Mmmm, fresh veggies.

Here in Shanghai, residents have the choice of shopping for produce -- and often meat, fish, and tofu -- at a supermarket (and a variety of supermarkets, at that), or the traditional way, at a wet market.

The wet market is so named because, well, it's wet. The floors are usually getting hosed down, or fish are sloshing water out of their pans, etc. Let's just say it's not somewhere you would want to wear your good clothes. A dry market, by contrast, er... well, I suppose a supermarket would count. Or it might be somewhere that sells grains and spices, but "dry market" isn't really commonly used. It's all about the wet market.

This is one of the larger wet markets near downtown Shanghai -- there's a whole 'nother double-sided aisle running parallel, where all kinds of meat pieces, products, and the like are for sale. Wet markets, by the way, are not for the faint of stomach; if you don't like thinking of what you eat as having been alive or having a face... well, in that case, you wouldn't be Chinese.

You could, however, still focus on the farmer's market aspects -- fresh, pretty local (I would bet that most items qualify for a 100-, if not 50-, mile diet), independent vendors. I hold out hope that the wet market tradition will persevere in the face of development, if only because they're still relatively popular in ultra-developed Hong Kong and Singapore (although supermarkets have definitely risen in the latter over the last decade), but with the big names -- chains like Carrefour, Tesco, Krispy Kreme, and Baskin Robbins, not to mention the fast food and restaurant places already here -- moving in apace, part of me worries that China will sacrifice a little too much in its race to catch the West, and won't be able to go back.

You might think, especially if approaching from behind, that a morning line 30 people deep was for the bus (or buses, as there are at least two that share this stop). But no, it's for the steamed bun seller.

I'm pretty sure the local Starbucks doesn't get this kind of line.

And now, for something completely different...

I'm considering using a couple of blog posts as writing samples for the inevitable applying of jobs. Some of you have professed to be regular, or semi-regular, readers of this blog, so I am enlisting your help. I have my favorites, but I'm not exactly objective -- so if you've read a fair number of entries here (more than, say, 3, and not just the pictures), I'd like your opinion. Do you have a favorite entry or three? Let me know which ones (if any!) stick out for you! You can leave a comment here or email me backchannel.

And yes, I'm aware these are not the standard writing samples. I'm not asking for best grammar, most informative (although those might be among your personal criteria) -- just the posts you liked the most.

Thanks!
LT in Big C

Yes, there are more. These ones are my faaaavorite.

Also pork, but not much broth. Both steamed and fried (simultaneously), so they have the crispy underside and the soft upper. Aside from not being soup dumplings, they also differ from the other dumplings in shape: they're closer to a crescent or half-moon shape than spherical. They're don't have the sweet tinge of sheng jian bao, and they're not quite the same taste as the xiao long bao, although I'm at a loss to describe the difference.

Guo tie aren't exclusive to this part of China, and are the dumplings that you're most likely to find in other parts of the world (they're also related to Japanese gyoza -- and, sadly, to the disturbingly named "Peking ravioli" that you find in New England), although the quality and contents can vary tremendously.

When I said "these" are my favorite, I meant the ones in the picture, from this vendor. He stands in an open stall, facing the sidewalk, so that the dumplings (and their aroma) are smack next to you. Best. Advertisement. Ever.

I think Urban Chicken WBAGNFARB.

I know this is a little late, seeing as the Olympics have been over for more than a week, but in my defense, this was from the final day.

Certain of the larger bus stops in Shanghai are outfitted with flat-screen TVs (and no, nobody tries to break them, steal them, or spray-paint them. There is something to be said for civilized society, and you may read that as you will). Most of the time, as far as I know -- it has to be said that I don't pay too much attention -- they are either off or showing ads. On a Sunday in the not too distant past, however, this one was showing the US-Spain gold-medal basketball game. It drew a much bigger crowd (I counted as many as 25 people in the last five minutes of game time) than the Chinese guy in the boxing bout that preceded it.

Why, how do you get your trees delivered?

This isn't a toilet blog, really. But sometimes I just have to share, and this is one of those times.

I recently had occasion to hang out in an airport first-class lounge (said occasion being a guest of a first-class traveler, not that my travel budget has suddenly seen a windfall), where I encountered what is either the coolest or scariest toilet I've ever seen. Really, I think it was even a step above the ones at Narita (Tokyo's airport) and Google.

The first scary-cool thing is that when you walk into the stall, the cover lifts up by itself. That's just weird and freaky, and made me want to look around to see if someone was watching with a remote control. But it's also a little geeky-cool. And good for the ultra-germ-aphobe, I suppose.

Another thing the fancy toilet does automatically is warm the seat, or maybe the seat is just kept warm 24-7. Either way, again: weird-freaky-cool.

The control panel was bad enough, but what was really intimidating was the instruction sheet glued to the wall. It all seemed very complicated for what is usually such a simple process (pull cord/press button/push handle) --just far too many options. Classic paralysis of choice. I counted 16 buttons, the only one of which I was confident in using turned out to be unnecessary, as the self-opening, self-heating toilet is also self-flushing. But I did feel the need to go back and get my camera to document them. I'm sure the woman at the mirror didn't think there was anything remotely strange about me going into the stall and beeping.

I finally made it to the Shanghai Aquarium. It's a pretty good aquarium, with a decent-sized underwater tunnel, lots of sharks and a decent diversity of other creatures, good signs, etc. But it turned out to also be an excellent place to observe non-aquatic creatures -- in this case, Chinese tour groups.

My second Shanghai sightseeing partner, Matt, and I were taking our time ambling through the first floor of exhibits and had just reached a large, open circular area with big ground-to-waist-height tanks (like the one in the picture at bottom) along half the perimeter. Matt had apparently just been about to comment on how he hoped the aquarium saw enough business to stay afloat, as through two special exhibit rooms we'd seen only a couple handfuls of other people (which was fine by me, since it obviated the need to jockey for space when reading the signs). Before he could vocalize this, though, there was a sudden clamor from the direction of the entrance escalators. Like a train, you can usually hear a Chinese tour group coming before you see it.

Within a few seconds, we found ourselves in the middle of a river of (possibly overseas-) Chinese tourists. The leader was a short woman holding the obligatory tour-group flag (this is common to most Asian tours, in my experience -- the group leader holds the flag aloft so that everyone can look up for the brightly colored piece of cloth rather than crane about for the top of someone's head) and squawking rapidly, only she wasn't so much leading as standing near the top of the escalators and barking out something I couldn't understand.

This was okay because the tour members -- all distinguishable by the matching red baseball caps they sported -- didn't seem to have any interest in being led. The first ones off the escalator strode quickly towards the first tank, and then swiftly around the room, barely stopping, but nonetheless managing to keep up a steady stream of oohing, aahing, and generally excited chatter. I'm pretty sure the first batch of thirty or so had made it completely around the room and had headed off into the rainforest section (at the barking behest of the tour leader, still at her escalator post) before the tail end had even gotten past the entry turnstile.

Matt and I had by now stepped back out of the river and into the center of the room to watch the entertainment. The stream kept coming -- every time there was a small break that we thought might signal the end of the line, another gaggle of red hats emerged into the atrium. The middle and back of the pack contained those sightseers not trying to qualify for the Senior Olympics, but they still moved at a good pace -- a few stopped to pose for pictures in front of some of the tanks, but for the most part it was a line in continual motion. Nobody strayed, nobody skipped around; they just beelined from escalator to first tank, clockwise around the room, and out the door. I would guess that there were at least a hundred people in the tour, and from first to last, with some stragglers scrambling back for pictures at the first tank, they managed to do a complete sweep of the place in less than ten minutes. A very raucous ten minutes, mind you (imagine the sound of indecipherable cocktail chatter, but at 80 decibels). I'm pretty sure they made it through the entire building before we even got to the second floor. At any rate, by the time we moved on to the rainforest area, they were out of hearing range, and we neither saw nor heard them again.

Apart from that adventure, I still can't get over the way aquarium glass only goes up to waist height here. I keep waiting for some American tourist to walk up and stick his or her hand in to try to pet the crocodile/fish/turtle (the shark tanks are in fact fully covered, except for the one where you actually are allowed to pet the animals).

I play basketball a couple times a week with a local women's rec club. I might have more to say about that in another post, but for now it's just to explain that I've had ample opportunity to scope out the public basketball-court scene. We've been rained out a lot lately, but before the Olympics began (I'll be curious to see if things have changed post-Games), I took note of the sampling of jerseys on display: on any given day, there are usually a good number of NBA jerseys, perhaps a sprinkling of Team USA or Chinese-pro-team shirts, and once a clubmate pointed out a Chinese-university uniform (she also noted that it wasn't a very good university, though I'm not sure whether she meant for education or basketball).

No one wears a Yao Ming jersey.

No, really. I've seen Stackhouse (Wizards edition), Pierce, Iverson (Philly), several Jordans and Kobes, LeBron, some generic team uniforms featuring neither name nor number, and even a Bird. Bird!! I would wager that the guy wearing it could not have been school age when Bird was still playing, but there was big ol' number 33 on display on a Shanghai court. But no Yao Mings. Which I thought was funny, since they do seem to love him here. When I asked another clubmate about it, she laughed a little and confessed that she prefers Kobe, then conjectured that people might just not like Yao's playing style.

Poor Yao. You have a season-ending injury, and then your hometown fans (he's actually from Shanghai) don't want to buy your jersey. And somehow I doubt it'll be more prevalent after the Chinese team's Olympic flameout.