take so much of bowls and glaze without there being a donut involved). I only breezed through coins and currency, but I did take in a bit about these pieces (left). They're not weapons, but really old currency. They're called sword coins, and were popular along the Silk Route (i.e., from Central China west to Turkey). I'm just sayin', talk about putting a hole in your pocket; that's some vicious change. I've written this post twice now only to have it mysteriously disappear before I could get it up on the site, so this time I'm cutting to the chase. A couple weeks ago I noticed that someone had set up a makeshift shelter on an office building ledge at the corner of a relatively busy intersection. There were a couple of doves (white pigeons?) hanging out... and this odd bird. I like to think of him/her as Elizabeth, what with the ruffled collar. S/he looked even funnier (haughtier) when standing up. I'm guessing this is probably the male of the species, though. Perhaps someone out there with actual ecological-biological-ornithological expertise might know more? |
Huh?No, I haven't seen the movie, and yes, I chose the name anyway. I'm told an Asian woman with green eyes is a plot point. Archives
July 2011
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