hold it in, let it out

The air is humid with a new warm dewiness. Could it be Spring? I hope so...


Juliane Eirich, Balloons


Found on my new favorite image site.

thinking of you

sun, bike, what's not to like?

I had a particularly wholesome day last Saturday with my pal H. We went bike riding all the way to the Shanghai zoo. The entire trip took one hour. Highlights include dimsum, losing an earring, finding a hidden private garden and me falling off my bike and nearly faceplanting into some old woman's cart. Deciding that one near death experience wasn't nearly enough for me, once at the zoo, I convinced H to ride the Scariest Ferris Wheel ever.

We were (ok, fine I WAS) totally fooled by the colorful exterior. But as soon as that door slammed shut and we heard the lock click from the outside we both regretted it. Our rusty, jail-like carriage slowly creaked its way up in space swinging precariously the entire way. After what felt like the longest 5 minutes ever, we emerged ashen faced and blood pressure significantly higher but pretty much unharmed. Whew.

Watch out ladies, a killer's loose. xoxo.

The following is an email sent to the Swedish Embassy by a jilted Chinese girl. The last line is the best (how much is "too much"?) Apparently the guy lives in Shanghai and the girl was kind enough to include a picture. Human flesh search anyone?

From: XXXXX
Date: XXXXX
To: XXXX
Subject: Please Help Protect Chinese Women From This Man

I am writing you to inform you of the perverse and inexcusable behavior of Johan Otto Englund who is studying chinese at Shanghai Jiao Tong University now. In Early February of 2009, Johan visited me in my hometown of Changsha city in china. We met online several months earlier and established a cyber relationship ( He contacted me there firstly. ) Johan said to me he was studying International politics in sweden before, who is very interested in chinese politics . He need to see Chair Mao's, Lei Feng 's home town in Changsha.

He asked me if i will show him around and meet him in person in changsha. He said to me in letters and phone calls at MSN. I was friendly to see a western friend from overseas to china who is special to see Characteristics in Changsha. I was enjoyed and be proud to be his tour guider that's all my feeling.

When i was leading Johan to Hunan Museum, Changsha Museum and Martyrs Park , Johan said he was thinking to being a nurse in Africato help poor ppl and he was working in Nursing home in Sweden, taking care of old ,retired ppls. He traveled lot places in Europe, Africa,South Asia . He will work in European Unions or United Unions forhuman rights. He is also a Vegetarian who doest want to kill animals.

Tour on the road, Johan was sincerely talking about the price of Mineral water, food, travel fee was expensive, he is thrifty . I respected his honest, Sympathy with his student status. I paid myself, sometimes I also paid his travel fee and food.

He said to me many beautiful words all leading me to believe that he is a noble humanitarian wanted a chinese girlfriend as Capable as I. His words persuaded me that he was falling in love with me and I liked him in lot in his noble Integrity. It seems Johan and I were happily togather after this so, I relented to his demand.

I taken Johan to my home twice . My mom cooked dinners for himduring Spring festival to Lantern. My mom was very happy to see awestern ppl can speak chinese to her and Johan said ,he 'd love to have Table Tennis ' competitions with my mom . My mom laughed lot andgave him expensive gree tea and good fruits as gifts. Johan didnt give me or my mom anything. He was very enjoyed visited my home and praised house's decoration deluxe and my mom's wonderful cooking.

I sent Johan back to Shanghai from airport in changsha . Then i havnt hear any informations from him. I called his cell phone , firstly nobody answer. Later, Johan said, he is busy and has a new gf in Shanghai. It is too late for me but, I hope in all my heart that you will be able to do something about Johan Otto Englund so he will not be able to hurt other girls like he has hurt me. Please do not let him hurt more chinese girls 's kind heart and friendly respect to ppl from other countries.

P.S. Johan gave me bad flu and asked too much sex.

Name: Johan Otto Englund Pass & Visa No. xxxxxxx xxxxxxx

Food review: Urban Soup Kitchen

When I was eight I wanted to be a teacher, when I turned twelve I wanted to be a marine biologist, when I was in high school I wanted to be a lawyer (mostly because of Ally McBeal) and ever since I turned 21, I've wanted to be a food critic. I love food, I love getting paid, professional critisizing combines my two interests. What could be better? Unfortunately, a ton of other people think the same thing and have higher culinary and writing credentials than I.

Since moving to China, I've weaseled my way into the good graces of the Dining editors of City Weekend, a local expat listings magazine. It's no New York Magazine or Sunday Times. Actually it's not even a Creative Loafing, but it lets me entertain my fantasy of being a food critic. While real food critics get large columns and ample word counts, I struggle with quarter page blurbs trying to compact my thoughts into a pithy 150 sound bite and by struggle I mainly mean ignore. The pattern goes a bit like this: They give me word limit, I ignore word limit, they cut and splice through my review until it's a pale semblance of the original writing.

Thank goodness for personal blogs where I can ramble on to my heart's content taking up valuable pixel space with my inability to write concisely.

Below is my review of Urban Soup Kitchen in it's full, verbose glory:

Cold comfort
Who doesn’t like soup? It warms you up on a cold day. It picks you up when you’re down. Truly, there are few foods in life that are as universally comforting as soup is.

Soups come in abundant variety - stews, chowders, bisques, thick soups, thin soups, soups with meatballs, with cabbage, with won tons, the list never ends; however, despite the infinite varieties of soups I find that most tend to fall in either one of two catagories. The first catagory of soups are forgiving dishes. At their best it’s something you’ve thrown together because you want a simple, hearty meal. At their worst it’s a stew of leftover ingredients, things that you’ve left too long in your fridge but are too cheap to waste. These soups are simplistic, easy to make, edibles that even a monkey (albeit probably a highly trained one) with a blender could do. The end results are nice, filling, comfortable.

The second catagory of soups are those that serve as a testament to the cook's talent. Instead of masking flavors, this soup puts them on full display, coaxing them out in the slow simmer so that every spoonful tantalizes your taste buds, making you want to savor it in your mouth til you sip it down slowly like you would a fine wine. Have soup from the second category and it'll shake you, coating your insides. It'll make you recall what it feels like to fall in love.

One weekend the sun was shining and the sky was blue. It was an idyllic day for a light lunch, a perfect day to check out this gourmet soup and salad place we heard about near Xin Tian Di. We arrived at Urban Soup Kitchen with high hopes and empty stomachs. Soups started at (YY28) and combos (soup and salad or sandwich) are a fairly reasonable (YY40-60). We were ready to dive and drink in the love.

Right off the bat a caveat to hungry diners, get ready to get your food to go - operating mainly as a delivery service, the only seating offered in this severely tiny nook of a restaurant are four bar stools set along a high narrow bar...facing the wall. Ever undaunted, we ordered two combos and took our food to Fuxing Park where we eagerly chose a bench and tucked in for an impromptu picnic. Before we left, the owner warned us that the shop was just starting out so they were still finalizing some of the recipes and for us to go onto their website to give them our feedback.

Initial feedback: please get better bread to dip into the soup. Our soup bread had the consistency of dry cotton and tasted of wood chip. Additional feedback: for the love of God take seafood bisque off your menu until you've managed to make it edible. Salty without having much flavor, the bisque tasted distinctively of not very good tomato paste and generic seafood. “This bisque tastes like dirt,” griped my picnic buddy, his lip curling, “I’m going to just pick out the meat.” In all fairness, the seafood bisque had a healthy portion of shrimp and he spent the next fifteen minutes fishing it out of the broth, his aggrieved air of someone who had been wronged by life dissipating slightly.

Despite the bisque and soup bread, the rest of our food wasn’t bad. The wild mushroom bacon soup was rich and fairly creamy, the massive chicken breast wrap was flavored well and the smoked duck breast salad finished with a lovely citrus twang but it didn't make us remember what it was like to fall in love, it didn't even remind us of a playground crush. It reminded us of an all-right date. Not bad but not something you absolutely can't wait to do again. The whole meal was something akin to what you’d make in college if you wanted something nice for lunch and had an hour or so of free time.

That being said, most of us have left college and don’t have that hour of free time (and just think about how you’ll have to clean up afterward!) which makes Urban Soup Kitchen is a serious competitor if all you want is a soup and sandwich. That being said, given the size of the market in Shanghai for exclusively soup and sandwhich places, they are also pretty much the only ones in it.

please. stop using the word bespoke. it sucks.

The summer of 2001 harked a great many things for me. It was the summer right after high school ended and right before college started. It was a summer of sunshine, soft Georgia nights, goodbye parties and the new prickling feeling that we were about to leave childhood forever and Grow Up. It was also the summer when pointy toed shoes from the fashion houses of Europe enacted a swift and irreversable coup that changed the face of women's footware as we knew it.

My friends and I viewed the trend when it started as a passing fad. Pointy shoes? Really? Shoes that make your feet at least an inch and a half bigger? Shoes that squeezed your big toe into your other four? Shoes that were basically a Western answer to Eastern foot binding?? They were impractical, witchy looking, stupid, not for us. Sure they were all over the catwalks but surely they'd be the kind of fad that was only Good For Magazines...and Europeans.

Over the course of two short months, I watched, with increasing dismay, as all around me rounded pumps were replaced by severe, pinched stilettos. On the streets, women's walks shifted from the easy, bouncy gait afforded to them by sensible rounded toe shoes to a dainty teeter in their new, shockingly pointy Fendi's.

I started noticing, to my horror, how one by one all my friends fell to the trend, their shoe collections changing by the minute to accomodate their new purchases. Pointed toe flats, pointed toe heels, pointed toed going out shoes, pointed toe... flip flops?! Well, we all know how the pointed shoe trend has manifested itself - now women everywhere are joined in solidarity as they they gingerly pry their oh so cute but painful shoes off their blistered red feet at the end of a long day. Awesome.

So back to the original purpose of this post. Like pointy shoes infiltrating closets everywhere at the start of the millenium, the word bespoke has insiduiously infiltrated the word scene. Bespoke as a past tense of the verb bespeak is actually a really nice word; however, bespoke as in the adjective for customized is incredibly pompous and obnoxious. I first read it in a british Vogue, where the word was used not just in the headline but also no less than 10 times in the actual body of the article itself. I had discounted the overuse of a rather ugly word as a freak occurance in a badly-written passage, a British colloquialism perhaps.

This was three months ago.

In the past week alone, I have heard it used both verbally and in emails around my office, written in various online blogs which I respect and enjoy AND in magazines that hail not just from England. Shocking and terrible. Bespoke sucks and is totally overused by not very clever people (sorry co-workers, this doesn't apply to you) trying to sound smart. Please people, stop the madness. Let us remember the pointy shoe infection of 2001. Ten years down the line do we really want to sound like overpuffed windbags using ugly words? I think not.

on light shows and ruining family vacations: hk trip conclusion

I have many pictures on my camera. It is out of batteries and I can't find the cord that links it to my computer. Once I get more batteries for it and find the cord, I will be able to finish off my HK updates. It'll be worth the wait. Or maybe it won't. I guess no one will know until I finally get my act together. Ha! I'm in the driver's seat.