Separate Incidents

Suckling Pig Barbecue

2009-06-01T01:32:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, Liz, Luke, and I went out for lunch down in Nanping (Southern Zhuhai) with our Chinese friend Josh. We went to a restaurant that specializes in whole roasted suckling pigs. Fifteen-day-old suckling pigs. Two weeks. Half a month. 1/26th of a year old. Less than the time it takes to play a best of seven series in basketball. Innocence has never tasted so delicious.

First, they take said pig (post butchering) and put it on giant fork. Kind of a pitchfork minus the inner tines. Then, they slowly roast the "skewer" by hand over an open charcoal pit.

After cooking, the pig is then sectioned up, put on a platter, and served with sugar and a sweet Chinese barbecue sauce. There wasn't a whole lot of meat on the bones, so we mostly jut ate the skin and a little of the fatty muscle layer on the outside. If this all sounds horrible - killing a baby pig, cooking it splayed over and open flame, and then eating only its skin - then I don't know what to tell you. It was one of the most delicious meals I've had in China. For my birthday last winter (not pictured here, but over on Rachel's blog), I had a whole lamb cooked up at a local Western Chinese restaurant and served to me and 15 friends. I like eating whole animals.

Such as this roasted chicken, which was also at baby pig lunch.

We also ate a range non-whole animal courses, with the lotus root being the highlight.

Plates, from bottom, clockwise: flatbread; wilted greens; lotus root; and a potato, celery, and wood ear mushroom dish.

The restaurant was a friendly, open air sort of establishment...

with a nice view of the city...

Leavin' on that Midnight Train to Yangshuo

2009-05-28T19:16:00.000-07:00

We had a few days off in the beginning of May, so we decided to take a trip. Like Gladys Knight said, Zhuhai became too much for the Dan (and Liz), so we went back on a train (bus) to a simpler place and time. We went on that midnight bus to Yangshuo. Photos come at the end of the post.

Yangshuo is a small but well known county capital in Guangxi Province, located immediately to our west. We caught a sleeper bus out of Gongbei that left at about 7pm and arrived about 12 hours later. This variety of sleeper bus was new to me: rather than having little cubicle beds lining the sides, there were three rows of two-foot bunkbeds with no storage space. Of course one can safely put their possessions in the luggage compartment under the bus; however, I stupidly didn't realize how little space we would have at out seats and brought my huge shoulder bag (which doubles as my camera bag), big water bottle, and jacket. The bed was already about six inches too short, so I ended up in the fetal position, spooning my bag and water bottle all damn night.

Yangshuo is a lovely little town (no skyscrapers) set next to the Li River, surrounded by verdant mountains and limestone karsts. It was a little overrun with both foreign and Chinese tourists, so we tended to spend most non-eating and sleeping time outside of the city. Local food was fantastic: beer fish (river fish braised in beer with tomatoes, green onions, and garlic), spicy snails (cooked in soy sauce, leeks, and hot peppers), and Guilin noodles (rice noodles in a salty broth with various pickled vegetables, greens and hot sauce).

We stayed our first few nights in the Yangshuo Xijie Youth Hostel, thankfully located a good distance from overcrowded, loud Xijie Street but still within easy walking distance. YXYH was adequate, safe, and reasonably priced, although the hostel owner (who speaks pretty good English) was constantly trying to sell us trips and tickets. I always got the feeling he was angling to take advantage of us, coming into our room at one point half-drunk and trying to convince us to go to the Longsheng rice terraces. It was annoying, so we avoided him as much as possible. If your Chinese is adequate, you are in general better off going someplace on your own and negotiating your way into sights and onto buses, rather than letting some booking agent or hotel owner do it for you.

We were pretty wiped out on our first day after the bus-a-thon, so we booked a trip through our hostel to take a bamboo raft up the Li River (I was tired so I didn't take my own advice). The Li River is perhaps most famous for being on the back of the 20 RMB note. It was also overrun with tourists, but we were tired and not looking for anything too strenuous. The Li River rafting seems like something one must do when they go to Yangshuo, thus I think we were happy to do it first and get it over with. The village from which the rafts leave, Xingping, was also a cool old place to walk around in for a little bit.

On our second day, we made our way north of the city to Shi Tou Cheng (a.k.a. shitoucheng, the Old Stone Village) to see the countryside, some very old hamlets, and some ancient Chinese stone gates. After busing up to Putao Town, we arranged for a couple of motorcycle taxis to bring us up into the mountains where we were fortunate to meet a man who gave us a two-hour hiking tour of the area for 100 RMB. Our guide - an elderly teacher at the village school - spoke no English. He was very patient however, talking very slowly and writing down the names of the sights in Chinese so that we could follow along as best we could. This hike, enencumbered by other tourists, was without a doubt one of the highlights of not only our trip, but my time in China as well. Pastoral orchards and rice paddies set against the craggy, towering karsts; friendly villagers and their not so friendly dogs; and the remoteness of the place, practically untouched by time; near perfect weather. I was so satisfied that I wrote down a little recommendation note in English for our guide that he could show to any other foreigners who came his way.

Day three involved renting bikes and, once again, escaping the throngs of tourists. At first we biked along the Yulong River's eastern side. After an hour or so, we forded the river (with bikes) via a hired bamboo raft (shades of Oregon Trail...no joke, we ran into some other bikers who chose to drag their bikes across the river themselves, and probably ended up getting typhoid). This was when this bike trip really came into its own: once again, there was almost no one else around; the weather was beautiful; the karsts, mountains, and lush valley were radiant; and there were lots of birds for Liz. We biked along the Yulong for quite a while, eventually crossing back to the river's east bank and making it into Baisha Town for a lunch of delicious Guilin noodles at a corner restaurant. After lunch, we backtracked to the Yulong River Bridge – an old-to-ancient arching bridge that offered a wonderful panoramic view of the Yulong River Valley. Following that, the noodles started to sit on us so we made our way back to Baisha and then home via the main road.

The next morning (day four, a Monday), we left our hostel in Yangshuo and went to the Farmer’s Holiday Inn. The FHI in located about halfway between Moon Hill and the Big Banyan Tree, pretty well off the main road and situated, as the name suggests, on a farm. This place was wonderful. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The proprietor was a lovely woman (with great English). She didn’t try to sell us anything, was very helpful and funny, and even showed us how to get into one of the local sights without having to pay an entrance fee (shhhhh…). I wish we had stayed at the FHI for our entire trip, rather than in stupid Yangshuo town. Also, their food was delicious and very fresh.

After checking in, we walked over to Moon Hill, a mountain famous for having a giant hole all the way through it. We were smart to wait until after the holiday weekend, because Moon Hill was not at all crowded (though it was very hot). We were accompanied by two oldish ladies who talked to us in broken English (and we to them in broken Chinese), fanned us when we got overheated, and offered to sell us wickedly overpriced water once we got to the top. It was a really beautiful hike; my biggest problem was that rather than hiking up a nice dirt trail, the majority of the hike is on the granite steps that are so customary in Chinese parks. I guess it was easier coming back down. The peak offered some really stunning views of the surrounding area.

After Moon Hill, we looped back around and saw the Big Banyan Tree. It was supposedly 2,000 years old. It was supposedly very interesting. It was actually very lame and touristy.

Following that, we crossed the road and checked out the Jianshan temple, reputedly the oldest Buddhist temple in Guangxi. It was fine, if a little unremarkable. One day I’ll learn that huge Buddhist Monasteries are cool and that small Buddhist Temples are boring (at least for me).

On our fifth and final day, we rented bikes through the FHI and decided we were going to try and make it all the way to Fuli Town, a picturesque village located to the east of Yangshuo. It was hot. Really hot. And we got lost. Really lost. We were using this cutesy hand-drawn map we got in Yangshuo, and it was less accurate than a drunk in the men’s room at Fenway. Roads, towns, and villages weren’t in the right places. None of the distances were right. Crucial landmarks were either in the wrong places or completely non-existent. Lingnan Art Publishing House did a real shoddy job on this map.

Nonetheless, it was still a very enjoyable day. Most of it was spent riding around in rice paddies or stopping to ask for directions (a challenge unto itself, since most of the locals spoke a heavily-accented Mandarin or a local dialect unintelligible to me). Finally, we got to the southern arm of the Li River exhausted, and decided that we should just turn around and go back to the FHI, lest we miss our midnight bus. Our midnight bus to Zhuhai.

Gonna board…gonna board…

The Big Thailand Post

2009-03-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

Salinger strikes again after months of inactivity. What can I say? Both my father and Liz's mother asked where the hell my blog had gone, and my father even said something about how he has to follow my life via Rachel Ready. Incidentally, some of the Thailand photos over there were taken by yours truly (passive voice intended), but I leave it to you to sort out which ones. My photos are all in a slide show at the end of this post.

Our two-week trip went as follows: flight out of Macau to Phuket (stopover/customs in Bangkok). Spent a few days in a Swede-infested beach community in Phuket before grabbing a bus over to Krabi Town. Stayed in Krabi Town for a night, then took a boat to lovely Ko Lanta ("Koh" means island in Thai). Crashed at two different beaches on the western and southern coasts of Ko Lanta, then took a bus back up to Krabi and, from there, a car up into a somewhat mountainous, more forested, non-beachy, and less-Swedish area called Phanom Bencha. Enjoyed Phanom Bencha for a night, then back down to Krabi where we booked a bus-then-boat trip across the straight to Surat Thani City on the east coast, and on to Ko Phan-nga. We tried two different places in Phan-nga before ferrying back to Surat Thani for our flight home. As an overview for people that don't know me but happen to stumble across this entry: I and my two traveling companions (Liz and Rachel) are all somewhat experienced travelers, though none of us had been to Thailand or Southeast Asia before (Liz and I currently live in China); we were traveling on a shoestring in February (second most expensive time of year in Thailand, just after peak season); we were not interested in party hotspots or in being overly-backpacker (despite the fact we all had backpacks); we were not looking for anything too spiritual or back-to-nature; we sought out more relaxed places instead of areas known for transvestites and psychedelic drugs; we never booked anything more than a day or two in advance, save for our first hotel in Phuket; and we prefer eating good, authentic, and spicy Thai food.

First, Phuket Island (pronounced "poo-ket"). Phuket Island is roughly the size of Singapore, and is perhaps the original Thai beach resort destination. I found it to be overdeveloped, expensive, and full of Swedish people. Personally I wanted to leave from the moment we got there, but in retrospect it was probably a pretty good way to start the whole trip: we got Mexican food; we sat on a really nice, somewhat crowded beach (Hat Kata...FYI, "Hat" means beach in Thai) for about four hours; and the din of tour buses and unhappy Swedish children made me appreciate every other, better place we visited. Initially we didn't want to go to Phuket, but friends of ours gave us the impression that going to Southern Thailand without going to Phuket would be like going to Fenway and not singing "Sweet Caroline" - it's just something that you've got to do, no matter how kitschy and overdone you find the experience.

We went immediately from Phuket airport via minibus (note: take a taxi instead - it's worth it unless you're traveling alone, and probably WAY faster) to northern Hat Kata, where we had booked a room at a place called Fantasy Hill Bungalow. The internet reviews said this place was nice, though there were complaints that it was at the top of an epic hill and that you might need a sherpa and some oxygen containers to make the ascent. Okay, I am exaggerating about the complaints, but let me say that this place was FINE. The hill took about 30 seconds to walk up and was not very steep. FHB felt off the main road (in a good way); the proprietor was nice; the rooms were clean and affordable; and the breakfasts were completely adequate. My only minor complaint is that it is a bit of a slog to get to the beach, but then again so is everything in Kata besides Club Med.

After some discussion, we decided the best course of action was to stay in Hat Kata for two nights and then leave for the greener pastures of nearby Krabi province. We caught a songthaew (basically a covered pickup truck with benches on the sides) to the Phuket Town bus station, and from there easily got a bus over to Krabi Town. Lonely Planet and other guide books crap all over Krabi Town, essentially saying that you shouldn't spend any time there unless you are forced to do so. Well, go to hell Lonely Planet and other guide books - I really liked the place. Sure, it lacks charm and is sort of a small, non-descript stop-over town, but it has some really redeeming qualities: a great, cheap used bookstore (located downtown, on the street that runs along the river/bay); a cheap, clean, and VERY affordable hotel located next to said bookstore; a really cool night market that pops up on the weekends; and, speaking as a denizen of barbecue (both American and Asian), Krabi has a fantastic outdoor barbecue at night, right on the water next to one of the ports. Plus, I got up really early in the morning (for some unknown reason), went for a walk, and saw a family of rabble-rousing monkeys that appeared to live in or around the roof of a house near the aforementioned barbecue. MONKEYS! Yup, I got everything I could have hoped for out of Krabi Town.

After booking our ferry tickets the night we arrived in Krabi Town, we hopped on a very crowded boat destined for Ko Lanta (technically called Ko Lanta Yai, the more popular and southernmost of the two Ko Lantas). The boat, about the size of a double-decker bus, was somewhat pleasant. It was a very nice day and the crew let the passengers splay out on the uncovered deck and watch the Islets, fishing junks, and long boats go by. Unfortunately the boat was so stuffed with people that it was near impossible to get our bags once the boat docked in Saladan, but what is a minor inconvenience when you're on your way to miles and miles (kilometers and kilometers) of pristine beaches?

For our first night, we booked a couple bungalows at the Kantiang Bay Beach Resort, located (appropriately enough) in Kantiang Bay. The resort (basically a handful of adequate bamboo bungalows, priced around 700THB/night, and handsome concrete cottages, all right on or very close to the water) and Kantiang Bay in general were nice, quiet, and clean, except that the three of us agreed that perhaps we had overshot the "relaxed" beach target and had found a place that was downright sleepy. The beach itself was nice but not spectacular (Thailand has high standards), the place had a sort of overly-isolated feel, and the restaurant options were severely limited. In fact, we ate at this place (it had some sort of whimsical, seafaring name, like the Drunken Sailor or Jolly Skipper) which has something that I, a man that stands at six-feet-four-inches tall, loathe: cute seating arrangements. In addition to normal tables and chairs (which were all full when we arrived, and in a less appealing part of the restaurant), they have small, low tables with beanbags instead of chairs, or small, low tables with low-hanging chairs fastened by ropes to the ceiling. This adorable crap drives me bananas. How the hell am I supposed to make this work? How the hell am I supposed to drink one of their overpriced beers and eat one of their admittedly tasty burgers when I don't know where to put my freakishly long legs? They should have yoga lessons on the appetizers menu. I ended up waiting for the people next to us to leave so I could steal a beanbag to stack on top of my beanbag, thereby allowing me to sit in a reasonable position at a reasonable height with my reasonable plate of reasonable western food on my reasonable lap. All this reasonableness aside, we left the next day and went to my favorite place on the trip: Ao Phra Ae, a.k.a. Long Beach.

We arranged for a songthaew to drop us off next to the access road for Long Beach, then hoofed it up the beach until we found a place that struck our fancy. I can't recall the name of the place, but it - like many other beachfront resorts - had mixture of traditional-looking, two-person bamboo huts, as well as the more redoubtable yet spacious, modern concrete affairs. We went for the concrete because there were three of us and it made more fiscal, groupthink sense to band together.

I have nothing but positive things to say about Ko Lanta's Long Beach: the beach was gorgeous (; there were a lot of people around but never enough to make the place feel crowded; and it wasn't too expensive. The food was sort of a mixed bag...our favorite place was called The Funky Fish (I think), which was right on the water, served good Thai and western food, and made good drinks. We had everything there, from pizza, breakfast, and buckets of liquor to one of the spiciest Thai curries I'd ever had. We also had a really awful meal at another place, but why dwell on the negative?

The three of us decided to take an all-day snorkeling trip, chartered through one of the travel agencies on Long Beach. Side note on Thai travel agencies: in my limited experience, the travel agencies all tend to be about the same, selling the same trips for comparable prices while trying to gouge you into buying something more expensive. As far as I know, most of them aren't trying to straight-up swindle you. The trips are real, the tickets are real, and the prices they quote you are probably fair. And by fair, I mean to say that they won't try to charge you more than the next travel agency right down the street. My advice is to shop around when you first arrive in a given town, pick a place run by someone who at least seems nice, and then to go back to that same place for bike rentals, trips, bus tickets, etc. As with anywhere, the promise of future exchanges of money for goods and services tends to keep things both amicable and on the level.

Anyway, back to the snorkeling. I can't recall the price for the trip, but something in the neighborhood of $20 seems to ring a bell. We chose to go for the cheaper "slowboat" snorkeling trip; however, because there were not too many folks going snorkeling, the company chose to take everyone out on the speedboat. This was good because we would get to visit more dive spots, but bad because the boat would be more crowded. The speedboat was also being used to ferry people between different island resorts, so when we initially got on the boat with a bunch of snorkeling gear, there were a bunch of upset-looking Swedish families, angry that their transport was delayed. I was angry that they had so much stuff with them and took all the good seats, so let's call it even.

While snorkeling we saw all kinds of fish, coral reefs (shouldn't the plural be coral reeves?), bats living in small caves in nearby karsts, and lots of lovely scenery.

After a day of snorkeling, we decided to get away from the beach (begone with you, damned pristine beach!) and go up to a cool park area called Phanom Bencha. We stayed at the Phanom Bencha Mountain Resort, which advertised a beautiful, more secluded setting, fewer tourists, delicious food, and guided tours. I'm pleased to report that they followed through on all accounts except for the guided tour: when we arrived, we told them we wanted a tour the following morning. The evening prior at dinner we met our tour guide, who also happened to work at the resort restaurant. As was our habit during our trip, we had a few drinks and called it a night early; our guide was still up carousing with who I think must be the resort's owners (some foreigners to whom I did not speak). The next morning, we went down to meet our guide and were told he had a family emergency and had left early in the morning. Maybe he did. Maybe someone was actually sick. To me, the whole thing seemed fishy, but what can you say when they tell you there was a family emergency?

We decided to go hiking in the jungle on our own, in an area in the mountains behind the resort. It was very beautiful and hot. Unfortunately Liz and I had already hiked around on some of the paths the night before (we saw a trained monkey retrieving some sort of fruit for his owners!) and Rachel realized that she wasn't that into hiking; therefore, since we did not know where we were going, we hiked for about an hour, came back, packed up, and got the hell out of there.

Now, I don't want to undersell Phanom Bencha Mountain Resort, because it is really beautiful, quiet, and mostly devoid of tourists. We also really like the small but refreshing stream-fed pool, with its stunning views of the forest and mountains. However, I want to make one thing very clear to anyone who stumbles across this blog looking for a review of the place: it is not even remotely close to Phanom Bencha Park. There is at least one giant mountain between PBMR and the park. A guy at the resort told us it was at a four-hour hike to even get to the park. Your options for accessing the park are to either arrange for a car to drive you there and back (which I think would have cost in the neighborhood of 800 THB) or rent motorbikes. Those extra fees, added onto the park entrance fee, the price of the resort (1300 THB for a four-person bungalow - much more expensive than your cheapo beach accommodation), possibly hiring a guide, and the cost of getting yourself all the way out to PBMR in the first place make this a somewhat pricey excursion. For us, I think it was very underwhelming, though that was due in large part to the somewhat shady lack of an available tour guide. I will always remember the Phanom Bencha area as a beautiful, unsullied setting surrounded by rubber trees, and will try to forget about how disappointing the resort was.

We went directly to the Krabi Town bus station, said goodbye to the Andaman coast, and booked a bus-ferry package across the straight and out to Ko Phangan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand best known for the Full Moon Party (more on that in a bit). The first bus was pretty quick and painless, unless your name happened to be Rachel. We got to Surat Thani, had to do some frantic bus-changing on the side of a busy road, and not-so-promply drove for another 45 minutes to a port south of Surat Thani. Finally, we were ready to get on the boat, along with about 1,000 Australians, United Kingdomers (?), and Frathouse kids who were jacked, pumped, and stoked to take a bunch of hallucinogens and go the Full Moon Party. We had heard of the Full Moon Party at Hat Rin: go, take something that will make you see elves and wizards, dance to drum and base until 6am, and try not to get hit in the face by someone spinning fire or shooting off bottle rockets. Fortunately for us, we had all been to Renn Fayre before and didn't feel the need to put ourselves into an altered state.

All 1,003 of us plodded onto the massive ferry like cattle being led to the slaughter. The ferry was also mostly quick and painless, save for our possibly drunk ferry captain not being able to dock the boat in the slip for about 20 minutes. After disembarking, Rachel arranged for transport to a decent beachside resort on the Northwestern portion of the island, a.k.a. as far away as possible from the Full Moon Party. I don't recall much about the this resort, except for the following: we met some nice travellers from Ireland and ended up playing King's Cup with them until the wee hours; we saw a monkey retrieving coconuts from up in a tree, and then opened one of said coconuts and drink the sweet juice within; and we relaxed on the beach and did nothing.

We left after two nights and went to Bottle Beach (a.k.a. Hat Khuad) on the island's northern coast. It was beautiful, secluded, and there was one restaurant right on the beach that we went to every day. As Bottle Beach was our last beach stop before leaving Thailand, we didn't do much: lounged around the pool and on the beach one day; went to the closest port city and had a garlic fish (amazing) another. All in all, it was amazing. I think it was Liz's favorite beach, and my second favorite behind Long Beach on Ko Lanta.

Note: this post was written over the course of an embarrassing number of months. Liz's computer died and we were sharing, making the whole blogging thing very difficult. I apologize if the end (or any other part) seems totally tacked on.

Martyr's Mausoleum

2009-01-28T02:41:00.000-08:00

Went with Rachel and Liz up to Martyr's Mausoleum, which, like seemingly everything in Zhuhai (or so says Rachel), is in our neighborhood near the Jusco.

Despite it being just up the street, Liz and I hadn't actually been there before. It wasn't amazing, but it was clean, green, perched atop a short hill, free, and had a fair amount of birds.

Thailand and Updike

2009-01-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

Firstly, Liz, Rachel, and I will be leaving for Thailand on Friday and will come back a couple weeks later. No idea if I'll have internet access, or the inclination to write anything while staying in what is reputedly the most beautiful country in the world. Pictures and stories will abound upon our safe return.

Finally, John Updike passed away yesterday. I was never a huge Updike fan; nothing against the man and his work, but I just haven't gotten around to reading him yet. However, his October 1960 New Yorker essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" - which covers Ted Williams' final game at Fenway Park and, in a roundabout way, Williams' career - left a lasting impression on me after I first read it some 10 years ago. The opening paragraph gives the quintessential and oft-repeated portrait of Fenway Park; the terse, perfect, and famous line, "Gods do not answer letters," could serve as a subheader on a Williams biography; but perhaps my favorite section, one that I considered during the that magical 2004 postseason run, is obviously about something much more than baseball:

...there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

A weekend in Hong Kong

2009-01-23T21:06:00.000-08:00

Liz and I headed to Hong Kong last weekend to meet up with some friends. We crashed in a hostel (cheap!) in bustling Causeway Bay (not cheap!), and used that as a jumping off point to explore Hong Kong Island and southern Kowloon. We took the ferry from Jiuzhou Port in Zhuhai (165 RMB each way; about an hour and a quarter in travel time) into Central HK, checked into our hostel, and we were off!

First thing: we had some delicious street food. I didn't snap a photo, but I seem to remember that it was some sort soup or curry or something. Tasty, but not altogether memorable for reasons that shall soon become apparent (many other good meals).

After that, the two of us, along with two friends recently of Portland/Shanghai, hopped on the incredibly convenient HK Metro (a.k.a. the MTR) and went north to the Kowloon flower and bird markets. The flower market is located on the sidewalk of a narrow street. Locals and tourists stand shoulder to shoulder with vendors. There were lots of floral and fruit (fructal?) arrangements for Chinese New Year. I don't know much about flowers, and usually things like this would have me bored to tears; however, the slightly exotic flavor (flavour!) of the place combined with the frenetic back and forth of Kowloon completely offset my total lack of interest in flowers. Also, flowers are easy to photograph because they don't move and are very colorful.

Next, we went to the bird market, which is at the end of the flower market street. If you know Liz, you know she was thrilled to go here. A few days before we went to HK, she was coyly saying things like "will we have time to go to Kowloon?" and "don't you think Kowloon would be cool?" I didn't know about the bird market until one of our friends mentioned it; I replied, "hey, Liz, I bet you'd like that!" Her reply: "Dan, why do you think I wanted to go to Kowloon!"

In any case, the bird market sells pet birds of all shapes, sizes, and colors (colours!). There are ornate bamboo cages everywhere. There are also tons of wild native birds hanging out and eating free bird seed. Liz was very excited. I joked that she would have to take a nap afterwards to settle her down.

Then we took the ultra-convenient airport tram ($100 HKD) out to meet Rachel. She was in surprisingly good shape, after sitting in planes/airports for something like 60 hours. We had Burger King (first fast food in five months), headed back to HK island, and met up with some folks for hotpot on the streets (lots of seafood!).

On Sunday, we got up a little late and went into Central/SoHo for Mexican food. Oh my god, I missed Mexican food. It was stupid-expensive but delicious. SoHo is a very interesting neighborhood; it's very westernish and touristy, and has a long system of convenient outdoor escalators known as the Mid-level Escalators.

After brunch, we headed over to check out the zoo, botanical garden, and aviary at Hong Kong park. I don't take pictures at zoos (or aviaries) because they never come out. The bars always throw the focus of the camera off; besides, would you really want to look at a picture taken by a tourist of a South American lemur living in a cage in Hong Kong? No. You can find better pictures of that selfsame animal on the internet. Suffice it to say that the entire complex at Hong Kong park was excellent, free, and worth the trip.

We then sort of wandered around the bustling financial district and successfully avoided getting hit by the double-decker trams. The Financial District has everything you'd expect in any of the world's great cities: expensive cars, skyscrapers festooned with bank logos, and high end stores such as Louis Vuitton, Armani, Bvlgari, etc. There's not really a lot to see, although personally I did get a kick out of standing in the heart of the fourth largest financial center (centre!) in the world. I did NOT get a kick out of a searched-for English language bookstore being closed.

We left HK island via metro and went north to the Temple Street night market. It was a little early, so we strolled around, looked at the street's namesake Buddhist Temple (which was mostly closed), and ate more street food. I'll just say right now that we ate every three hours on Sunday night and that I personally did not take any photos on my camera of anything except the last late-night meal. Perhaps Rachel or Liz took some photos that I will be able to post later. In any case, here is what I recall about those three meals, in order: first meal (street food in Kowloon) was some boiled crab, tofu braised in soy sauce, small clams in soy sauce (my favorite), fried wontons, and Skol, the nationless beer. Second meal (street food, also in Kowloon) had some sort of beef noodles, really interesting egg rolls (outsides had a fried fishnet look to them), and something else that I can't recall. Third and final meal (at a restaurant in Causeway Bay) was sharkball noodle soup and a plate of crispy fried dumplings. In between eating, we checked out the night market, talked with some locals, and went up to Lan Kwai Fong for a moderate amount of expensive revelry. All in all, it was a fun, contained evening.

Monday morning we got up, checked out of our hostel, and had breakfast congee at a local spot. The congee was thicker than I'm used to, but still the same, with century egg, scallions, and shredded pork. Delicious, if unremarkable. We then walked to Victoria Park, which is west of Causeway Bay. More of a community oriented space than Hong Kong Park, Victoria Park has soccer fields, open gardens, and even a pool where people can launch model boats! As in every park in China, there were older people doing freestyle Tai Chi.

We then got on the metro and headed up to the Peak Tram base station. The Peak Tram is a funicular railway that runs up to the Peak, a.k.a. Victoria Peak. The Peak looms over Hong Kong island, and gives some absolutely spectacular views on clear days. Of course, truly clear days are few and far between in southern Asia, so we would have to settle for mostly clear with a thin veneer of haze. The Peak Tram is bloody steep; in one of my photos, I (poorly) tried to show level ground in contrast to the 27 degree gradient of the railway tracks. Good lord was it steep.

Ten minutes later, we were at the top, and were treated to some really stunning daytime views of the Hong Kong skyline. Just beautiful. The biggest downside to the Peak is the hideous Peak Tower. This U-shaped monstrosity - home to the culturally enriching Madame Tussaud's Hong Kong - is supposed to be reminiscent of a wok. To me, it was reminiscent of an air control tower ("let's rack 'em, stack 'em, and pack 'em!"). Awful. Apparently you could pay an extra $15 HKD to go on top of this odious structure for an even better view, but I chose to save my money...which I think worked out just fine!

Our final act of Hong Konging was to go back to the mid-level escalator area and eat lunch at a New York style deli. It was transcendent. Rachel got pastrami, and Liz and I went half and half on a Rueben and an Italian sandwich. There were onion rings as well. This may seem trivial to you, but I cannot get anything approaching this in Zhuhai, so I was quite pleased.

We left Hong Kong via the Kowloon ferry terminal because they had a 5:30pm ferry. The entire travelling process was a snap. Simply put: I love Hong Kong. If anyone knows of a Hong Kong -based financial institution or marketing firm looking for a young English speaker with a tremendous work ethic and above average writing skills, send them my way!

Finally, here is a photo sequence, taken from an elevated walkway at the corner of Queens Road and Pedder Street in Central. I would recommend advancing through the pictures manually as fast as you can, rather than using the too-slow autoplay.

Heading to Hong Kong

2009-01-16T18:02:00.000-08:00

Liz and I are heading to Hong Kong to meet up with this person (arriving from Europe) and this person + girlfriend (recently of PDX and Shanghai). The meeting is part long-term plans, part magical scheduling confluence. We're not sure exactly what we'll do, though a trip to Victoria Peak is certainly on the dockett. As one member of our party will be very jetlagged, I think the answer: not much.

In any case, this week Liz and I took turns getting ill (either mild food poisoning or a 24-hour bug), so we haven't had much occasion to take photos or eat anything interesting. In fact, I'm currently drinking the first cup of coffee in three days that hasn't made me double over in pain.

Ginger Coke

2009-01-09T23:44:00.000-08:00

Liz has a new favorite breakfast beverage: jiang le, or ginger cola. Basically, you take some Coke, toss in some julienned or shredded ginger, simmer it for a while to cook off some of the water, and serve it hot (or presumably cold). She first had it yesterday at local luncheonette, and again this morning at the Hong Kong restaurant. It is not carbonated (the bubbles disappear in the simmering), but it has a definite gingery smack to it. In fact, the drink always has a big pile of ginger floating it it! I'm not a huge fan of ginger - I tend to like it if it is cooked into a dish - but this is tasty and feels good on a sore throat. It sort of resembles black coffee, so I guess it is an acceptable breakfast drink.

An American friend had a cold a few months back, and Chinese friend came over and made him some jiang le. "Chinese medicine," she said, "good for health." His reply: "but you've only had Coke in Zhuhai for like 10 years!"

Sichuan Restaurant - not hotpot!

2009-01-08T16:54:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, we went to a Sichuan restaurant in our neighborhood for lunch. Famous for pandas, mountains, and the notorious 2008 earthquake, Sichuan (a.k.a. Szechuan) is known as one of China's two spicy provinces (the other being Hunan). Perhaps Sichuan's most consumed cuisine is Sichuan hotpot, which I have had many times and which I regard as one of the most enjoyable dining experiences you'll find; slowly chowing on plates of meats and vegetables cooked in a pot of ultra-spicy boiling liquid that is shared by you, eight friends, random Chinese well-wishers, and an always-growing stack of beer bottles is terrific. (A note of warning: when finished, you have a gut full of fire and you stink like a spice rack; hotpot is best consumed when you have adequate time afterward to change clothes and take a nap).

All that is fine and dandy, except that the Sichuan restaurant we visited was not hotpot. It was just delicious Sichuan food. Spicy, simple, savory, and served family style. We're still working on learning menu Chinese, so some of what we ate was ordered via "eeny-meeny-miney-moe."

The first dish - we actually got a double order because the servings were very small - was spicy beef.

Beyond soy sauce, I have no idea on the sauce flavoring...though I can say confidently that the numbing, slightly metallic-tasting Sichuan peppercorns were making themselves known. From the way the dish was served, I would assume that it was cooked in a bamboo rice steamer, but I don't know if there were other preparatory steps. The tender, slightly sour (perhaps some fermented rice and/or soy?), salty, and spicy beef was just splendid on top of a bit of rice.

We managed to order wonton soup.

This was not the wonton soup you'll find at your $7.95 lunch buffet in the States; it was proper, with pork, squid, mushrooms, and amazing boiled wontons (basically dumplings, with extra strands of dough).

The next dish was good, if unremarkable. I ordered it unknowingly - oh well!

Green beans, potatoes, seaweed (wakame maybe?), and chunks of bone-in pork (of course!) all simmered to perfection in a fairly standard broth. At first I thought it was a little boring, but then our friend Luke made the point that most vegetables you get in China are stir-fried in oil and covered in soy sauce; that is to say that simple, lightly-seasoned al dente vegetables (such as those pictured above) are actually a refreshing change of pace. If you subtracted the seaweed and switched the pork out for lamb, it'd be downright Irish.

Now for the dumplings, a.k.a. jiaozi.

Wow. This was a real crowd pleaser. I've never seen dumplings served like this before. What you're looking at are 12 dumplings that have been carefully placed in a very hot, oiled wok, and browned on the bottom. Then (I think) the chef poured some sort of batter into the wok around the dumplings; the screaming hot oil then bubbles up through the batter, quickly crisping it and giving it this sort of sunburst effect. The dumplings and concomitant batter are then dumped upside down onto a plate. Voila! The crisped batter retains the shape of the wok (or other cooking vessel), giving the whole thing a kind of crispy umbrella effect. This is just my guess at the preparation...I could be totally wrong, so please correct me if you know otherwise. The dumplings were tasty, but their real star power came from their presentation and their texture - soft and moist on one side, perfectly crunchy with little bits of batter on the other.

We also ordered ma po tofu, but I neglected to get a picture of it. It was delicious, with both the spicy hot pepper flavoring and the numb of Sichuan peppercorns. You can find this dish in many Chinese restaurants, including very dumbed down (but delicious) versions at western Chinese restaurants.

Also ordered at random was a bowl of dough balls. No picture, and I wouldn't even know where to find them on the internet. Basically, they were gumball-sized spheres of gooey rice dough with a bit of sweetened bean paste in the middle, cooked and served in warm, slightly-sweet sugar water. It sort of looked like half a dozen misshapen golf balls sitting in a bowl of water. Apparently they are usually eaten for breakfast. They were fine.

Finally, we unknowingly got a bowl of steamed eggs. As opposed to the other dishes which found their way onto our table 10 minutes after we ordered, this dish took about 30 minutes.

Steamed eggs, in texture, are sort of reminiscent of an egg custard or a stiff pudding, though steamed eggs are much lighter, usually savory, and served warm. Soy and Pepper, a food blog I read from time to time, has a pretty good rundown on the preparation of one variation of this dish. As with omelets and quiche, I would guess that steamed eggs can be made with all kinds of ingredients; the version we had was just steamed eggs with a drizzle of unidentifiable, salty-sour brown sauce (I suspect the sauce was the same base for the sauce in the spicy beef dish mentioned above). Its almost buoyant consistency and understated flavor served as a sapid counterbalance to the rest of the heavily-seasoned dishes we ordered. In other words, not stupendous, but a good capstone to delicious meal.

Hong Kong Restaurant

2009-01-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

After a night of a perfectly controlled and reasonable amount of fun, Liz and I met a friend at the aforementioned Hong Kong style restaurant (HKR). No idea of the name because - surprise! - the signage is all in Chinese. Nonetheless, this place has been somewhat of a revelation for several reasons, which I shall list and, in my roundabout way, discuss.

First, its menu is small, without English and (for the most part) pictures, and all the like items are grouped together. Liz and I (mostly Liz) are trying to learn menu Chinese. We know the big ones now: pork, chicken, beef, lamb, rice, steak (no bones!), fire (meaning roasted, pan-fried, or grilled), sandwich, and a few others. However, since many Chinese menus are massive and are slapped together in a way that doesn't necessarily make sense to a couple of gringos like us, our menu Chinese will only get us as far as knowing what the dish's main protein will be, excepting when there are pictures on the menu. HKR, thankfully, gives you a rational, compact menu written in highly legible typeface. We don't always know precisely what we order, but at least we feel pretty confident that we won't be served a plate of regret, self loathing, and offal in brown sauce.

Second, the place has a definite Americana diner feel to it. If they served omelets or if I overheard a couple of old guys bitching about the Red Sox in between sips of heavily creamed and sugared coffee, I'd think I was back in New England. Okay, slight exaggeration, as there are roasted ducks and chickens (avec les tetes, bien sur!), but I digress. HKR is lined with spacious four-person booths; this is important because you don't get giant tables of Chinese families yelling at each other (which sort of disturbs, nay shatters, ambiance). And there are always a lot of people in HKR. A good diner should be packed with people - talking loudly but not shouting - to give it sort of a buzzing hive aura. HKR is clean (not that I'm a neat freak). They have nice pictures on the walls. Next to the kitchen, there are muted TVs which play sports (they had a Portland Trailblazers-LA Fakers game on today) and news. I like this because my first instinct is not to stare at them with blank stupidity as I try to parse the Mandarin (as is m habit with every other ambient, sound-on Chinese television), but rather to try to ascertain what is going on with careful observation. Seeing and not hearing is better. In general, it's just a good, familiar restaurant to walk into, and that's what you want in a breakfast spot.

Third, they have real coffee! Not instant coffee! I cannot overstate how important this is! Most places don't have coffee, unless you go to a "Western" restaurant (expensive, cheesy, and devoid of people), a coffee shop (expensive), or make it at home! And the coffee is good! Really good! I'm not the coffee snob I was when I lived in Oregon, but I know good coffee when I have it! Look! I'm writing with exc!amation points!

Fourth, the food is really tasty and inexpensive. It's not served family style, which is a plus because I hate having to come to a consensus or to order for other people or have other people order for me when I have a damn headache/haven't had coffee yet. As I mentioned in my previous post, the congee is top notch. The congee comes in half a dozen traditional flavors (i.e. pork, chicken, fish) and with the usual accouterments (chopped century egg, scallions, sliced mushrooms). It also comes with chunks of youtiao, which serve as veritable croutons with a texture reminiscent of fried dough. Note: youtiao in Cantonese means "fried ghost" - horrors! HKR also has delicious baked riced and vegetable bowls, as well as sandwiches. Hurray sandwiches! They're definitely Chinese style - with the requisite slightly sweet and very squishy white bread and gobs of mayo - but how can you complain when someone fries a pork chop, puts it between two slices of bread with some cheese and perfunctory vegetables, and gives it to you? You can't! Did I mention they have coffee!

Here's a couple photos. The congee up close; it's slightly brown because I stirred in a drizzle of soy sauce.

Here's the bird's eye view.

Ham sandwich at left; pork chop sandwich at right; coffee! You can see the youtiao on a plate peeking out from behind the congee as well.

Anyway, this place may not be anything special, especially if you've spent a significant amount of time in China and/or Hong Kong. But diners - or breakfast spots - in a specific sense are not special: they all have great French toast, western omlets, sandwiches, red leather booths, and long lines on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they have pissed off Portugeuese guys from East Providence, or Jerry Seinfeld, or the Fonz, or an awkward conversation between two people that just met the previous night. It's not the exclusivity or uniqueness of a breakfast spot that gives it cachet; it's good food, reasonable prices, and comfortable surroundings enveloped in sublime familiarity.

Putuo Temple

2008-11-19T20:35:00.000-08:00

Last Monday, Liz and I took the #26 bus to its very end to see the Putuo Buddhist Temple in Northwest Zhuhai. It is pretty out there, beyond the wide avenues and concrete abutments of New Xiangzhou and past some fairly provincial hamlets and dirt roads. Mind you, the temple's setting is not a wholly pastoral one: there's construction equipment and mini-mountains (some call them hills) of excavated dirt all throughout the area, as well as what appears to be the nascent groundwork for either a lightrail or raised highway.

There's plenty of construction going on inside the temple too, with contractors, carpentry stuffs, scaffolding, and concealing tarpaulins in many of the temple buildings. In my pictures, you can see piles of roofing and wall tile, ceramic adornments, and the aforementioned scaffolding, etc.

The Wet Market

2008-11-17T02:11:00.000-08:00

Not too much to say on this post...here are some photos (complete with captions) that I took of the Wet Market a little while back. Called thusly because the entire first floor is a veritable seafood emporium, the Wet Market also has lots of produce, eggs, dried goods, and Chinese women wielding meat cleavers in poorly lit areas. As always, click through to see the full slideshow.

I've got some more photos to put up in the next few days, so sit tight.

Obama got next

2008-11-04T20:37:00.001-08:00

I would like to thank Americans for voting with their heads and their hearts, not with their hate and fear. I'm glad to have a balla for president, even if he is a Bulls fan.

Wake's back

2008-11-01T03:51:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of Boston.com

Tim Wakefield, my favorite Red Sox pitcher of all time, will be back with the team next year. Wake currently has 164 career wins. If he is healthy and can put up his standard 12 wins a year for the next three seasons, Wake will surpass the immortal Cy Young and that scumbag from Texas for the most wins all-time in franchise history (both have 192). In addition, his 1,907 career strikeouts are tied for 77th all-time in Major League Baseball history. He already has more strikeouts than Ron Guidry, Bret Saberhagen, Frank Viola, one of the Niekros, and anybody nicknamed "Wayback" (groan). If he gets about 110 strikeouts next year (which is below his career average but probably a pretty good bet, judging from the last three years), he will surpass Whitey Ford, Al Leiter, Catfish Hunter, and Orel Hershiser. Much love Wake - keep it up for another 10 years.

Happy Birthday to throw me out the window, and photos of Shijing Shan

2008-10-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

I have been woken up by some pretty horrible, irritating things in China, but today I think takes the cake. Let me set the scene: I was sleeping very soundly - a feat unto itself if you've ever rested your head on a calcified Chinese mattress with its equally petrified pillow - when I started to stir at this...this...sound. It wasn't the ubiquitous car horn, jackhammering, or random building construction that you sometimes get but which we are for the most part spared because our apartment is on the 18th floor. No, my friends, it was something more nefarious and sinister. Rotten. Evil. The last sound you hear as you pass through the fourth circle of hell. It was "Happy Birthday to You" on a continuous loop. It was a tinny, midi-esque, lyric-less version that had all the acoustic depth of a ambulance siren. In fact, if it weren't for the lack of Doppler effect (meaning it was in motion), I might have thought (and prayed) that it was attached to some sort of vehicle. But of course it wasn't; wherever it was and whatever stationary demon spawn that acted as its sounding board was here to stay.

And on and on and on and on it went. There was never a fleeting hope of this damned song ever ending, for as soon as the final note of the chorus (the "to youuuuu" note) was struck, there, right on top of it like a tailgating pickup truck on 128 in rush hour, was the first note of the song ("Happy Birthday...") in catastrophic, gut wrenching liaison.

After several minutes of me being at least partially awake, I began to consider more lucidly where this horrible racket might be coming from. Let's see...the windows are closed, so that must mean it's either the loudest child's toy in all of creation in use on the ground several hundred feet below; or it's in an adjoining apartment, meaning it must be the second loudest child's toy of all time in order for it to seep through the foot-thick concrete walls. Hey, maybe it's a cellphone...what the hell kind of person has this as a cell phone ring, why haven't they picked up, and why hasn't the person on the other end given up in desperation? Oh, I've got it: someone has this as their alarm tone on their alarm clock. I remember one of my old housemates would sometimes set his alarm the day before and then sleep at his lady friend's house, meaning I would have to lumber into his room in a haze and flip the thing off. The left-on alarm also lead to Elaine borrowing a meat slicer to feed a starving cat, if memory serves.

At this point I was starting to see spots. Mercifully, I was spared "Happy Birthday to You" for about five minutes when an actual car alarm went off. That's right: I was happier to listen to a blaring car alarm then to have to hear that song. However, it was imprinted on my hearing, so when he car alarm went off and the song could once again be heard clearly, it was as if it never left.

While I try to talk myself out of jamming a pencil in my ears, here are some photos I took last week when Liz and I went on a hike up a mountain (Shijing Shan) at a local park (I use that term loosely) about ten minutes (by bus) from our apartment. The full album/slideshow is viewable in slideshow form here. All the photos in that album are represented here, so only check out the slideshow if you want to see the photos in high res and/or sans witty commentary.

To start: in my experience, parks in China are not vast green wilderness or even apportioned public land areas like Central Park; rather, they are a blend of amusement park, tourist attraction, and genuine park. They are closer to a ski resort in the summer time than they are to anything else - and Shijing Shan completes that comparison with a ski lift, a mountaintop restaurant, and this thing, which is not unlike an alpine slide:

But I'm getting ahead of myself. At he base of the mountain (more of a large hill, really) is something straight out of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee: bumper boats, bumper cars, cheesy little shooting galleries, and an "exotic" bird house. If you know Liz, you know she loves birds, but even the awesome grandeur and untold promise of this exotic bird house (basically about the size of two mobile homes) couldn't make us for over the RMB to gain entrance. Look how happy Liz looks outside, with a couple of peacocks tethered to a gold painted bench!

Reel it in a little hon' - your enthusiasm is spooking the locals! Actually, I think this photo is pretty cute, but I digress...

Also, there was, for some reason (art for art's sake) a large bronzed hand, measuring about six feet wide. I could not be convinced to lay in it, Fay Wray style.

Once you get beyond all the tacky stuff at the bottom, the hike is actually quite nice, offering some excellent views of the surrounding scenery...

...Jida (section south of Xiangzhou, where we live)...

...and of Xiangzhou (notice the "Boat Restaurant" on the right hand side).

Our apartment is one of the pinkish/beige buildings at the center of this photo.

Also at the top of the mountain was a neat rock formation, which I dubbed "Chinahenge" even though it most likely has no spiritual or historical bearing on anything.

Finally, at the absolute peak of Shijing Shan is a huge radio tower. It's massive, and is probably the reason that I get clear-as-a-bell cellphone reception in elevators.

Here's an artsy version of the tower, with a red Chinese banner in the foreground.

After we made our way down the mountain, we crossed the street and went over to Haibing Park, which is actually sort of similar to a Western style city park. Of course, this one had some kind of neat birds, such as the common kingfisher, seen here in the middle of a manmade lake...

...some sort of fake crane statuary (still looks pretty neat)...

...and some variety of wagtail (small white, gray, and black, on the cement lip that ringed the pond), so called because it wags its tail when to runs around.

Okay, "Happy Birthday to You" has finally stopped playing, though I can still hear it go on and on and on...to youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

It's great to see you're still in the bars

2008-10-16T01:28:00.000-07:00

Goddamnit I know. I'm the bloody JD Salinger of blogging. It's been forever. And there are no pictures. "Why no pictures? Where are the posts? What have you been doing over there that is keeping you from posting?" Well, I've been having a helluva a lot of fun. Let's examine the fun in greater detail shall we?

What does one do for fun in Zhuhai specifically (and, one assumes, in China in general)? The short, simple, and safe answer is that DVDs are cheap and plentiful. With Netflix in the USA, I probably watched more in terms esoterica, but here volume of consumption is the name of the game. One DVD can contain several movies or a season of a TV show. For less than $4 US, you can own every violent de Niro movie; the first 6 seasons of 24; a collection of eight "post-apocalypse" films; every Bond film EVER; every Wesley Snipes movie that you've never heard of; or a lot of dirty movies (or so I'm told). You can find pretty much anything if you know where to look - including some fairly esoteric, artsy films. I always try to talk myself out of renting/buying the interesting German film, simply because I know that I'm usually looking for something a little more escapist (or short, like a TV show). Anyway, volume, as I said, is key. I have a friend who will tear through a whole season of a TV series in a day; it took him about a week to watch all five seasons of The Wire. I don't watch TV like that, but I understand the sentiment.

What else does one do for fun in China? Bars, clubs, and BBQ (pronounced "bee-bee-cue" or just plain ol' "barbecue," if you're talking to an English speaker). The word bar is misleading, relative to what you would think of as a bar in a western country. You won't really find the dark, quiet dive bar that you like going to on a Tuesday night to watch a Celtics game. Aside from some hotel joints and Irish pubs (both of which are fairly expensive), bars here are essentially limited Karaoke places, Western bars (usually expensive and filled with rambunctious Aussies) and the outdoor establishments found on Walking Street in Gongbei (adjacent to the Macau border).

Karaoke is everything you've seen on TV: small, dimly lit room; terrible songs played at maximum volume; couches; bar girls; and lots of people saying "cheers" every five minutes. Western songs are often renditions reworked by a Chinese artist, so the pacing of the song is completely off. Every karaoke place has "Hotel California." If you come to China and go to a karaoke place with any Chinese people, they will ask you - nay, make you sing this song. In the words of the Dude, I hate the &%#@ing Eagles man, so this is an especially painful but expected part of ingratiating yourself with the locals. I don't do karaoke much, so let's move on, shall we?

Walking Street (a.k.a. Lianhua Lu, a.k.a. Lotus Lane, a.k.a. Ji Lu) in Gongbei is a special type of attraction. To start, I should note that almost no locals go there because it is a place featuring, shall we say, lots of women of ill repute. However, to dub it a trashy Red Light District isn't really a fair appraisal of the place. Walking Street proper is several hundred yards of open air bars, surrounded on both sides by clothing stores, restaurants, electronics stores, and the like. Lots of Taiwanese, Macanese, Japanese, Southeast Asians, and a smattering of gringos go to this area because there's lots of shopping, relatively cheap drinks, and ladies of the night. My favorite thing about Walking Street is the people watching, specifically watching the prostitutes scatter into the stores when a police van comes by to do a sweep. You see a van coming, and all of a sudden the go-go boots, small skirts, and clown makeup disappear. Also, when you're sitting at a bar on Walking Street, beggars, shoe shiners, and small song-singing children will come up and try to separate you from some of your money. Shoe shine (a really good one) is about 4RMB; having a little child sing you a song is usually 1 or 2 RMB; and beggars are annoying and persistent.

The most cruelly hilarious type of beggars are women with a child in their arms to elicit sympathy; now before you think I'm some sort of heartless monster, I should tell you that that child is not their child. It is a rented child. I don't know how they arrange it, but it is possible for women to rent a child for a few hours to boost their begging cachet. I know, I know, it's still very sad. Downright heart breaking. But it's China - you just have to laugh at the seemingly bizarre things that you are powerless to change. Also, our friends Luke (an American) and Ricky (from Cameroon) love telling the women that they want to eat their baby in Chinese. Why say something so horrible and wrong? Because it will make the women leave you the hell alone. It's a big game: you sit, have a few drinks, b.s. with the bartenders (these 20-something girls have taught me more Chinese than anyone), play liar's dice, laugh at the prostitutes, talk with the random foreigners, get your shoes shined, and tell the beggars to leave you the hell alone. I know it sounds very debauched and wrong, but that's just the game and that's just how it is. In my first days in China, an Aussie friend here gave me some solid advice that (to borrow a line from The Great Gatsby) I've been turning over in my mind ever since: "China's got 5000 years of culture. America's got 200 and Australia even less. Don't think you're going to go about changing the Chinese, because really it's you that had better go about changing a bit." Sage advice for living here, having fun, staying safe, and staying true to yourself, and, ultimately, for reading this blog as well.

Where was I before I started getting all philosophical...right, Walking Street. You meet all kinds of interesting folks down on Walking Street, and most of them are just doing what you're doing. I always go to Walking Street with a group of people and usually with Liz, so the prostitutes leave me/us alone. However, if you're alone or in a group of only men, the prostitutes, called ji (pronounced "gee," Chinese for chicken), will approach you, hand you a small piece of paper with their phone number on it, and get uncomfortably close to you. One time we were there in the afternoon talking to a Chinese-American guy who was sitting alone, waiting for his wife to come out of a foot massage parlor. He made a bet with his wife that in the time it took for her to get a foot massage that he could collect over 20 slips of paper, meaning that he would be approached by more than 20 ji. He easily had 30 when his wife returned, so I guess he "won" the bet. His prize was that his wife underestimated how enterprising ji can be.

Walking Street is also good because it is not loud, pretty safe, and an inexpensive staging area for doing something else in Gongbei. One thing you can do in Gongbei is underground go-karting. I've only done it once and it was fun...I mean, who wouldn't want to go to a go-karting place that also has a bar, right? Actually, me. I wouldn't want to do that. However, I did it once a bunch of friends, but thankfully there was no one else in the place because there was a raging typhoon outside. I don't want to say any more about the state of the go-karting place because I want my parents to be able to sleep soundly at night...suffice it to say that the cars are fast (and very stable) and so is the track.

Another fun but expensive thing to do is to go to Bar Street. Bar Street, which is very close to Walking Street, is a beautiful, tree-lined avenue with hotels, restaurants, and bars/nightclubs throughout. The two clubs I frequent - called Bar 88 and MTC - are very different from each other but they both serve alcohol in the same way: by the bottle. At bars/nightclubs, you (and presumably 3 or 4 friends, unless you are some sort of blistering, wealthy drunk) split a bottle of liquor (all the popular brands of vodka, gin, whiskey, and scotch), which the servers will mix with a mixer of your choice in a big jug (carafe? pitcher?) filled with some ice. My favorite is Jack Daniels and green tea (and somewhere my mother is shaking her head and saying "no no no, that is sooooo wrong"), which, if mixed correctly, is not too strong and doesn't make you feel like some sort of boozed up mess. Once you have said alcoholic concoction (or a glass of wine or a beer), you and everyone in your party will start playing liar's dice or, my favorite, rock-paper-scissors. Yes rock-paper-scissors. It sounds so stupid, but I swear that getting a group of 10 people to play rock-paper-scissors is one of the more enriching and entertaining ways to kill a few hours. You get to know everyone without talking a lot (important if your Chinese is as bad as mine), people from other tables come over and start playing, and you don't have to try and yell over the VERY LOUD music (more on that in a minute). It's a helluva lot of fun if you have any competitiveness to you at all and I think I'm going to bring it back to the US.

So about the two clubs and their really loud music: the music ranges from American and Chinese hiphop, pop, and techno to revved up versions of songs that you never thought could or should be revved up. Most notable is "Happy Birthday to You." Think of the most annoying, bubblegummy techno crap that you can and then put someone with a vaguely German accent singing "Happy Birthday to You" over it. Now imagine, if you will, that you're in Bar 88 - a big nightclub that looks somewhat nautical, but also like it was designed by someone that's seen Fritz Lang's Metropolis a few too many times - and "Happy Birthday to You" comes on. For some reason, the bartenders start handing out sparklers to people, and not like the cute little sparklers you got on the 4th of July when you were 11 years old. Big sparklers. The size of Bill Clinton's cigar. Massive. Now imagine that you're, say, six feet four inches tall and surrounded by a throng of listing, possibly very intoxicated Chinese people who are all about a foot shorter than you. When said Chinese people hear "Happy Birthday to You" and get sparklers, they go bonkers and you cover your eyes because those damn sparklers are right at eye level. I mean, the whole thing is really hilarious and, white-hot magnesium aside, a lot of safe fun. The bartenders juggle flaming bottles. People come up and "cheers" you constantly. There's a million tv screens, all playing concert footage of some random American hiphop, R&B, or pop concert (i.e. Ja-Rule, Usher, Beyonce) without the sound on. And no one - and I mean NO ONE - can dance. I don't know if it's endemic to 20-something Chinese people or what, but NO ONE can dance. I mean, I can't dance, but they really really really can't dance. I've only been to a handful of clubs in the USA, but I seem to remember being very intimidated by everyone else's ability to dance. Here, I'm bloody Fred Astaire and they're Elaine from Seinfeld. Amazing.

Anyway, Bar 88 is loud, crazy, and fun. MTC is smaller and somewhat more low key. Still loud, but you can still talk to your friends, play the aforementioned games, and gawk at the impish stage dancers and their sequined dresses. MTC has a much more modern feel and generally a place that I prefer, inasmuch as I go to Bar Street. As a rule I only go to Bar Street if someone else is paying or if someone else drags me there. For me, the clubs are too much spectacle and not enough camaraderie, but that's just, like, my opinion, man.

Almost every night in Gongbei (or anywhere else) ends as every night should: with pieces of meat on a stick, grilled to perfection. I cannot overstate my love for the BBQs. They're everywhere in Zhuhai and they're open very very late. You can get pork, chicken, beef, grilled vegetables, fish, fish/pork/chicken balls, Chinese hotdogs (similar to American ones, except slightly sweet and smaller), fried tofu, and more. My favorites are the grilled eggplant (cooked in tinfoil with about 25 cloves' worth of diced garlic), giant oysters (also cooked with a mountain of garlic), any green vegetable, and the guilty indulgence of a hotdog. Liz really likes these things that are like slender green onions, skewered through the ends and coated in some sort of magical brown sauce (not soy - I'm not a moron). BBQs are not like hotdog stands or lunch carts in the States; rather, you go to a BBQ, pick out what you want from a table of meat and produce, sit down at a table, and then a waitress will bring you your cooked food and whatever you want to drink. They're always on sidewalks, always have people at them, and are always a good idea. I've only been here a couple months and am still getting through the "I miss this from America, I miss that from America" stage, so I'm not to the point where I think "man, I'll really miss this thing or that thing about China when I return to America." That being said, I can say unequivocally that I will miss BBQ when I go back to the States. Oh my god, I will miss it. One of my least favorite things about having to teach (or do anything) at 8am is that I probably won't have the opportunity to have BBQ at 2am the night before, regardless of whether or not I have been drinking. In America when you've been out all night, you either make some cheese fries or a grilled cheese at your house, maybe order a pizza, or get a sober buddy to drive you to IHOP or some trash like Taco Bell. Here, it's BBQ. Oh my god, I love BBQ. I have to teach all day tomorrow and Sunday, and I am dying on the inside just thinking about how I probably won't have BBQ for a few days. Shed a tear for me won't you?

In closing, I would like to say that I'm not hitting the bottle really hard or anything. Most nights here are just nice and quiet - hang out at home, eat some dinner, watch a movie, hang out with friends, go out to a restaurant, doddle around on the internet, etc. If one chooses to go out, the late nights are just more of a lifestyle necessity: we teach nights quite frequently, so if we want to go down to Gongbei, etc., we usually don't get started until after 10pm. Before we left, I joked with Liz that we were going to be like NBA players, who never hit the nightclubs or restaurants post-game until 11pm simply because their job keeps them late. Same thing with all the Broadway types I used to work with back home. We aren't crazy and, much like the States, still keep it pretty low key; however, sometimes you just have to play rock-paper-scissors, sing some songs, crack some jokes, and see the sunrise.

Wanshan Island photos

2008-10-06T19:31:00.000-07:00

Here are the photos from Wanshan Island. Liz took some and I took some - I didn't bother to give a photo credit because I don't remember who had the camera in their hand. Also, I should point out that these were taken with Liz's little Fujifilm point and shoot, as I wasn't sure how safe my camera would be in our hotel. As it turns out, it would have been fine and I was kicking myself for not bringing it along.

Liz has photos up on her blog as well, along with a more thorough account of the trip.

Back from Wanshan Island.

2008-09-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

Liz and I just returned with our American friend Luke from a little two-day sojourn out to Wanshan Island. I'll keep this short (photos will be up later) as I'm fairly exhausted from laying around on a beach, eating mountains of seafood, and enjoying the nightlife a little too thoroughly.

The beach wasn't awesome. It was more than adequate, but also kind of small, dirty and only accessible by boat. On the plus side, there were never more than about 50 people.

The village we stayed in was little more than a small fishing port. Had maybe three or four restaurants and the requisite bbq spot, all right on the water next to the fishing trawlers. Our hotel was fine - relatively clean, safe, bug free, nice view, and at the top of a million flights of stairs. Almost everyone we met was really nice (except some folks at Karaoke...long story). And the food...oh the food. Piles of seafood, all caught within the last few days and all freshly killed and cleaned. There were these kind of lobster/shrimp looking things called lei niao sha...and quarter-sized clams that you dip in spicy soy sauce...I could go on and on. More to come after we get some sleep.

Liz has a blog

2008-09-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

"You know, you remind me of a poem I can't remember. And a song that may never have existed. And a place I'm not sure I've ever been to." - The Simpsons

Liz has a China blog too, called Footloose Fish - you can access it from the side panel or at:
http://footloosefish.blogspot.com/

Typhoon photos

2008-09-27T03:49:00.000-07:00

When Liz and I were leaving for this great adventure, everyone told us to be careful, safe, and the like. Like a seven-year-old who's been told not to look at the sun during an eclipse, I decided to go against my own best interest and venture out with some new friends (Michael and Bev) into the remnants of a typhoon. I assure you, the typhoon was still blowing hard and, yes, we brought beer. Here are photos - I'm going to try to them with a Picasa slideshow because there are so many. Simply click on the slideshow to see full size versions of individual slides, or to see a larger slideshow.

Tim Wakefield approved

2008-09-26T08:10:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to shoot out a belated congrats to the Sox on making the postseason yet again. As far as autumn in New England goes, I think I'll miss October baseball more than fall foliage, Sam Adams Octoberfest, and hating returning college students.

Special congratulations go to Jason Bay, who had to switch the dates of his timeshare in Sanibel to November for the first time in his career; to MVP Dustin Pedroia; to captain 'Tek and his robust .220 batting average; to Tito's fleece pullover; to Dice-K's finesse; and to Tim Wakefield, my all time favorite Red Sox player.

(Photo courtesy of Surviving Grady)

Yes, Tim, I also approve.

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled China programming...

The Island of my mind was not this dirty

2008-09-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

We went to Qi'ao Island last week. It was actually pretty nice considering we were able to get there by bus. A side note on the buses here: they are very frequent, cheap, and efficient, and you thank your lucky stars if you are able to get an air conditioned one; they usually aren't too crowded except during rush hour; and absolutely nothing is in English (shocking I know). Anyway, we took a bus (including a detour where we went about 20 minutes beyond our stop and ended up in a Chinese office/industrial park) and were able to escape the throngs of people for a few hours.

Qi'ao Island is just off the coast of Tangjiawan on the northeastern tip of Zhuhai, and is accessible by a nice bridge via bus #85. Qi'ao isn't super exotic or anything, though I guess "exotic" is relative to whatever you know and expect. On a sliding scale, Qi'ao Island is more exotic than Rhode Island, Fire Island, and Staten Island. Actually it is more built up than I would have expected. There are several university affiliate branches out there, as well as some smallish factories, an international school, some restaurants (more on that later), and a few oldish fishing villages. I read that there are also old ruins and temples, but I didn't find any. It was about 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,000 Celsius) and we underestimated how much water a couple of gringos would need to stay strong, so our hike was perhaps not as awesomely awesome to the awesomest power as it could have been. That is to say that we cut it a little shorter than we would have liked. Oh well.

In any case, I'll let the pictures do the talking. Also, I'm still waiting on more suggestions for Snake Whiskey...

***

Here's the entrance to the mountainous "area" in which we went hiking...let's just call the "area" a park, because the actual name of the place is both long winded and completely nonsensical, as you can see by the writing above the archway:

I have no idea what "ollywood [sic] International Film and Television Culture City" is, as the park does not in any way involve "ollywood", "International", "Film", "Television", "Culture", or "City" (it may involve "and", and nature's inherent complexity probably requires a conjunction or two to keep on keepin' on). Side note: it's like the joke my highschool European history teacher used to tell about the Holy Roman Empire - "It was neither 'Holy' nor 'Roman' nor an 'Empire'." When Mr. Jackson said that, we just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Perhaps there was once a movie filmed there...as far as I could tell, there were just a few beat up little concrete huts, a giant radar tower on the mountaintop, some fishermen's shacks, a couple hard-to-access beaches, dead frogs, and menacing giant spiders on their equally menacing webs. Not sure what the scenery would give you cinematically, but clearly someone from the crew stole the "H" on the entrance sign when they found out that their contract didn't carry into post production.

Here's one of those dilapidated concrete huts I was talking about.

Here's a view of the coastline, taken as we were walking down a little dirt path.

After our hike, we found a beach a few miles away that had a really wonderful, quiet restaurant. We had some sort of pork dish (or maybe it was duck)...

...and the best tofu dish I've eaten in my entire life, cooked with noodle-thin mushrooms...

Also, out front was a guy raising and lowering a giant fishing net into the water using pedal power. You can see the net being raised on the giant harness, as well as the fisherman in the small covered area on the right.

Also, I'd like to note that we survived our first typhoon, which made landfall here on Tuesday afternoon and night. After staying up all night at a friend's apartment (typhoon party), we went out and took come shots of the destruction. I'll get those photos up this weekend.

Snake Whiskey

2008-09-16T23:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I saw my first bottle (jug) of whiskey (?) with a cobra inside it; I'm thinking about buying it and doing a more grotesque version of my buddy's chronicle of drinking an Agent Zero. I just asked Liz what she thought might be a good mixer for Snake Whiskey. Her answer: "regret." She's probably right. Personally, I think Coke would work, but read somewhere that you are supposed to do shots (which I hate) and then bite a slice of cantaloupe (like a lime after tequila). Any ideas? Not trying to get bombed...just hoping for some interesting takes on this exotic, possibly medicinal liquor.

Snake Whiskey and apple juice probably wouldn't taste very good, but at least you could call it an "Original Sin." A good drink name would be "the Indiana Jones" (as in "why'd it have to be snakes?"), but I haven't gotten a whole lot further than that.

I'm now accepting submissions - all drink ideas that DO NOT include consuming the actual snake will be considered. All drink ideas that DO include consuming the actual snake will be hilarious.

Island photos, Autumn festival, Gongbei and more

2008-09-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

Here's the second round of photos. For some reason I have been terrible about taking photos of a lot of the things that to me make this place so unique: the vendors, the random guys on bicycles carrying van-sized bundles of styrofoam and cardboard, the food, Chinese fashion, and the like. I may have to commandeer Liz's point-and-shoot to take some photos when I leave my bulky kit at home. She won't mind...I think she kind of likes me.

Here's an old rundown apartment building across the way from where we were staying after we first arrived. I'm not sure, but my guess is that these types of places were first built when Zhuhai started to expand beyond a fishing village some 20 years ago. They're still around - moreso away from commercial areas - and are not the type of place that I would want to live.

Here is Ye Li Dao (or Ye Li Island) during the day, as seen from our 18th floor apartment.

The boxy, temple-looking thing on the left is actually a restaurant, which is visible at night...

I took this during the Mid-Autumn Festival. If you don't know what the Mid-Autumn Festival is, let me break it down for you by way of a simple equation: Halloween + (Phish concert - illegal drugs) + China + (4th of July - universal drunkenness) + Lunar Calendar = Mid-Autumn Festival. There are families picnicking everywhere. Little kids carry around traditional paper lanterns. People are happy. Glowsticks. Blinking, lit up toys. Disgusting mooncakes (no one likes them). And old people dance in the streets!

I probably snapped off 40 frames to get this scene: just across the causeway on Ye Li Island, they set up a circular fenced off area and played Chinese swing music (for lack of a better description). One by one, older Chinese couples would get up and dance. Well, more shuffle around in rhythm while holding hands. And on and on it went.

Ye Li Island has a path that goes all the way around it and takes a few hours to walk, or so I'm told. We only made it about 15 minutes in. I snapped these photos of people approaching on bikes and on foot. It was very crowded, in a good way.

Here's a shot of some locals I took today in Gongbei - the busy, somewhat touristy area that includes the Macau border.

The bike carts you see are often filled with anything from trash to produce.

Not sure what to make of this. It was in front of a hotel-looking building, which I assume was actually a government building of some kind.

As you can perhaps tell by the glass tubing, the plane gets lit up at night (I'll try to get a photo if I'm ever in the area).

The rest of the shots were taken from Lover's Road in Gongbei, about an hour before sunset.

Here's Liz, with Macau in the background. Or Macau, with Liz in the foreground...however you want to look at it. Regardless, if you click through and blow up the photo, you can see the crown of the Grand Lisboa in the skyline just above Liz's head.

Here are two shots up Lover's Road in the other direction. You can see part of sprawling Zhuhai in the first...

...and a semi-funky shot where I was playing around with the f-stop.

We were seaside during low tide, so there was a flock of Little Egrets jumping around in the mud looking for dinner.

Liz told me they were Little Egrets. I have no idea. The only birds I see these days are either skinned, roasted, and hanging in shop windows, or are locked in little wire cages waiting to be skinned, roasted, and hung in a shop window. As an aside, we had lunch yesterday at an outdoor noodle place that adjoined a sidewalk stall where you could have a lady kill, pluck, and gut a live chicken or goose for you. Good noodles. I plan on going back during the chicken stall's off hours.

As I said, it was low tide. There was also a guy wading around in a larger tidal pool looking for small crabs.

Chinese Quahoging, my friends. Chinese Quahoging.

First day photos in Xiangzhou

2008-09-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

People have been asking for photos, so here they are in the approximate order I took them. Liz and I had time the first day we were in town to walk about in our area (called Xiangzhou...sort of the Brooklyn of Zhuhai, as best I can tell), so these first few photos are as close as you'll get to my first impressions (minus, regrettably, any food photography). Click on the photos to see higher res versions. At some point I'll get a Flickr account and make this photo thing a little more streamlined, but currently I feel like some content is better than no content

This is sort of typical highrise architecture in Zhuhai. Usual setup on the main boulevards (or "beilu") is a 20-story apartment or office building with a one- to four-story shop of some kind at the bottom. In the pictures above and below, there are large electronics stores at the bottom.

Same building pictured here on the left. Our apartment is in the second set of tan buildings on the left. We're on the other side of the building, 18th floor (more on that in a bit).

Two old men lounge around in the shade of an alley; one of them is some sort of cobbler. It's at least 90 degrees out. Every alley and sidestreet is full of people fixing things (cobblers, tailors, small engine mechanics), cleaning things (carpets, furniture, dishes), and, of course, selling things (clothes, shoes, sunglasses, noodles, whole roasted chickens, dried fish, produce, Chinese medicine, DVDs, juice, tea, and beer). I'll make sure I get some shots of the different vendors and post them here. Important to note is how safe I feel here. Other than the threat of pickpockets and the occasional drunken idiot, I think common sense (no dark alleys at 2am) will keep us very safe.

Silk flowers in a storefront.

A cat leashed to a tree. The angle of its neck makes me think it's giving me the once over.

Banyan trees line one side of Lover's Road. Lover's Road (more pictures to come in future posts) is the main thoroughfare that meanders along the seaside in Zhuhai.

We took a bus south along Lover's Road and hopped off in a beachy part of Jida, a slightly less residential part of Zhuhai than Xiangzhou. We stopped, had some malted beverages and watched the sky turn dark. This little seaside bar (an anomaly in Zhuhai) channels its inner Thailand and places some lanterns inside kayaks planted upright in the sand. I got this photo by putting my camera on our table and telling everyone not to move. I need a damn tripod. More to come soon.

First post, two weeks deep

2008-09-11T19:04:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody. My apologies for the delay in setting this up. For reasons that are too frustrating and inane to recount, I didn't get a stable internet connection until about two days ago. If I had my act together, I would have diligently written down my initial thoughts upon arrival ("wow, everything is in Chinese!" "Wow, everyone smokes everywhere - even in elevators!" "Wow, Cantonese people are short!" "Wow, Chinese fashion is like reading a newspaper with a migraine!"). Sadly, you'll just have to dive right in, without the all the wonderment of encountering any place for the first time. By now I've been living and working here for nearly two weeks - hardly a veteran, I know - so please accept my apologies if I casually throw something out there without explaining it. That is not to say that I know everything about where I am, etc., but that the part of this blog that was to be about discovery will start in medias res, so to speak.

That leads me to the purpose of this blog, titled "Separate Incidents": firstly, I require a forum to write my thoughts, lest this whole experience be lost. I've also been told that expat English teachers' writing skills sometimes erode after a year or two of speaking simply, so I'm trying to stave off that brand of scurvy with a lime of eloquent blogging.

I've also recently taken up photography (Nikon D40 with a 18-55mm kit lens and a 55-200mm telephoto w/ VR, if you're interested) and want to have a place to show off pictures, get some input, and generally give the hobby a sense of purpose. Yes, I have a need to display whatever I shoot - as the good book said, you don't light a candle and put it under a bucket (or bushel). As I've only been taking photos (with effort) for a few months, I can't really say what type of photography you're going to see here; there will probably be landscape/cityscape shots, some portraiture, LOTS of food photos, and maybe some artsy fartsy pieces that won't make me look like a total hack.

Lastly and most importantly, Separate Incidents is to be a window into my daily life here in sunny Zhuhai for family, friends, colleagues, and anyone who wants to read it. Phone calls to/from China are expensive; emails are fleeting; letters are slow; and I need you folks to feed my latent narcissism. Anyone who wishes to reach out can do so either in the comments section of the most recent post, or can email me at the usual place.

Separate Incidents is nothing more than a collection of observations, photos, and, of course, the occasional rant about the Boston Celtics or the Red Sox. Hopefully we all learn something from this.

Friends, food, and New Year's

2008-01-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

Here's a laundry list of things that have been keeping me (us) happy and entertained for the last few weeks.

Firstly, we purchased the seasons 1-18 of The Simpsons on DVD for about $4 US. I have been watching The Simpsons since it first aired. My wonderful and incredibly rational parents never seemed to have a problem with the occasionally foul mouthed program, so I just sort of ran with it for - gulp - almost two decades. I watched it when it was the smartest comedy on TV in the mid-90s (and I didn't get half the jokes); when the celebrities ruefully dominated and centered the show to the point of stagnation; when the show hit its absolute nadir in 2002 with the "screaming caterpillar" episode; and when it came back a year or two ago, a Lazarus of sorts, with rediscovered wit and a heightened randomness I took to be a tacit hat-tip to erratic plot arks of Family Guy. I've spent more time watching and quoting the show than one man should, but never in all my years have I owned even a single episode. Always subject to the whims of syndication, I could never simply throw on a DVD or a tape and watch whatever I wanted. That all changed last week, and, friends, I simply couldn't be happier.

We went to Dim Sum a few weeks back with some of Liz's students - pretty good time all around. Dim Sum is one of my favorites, and has been ever since I first had it with my parents. Essentially course after course of appetizers, Dim Sum is Cantonese brunch. Dumplings, noodles, congee (a.k.a. jook, a.k.a. rice porridge, a.k.a. delicious), egg rolls, steamed vegetables, Chinese pastries, and chicken feet magically appear on your table (after one of our nice putonghua-speaking accomplices do the ordering). I apologize for the photos: the light was terrible.

That same day, we went to a Hunanese restaurant in Gongbei with a couple friends, one of whom happens to be from Hunan and did a superb job ordering all the food. Hunan is widely known as both the birthplace of Mao Zedong (every Hunan restaurant is adorned with his picture, or, in some cases, a life-sized bronze statue) and as one of China's two spicy provinces (along with Sichuan). Our Hunanese friend ordered us a smattering of dishes ranging from savory-but-unspicy vegetables (for our fourth friend, a Canadian with a somewhat low tolerance of spice) to a sublimely, delicately spicy pot of beef, peppers, and julienned potatoes/root vegetables. There was also a fabulous dish of very spicy, thinly sliced potatoes that would have been the champion of the night, were it not for the beef dish. Our friend also attempted to order us donkey, as Liz and I have yet to try it; alas, we arrived at the restaurant towards the end of the night and they happened to be out of ass. Also unfortunate is that I did not bring a camera. I do not like to carry expensive camera equipment at night in Gongbei, an area infested with prostitutes, grifters, pickpockets, and other malcontents. Next time we go - which will be sooner rather than later - I will come back bearing photographic evidence. (Note: since then, I have discovered three Hunan restaurants near to my apartment; I shall go soon bearing a camera).

What else, what else, what else. Took these cool photos from the roof.

We went to Macau the week before Christmas. Let me just start of by saying that I would move to Macau in a heartbeat. I really like Zhuhai a lot, but there's just something about Macau that draws me in. Narrow streets. Everything in Portuguese. Vague, Las Vegasesque feel to the place. The utter mishmash of languages. The colonial history. I just love it. Senado Square is beautiful, if a little touristy; it reminds me of Puerto Rico. Fisherman's Wharf is totally touristy crap like you'd find in Vegas: they have a fake Roman Coliseum, a fake Middle Eastern locale, a fake Chinese temple, a fake volcano, fake colonial houses in the Portuguese architectural style, a fake African restaurant...it just goes on and on. I'm shocked they didn't have fake Pyramids or a fake Eiffel Tower. Nonetheless, it was very pleasant and not crowded, and they had a bakery where we could get donuts - yum!

Christmas Eve came and we cooked a big feast with our friend Luke from upstate: I did my mom's southern style sweet potatoes with brown sugar and pecan topping (walnuts substituted for pecans); southern style green beans; and a pan gravy. Liz did an incredible no-bake cheese cake. Our friend did a butterflied roast pork loin with apple stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, and peas. Overall everything was delicious...there was a lot of the last minute preparation (roasting the loin and the garlic for the mashers, slapping together the gravy) made more difficult because we had to shuttle things here and there between three different cooking locations. No complaints, though: we had a nice, traditional, leisurely dinner that didn't involve eating with sticks and/or at a restaurant.

From Christmas in China 2008

We got a (fake) Christmas tree here too, with lots of ornaments, lights, and a star. It's about 5 feet tall, slightly haggard, but does the job.

From Christmas in China 2008

Feliz Navidad! Er... Sheng Dan Kuai Le!

Post-dinner, Christmas Eve was spent at our local western watering hole. It was a mess.

On Christmas day, Liz gave me an alarm clock (awesome), a sweater (awesome), and fuzzy slippers (awesome). I especially appreciated the gifts that would keep me warm. It doesn't really get below 50 degrees here, but it feels much colder for three reasons: one, my body has recalibrated somewhat to this climate, meaning that 50 degrees feels much cooler; two, none of the apartments have insulation and they are all made of pure concrete and steel, so our apartment is actually colder than the outdoors; three, we have no heat source of any kind, and I am not about to drop a bunch of money on a stupid heat fan. I don't want to give the wrong impression to my friends that happen to be living in such snow entrenched-climes as Chicago, New England, or the greater Northwest (yikes!), as the weather here is lovely and I haven't had to use a snow shovel or de-icer once, and would not under any circumstances consider donning a pair of gloves. However, much like how New England can feel absolutely miserable when it's only 75 degrees, Zhuhai feels positively icy at 10pm on a given winter night.

New Year's was a lovely if not debauched evening. We started off at the beautiful apartment of our Chinese friend, whom I shall call DD. A little background on our past relationship with DD is in order, I think. Liz and I first met her through our American friend Luke. Whenever she invites us over to her house or out for dinner, she always shows us or introduces us to incredible things that very likely we would have no way of finding or experiencing otherwise. Such past examples include: rollerbladers in nightclubs (the night we learned competitive rock-paper-scissors); doing shots of Chinese whiskey distilled with tiger bone (yes, tiger bone); homemade barbecue and Sichuan hotpot; and, on Christmas, a really elegant chain restaurant called "6000."

On New Year's, DD invited us over to make jiaozi (a.k.a. gyoza, a.k.a dumplings) with her family. Basically, one person (DD's sister, in this case) rolls out hundreds of pieces of dough into little coaster-sized jiaozi wrappers. Then, another person (me, Luke, Liz, DD, and DD's mother, in this case) puts about a tablespoon of jiaozi filling (usually some combination of ground pork, green vegetables, egg, mushrooms, etc.) in the middle, and then seals the whole thing up by folding, pressing, and crimping the edges together. Ultimately, the "perfect" jiaozi will take on a slight crescent shape, with expertly crimped undulations of dough running along the edge of the dumpling's concave side. For me, Liz, and Luke, the "perfect" jiaozi remained in the theoretical realm, as our attempts were usually uneven, partially full, and sort of ugly. Well, not exactly true: not to toot my own horn, but I got pretty decent at making them by the end of the night; in fact, I found the whole process very relaxing and therapeutic! In any case, the three Americans were no match for DD and her family - especially DD's mother. This woman was an absolute machine. I had to learn the folding techique from watching DD's sister, as her mother - who has made millions of jiaozi, I'm sure - was so fast and fluid with her movements, that I could not perceive the different steps. The effortless and knowing way DD's mother would seal those suckers up reminded me of watching my own mother make biscuits - just completely unconscious, like she could do it if struck blind.

After we had put together what seemed like a million dumplings, DD's mother and father commenced to cooking them - either by boiling or steaming them (not sure). The fully cooked ones rolled by me and my American counterparts we easily identifiable (lumpy) but still delicious. Thankfully we were permitted to eat ones rolled by defter hands.

Following dinner, DD, Liz, Luke, and I sat around drinking some good red wine and talking. DD, whose English is passable (and better than our Chinese), inevitably went over to a very dangerous closet in her apartment: the place where she keeps the booze. DD is a popular lady, and receives a lot of thank you gifts from friends and clients; in China, you express your thanks with expensive cigarettes or, for non smokers such as DD, alcohol. I already mentioned the tiger bone whiskey. She also has what must be a two-gallon bottle of Hennessy (Chinese people like cognac). But on this night, New Year's, she broke out one of the most astounding alcoholic beverages - perhaps tonic is the right word - that I've ever seen: deer penis whiskey. Strong stuff no doubt, and very expensive. DD convinced the four of us (not a difficult feat) to knock back a modest shot of the stuff, which didn't taste too bad. Then Luke and I knocked back two more, then the four of us finished the smallish bottle...and let me tell you...WHOA! Like nothing I ever felt. Not drunk in the least, but just...amped. Luke and I were talking a mile a minute, we both turned bright pink, and we both felt like we could throw a car. Seriously. This was the kind of thing you read about in regards to PCP, cocaine, and that lot (minus the turning pink, I assume), though I think it was probably more testosterone than anything else. Just awesome, wild stuff. If you're ever in China and someone offers you a bottle of deer penis whiskey, take it for the love of god!

With a gut full of jiaozi and the physical strength to punch through a wall, us Americans headed back to Luke's pad for a little while before going to a New Year's party at a night club. Some stuff happened. There was music, and a dance floor, and someone (not me) got sick all over someone else (also not me). We went home fairly early in the night. What else can you say? I stopped being excited about New Year's a while ago. It's a holiday for people that don't drink to get drunk, and for people that do drink to get very drunk. You have fun, stay safe, and move on. Happy New Year! Xin Nian Kuai Le!

On New Year's Day, we went out for the first time to what is now my favorite breakfast spot: a new Hong Kong restaurant just north of the Jusco. Unfortunately, the restaurant was packed, so we were "forced" to go get our hair washed at the salon next door. "Hair washed?" you say. "What the hell?" Before you judge, you should know that getting your hair washed involves laying down, getting a full head, neck, and hand massage, and, if you want, an ear cleaning and a brush and blow dry (Liz got princess curls). It's like heaven. In the States I always hated getting my hair washed at a salon because it was usually done by some bitchy woman from Revere that talked to her friend about last night's episode of "Dancing with the Stars" while she pulled out wads of my hair. Here, it's awesome and cheap. Just heaven.

After the wash, we were able to land a table at the Hong Kong restaurant. We got three bowls of congee and three orders of rice, green vegetables, and beef cooked in individual clay pots. Really amazing food when you're trying to ward off deer penis whiskey's residual demons. The entire menu at this restaurant is in Chinese, so in subsequent visits we just have to hope our knowledge of Chinese characters will get us through. We went this morning and ended up with congee (again) and a pork chop sandwich, which is roughly what we thought we were getting!