Buildings and Clothes

OK, so I'm still having trouble getting photos up. The internet connection from China is not very good; I suspect that the cable is still not yet fully repaired from the earthquake off Taiwan. If that is not the case, and this is as good as it gets... Well, then it becomes less likely I'll manage to get many photos up before coming home. If mike's super-phone becomes operational, perhaps we could use that, but that too seems to not be making more progress.

Anyway, China is very good. I said last time the food was amazing; well, the spell was broke and we stumbled across our first bad meal here. In fact, it may have been the worst meal I've ever seen. Mike and Sarah and I wandered around looking for dinner, hoping to find a restaurant with either pictures or English on the menus, and eventually found someplace a bit off the main road. We walked in and sat down, and some workers walked by us outside, saw us through the windows, and laughed at us. This should have been a warning sign. We sat down and ordered what looked to be nice dishes from the menu.

The first one came out, and we got a bowl of burnt peppers, cut up bone with a little meat on it, and a few burnt peanuts. We strongly suspect the meat was dog meat, based on the width of the bones (fairly reliably too thick to be chicken bones), and the scantness of meat on them.

The second plate was, no kidding, a huge dish of greasy bacon with a few peppers thrown in. Beijing food is pretty greasy in general (it seems it is notorious for this among people from other areas of China), but the restaurants we usually eat at manage to keep this to a manageable level. This, there was no managing. It was amazing. It was amazing that someone would think to eat this, and not die of a heart attack immediately afterwards.

Luckily, the third dish was a relatively edible sweet and sour chicken, so we ate a bit of that, laughed and took pictures of the other stuff, then left and found a bakery to get the taste out of our mouths. It was very funny.

Tonight was a much better dinner. Mike and I skated South towards the area we had previously found the shoe shop and music store, and found a really good equivalent of a Chinese diner, with the added bonus of pictures on the menus. We got some decent pork dish, a really tasty beef-pepper chinese burrito type thing, and a really tasty vegetable-and-seafood dish. We're not quite sure what the seafood in the dish was, it was cut into thin, inch or two long strips. We're suspecting starfish, but that may be us hoping we tried something exotic and tasty.

Our luck just improved after that. As we were eating, in walked two Chinese guys who looked to be our age or a bit younger in low-hanging thugged out western jeans and similarly styled jackets, and one was carrying a skateboard. So we both jumped up and shouted "Friend!" at them in Chinese and ran up to them. Mike asked them where the skateboard shop was in Chinese, and after working on getting it out for half a minute or so, the dude with the skateboard said in perfect English, "Yea man, there's one right down the road." His English was good enough that it was fairly clear he had spent some time in the States (his clothing suggested as much too). It was funny.

Anyway, we got the directions from him and finished dinner, then headed down the road (by this point we had given up on getting back in time for the acrobatics show that was scheduled). On the way I bought a jacket, which I really like cause it isn't too flashy, no graphics or whatnot, but the cut of it is subtly but definitely Chinese. We eventually found the skateshop. Once there, we made friends with the store clerks and bought a real sweet deck from a new Chinese skateboard company (We both wanted it, but bought it now in hopes that we would find more from that company in Shanghai. It's apparently a very new company). We watched a skateboard dvd made by that company and talked to the store clerks for a bit.

It was sweet. OK, off for now.
Hope things are well in the states.

-Tom