killer fridays

After one week of straight, cold drizzle, the weekend is upon us. Highlights of this week include purchasing a new, pink rain poncho, realizing that my cell phone actually made a full recovery and nearly throwing up not once but twice in a period of less than 48 hours due to sheer nausea from eating disgusting food choices (both times, choices that were not made by me. See how I suffer for the poor judgment of others? Life is so hard for me...)

PINK PONCHO
In some places, rain brings puddles to splash in or a respite from the blinding heat. In Shanghai, rain just brings misery. It cant even really be counted as rain, it's like a constant light drizzle making me think that the origins of Chinese water torture probably originated from this city. I can see the conversation now:

"What will make people go crazy?"
"Well, I'm from Shanghai and let me tell you about what happens to this city at the end of Feb..."

In Shanghai whenever there's more than just a touch of moisture in the air, the following is sure to happen with grim certainty:
1. it will be either way too cold/ way too humid
2. your feet will be wet
3. your apartment will refuse to warm up
4. you will get poked in the head with umbrellas
5. there will be no cabs
6. people will shove you out of the way to get a cab
7. everything will smell bad

I've been riding my bike a lot as of late in the rain in an effort to avoid the inconveniences of the situations posed in numbers 2, 4, 5 and 7 and to minimize the affects of situation 7.

While in China some people are able to do this no problem:


If I attempted it, I would probably be doing this:

No thanks.
So on Monday, Andy and I went to buy these beauties:

I got a pink one, Andy opted for a manly teal. RMB25/each and 15 minutes later we emerged looking like giant Easter eggs but fully protected from the rain. SUPER hot.

CELL PHONE RECOVERY
Earlier I posted about how my cell phone was stuck on 02/12/2009 for all perpetuity. Well, that wasn't quite the whole story. It was actually just stuck (so I thought) on the date 12. So the month would change. One day it was 02/12/2009, the next it was 03/12/2009, then the next it was 04/12/2009.

Figured it out yet?

I was reading the date wrong. 02/12/2009 was not actually FEBRUARY 12 2009 as I originally thought, it was in fact, DECEMBER 02 2009. Isn't that just the darndest? I swapped the dates around and now the phone is fine although I'm a bit concerned about my apparently terrible powers of deduction as it took me nearly a week and a half to realize the date thing.

DISGUSTING FOOD
Wednesday night I joined up with some friends for what I thought would be a simple Japanese meal. Instead the night devolved into a food Ripley's Believe it or Not with us picking fishy meat off of this freak show:


That's right, that's a LIVE fish that someone sliced and brought to the table for our dining enjoyment. I've heard about this practice before but never really understood or had any desire to experience it. That night at dinner, I learned an important lesson about peer pressure - it doesn't end at high school. So there I was, faced with a fish obviously straining to breathe, it's mouth slowly opening and closing, its eyes staring glassily ahead as if steeling itself for us to start picking at its flesh.

I could tell you that I ate the fish out of respect for it giving up its life to us. I could tell you that I ate it out of being open minded to this apparent culinary delicacy. I could tell you that I was genuinely curious. But I'll just level with you - I was fucking hungry. I had arrived late and by the time I had gotten to the table, the only thing my "friends" had left for me were two potato croquettes and a cube of fried chicken. Damn vultures.

There I was with nothing else to eat except for this poor fish and in spite of the hunger pangs violently spasming my stomach, I had to take a pause and evaluate if I really wanted to do it. But then my hunger got the best of me and I went for it. I snagged a translucent piece from the center of the fish careful to avoid looking at its head (not an easy thing to do with it's mouth still opening and closing).

I popped it in my mouth and chewed. How was it you ask? Was the fish tender? Was it infused with the ambrosia of freshness? Did I taste the exquisite flavor of life?

It tasted like death. A horribly chewy and tasteless death infused with a healthy dose of guilt. No matter how much I chewed it, the piece remained the same shape in my mouth. I finally had to just swallow it. It clunked its way down my throat and landed in my stomach with a dull thud disproportionate to its small size. Never. Again.

The next afternoon, still nauseous with the memory of my meal the night before, I heard a voice scream from our office intercom. "CAKE! CAKE in the kitchen! Come down now!" it commanded. Cake? YESSSSS! I ran down stairs and in the center of the table sat a ruffled, white chocolate flake cake with white icing. Pristine, delicious. I grabbed a slice and took a big bite. To my horror, rather than my mouth being filled with buttercream goodness, it was filled with the taste of this:


It was durian flavored cake. For those of you unfamiliar with durian, I will tell you now - it tastes as disgusting as it looks. I'm not sure if fruit can be described as gamey but that's a pretty apt description durian - that is if that game had been mowed down by a truck days before, left out on the road to rot and then had gasoline poured all over it. Most of the time the smell will hit you before the taste but when smothered under flakes of white chocolate, I didn't notice until it was too late. One minute you're at a happy, birthday celebration, the next minute you feel like someone has farted into your mouth. It was a pretty jarring jump in states of being.

That's the highlights for this week really. There were highs, there were lows and there were some things thta just were. I'll end this update with a current affair topic that has been on everyone's minds - monkey pets mauling their owners.

Happy Friday! xo