Spicy? August 27-Sept 2 2007

August 27-September 2 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070831/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_china_ninja
now this is hilarious. Sorry maybe I’m culturally insensitive, but from my view point, F-U-N-N-Y


So this week was pretty uneventful. No funny stories, except my man Elvis(this is an alias, I’ve decided to use aliases from now on since I don’t have people’s permission to talk about them) was hilarious. Dude’s English isn’t perfect, but he is easily the funniest guy in the office. Cracks me up every time I talk to him. So Monday I was in a really good mood and I decided to buy some Bao Zhi for breakfast. These are dumplings the size of donuts filled with vegetables or pork or beef, or shrimp or shrip and vegetables. Anything you want really. So I decide to be a nice guy and get them for the whole office. I buy fifteen of them. These suckers are steaming hot and I get them in a plastic bag. The steam escapes and hits my hand, I almost drop all of them on the ground. So I get myself in a taxi as soon as possible instead of trying to walk with them. So I get to the office, get them out of the plastic bag into a ceramic bowl, plastic forks (no chopsticks at the office), paper plates, napkins, I’m freaking Martha Stewart over here. Ready to go (and I’m get to the office before everyone else). This deserves extra notice since I think I have made it to work “on time” probably 5 times in 2 months or so. So patting myself on the back as we speak. Oh did I mention each of these Baos are 1RMB a piece. Not exactly healthy stuff, but it’s better than a donut, that’s for damn sure.
Elvis: So nice of you to get breakfast for us.
Me: No problems, any time.
Elvis: What’s inside
Me: Vegetables (This was a loca restaurant and since I couldn’t read the menu, I just pointed to something, it was just green veggies and tofu, Egh, I should have asked for pork (which is Jiuro prononounced: Jew Row, irony much?)
Elvis: hahahaha, Goodbye (and walks back to his desk). Just had to be there. Obviously he prefers the meat filled ones.
And for lunch we go to a wonton soup place, now let me say wonton soup sucks stateside (alliteration, just for you my English teachers). This was a whole in the wall shop and they did frozen wontons, and it was still better than any wonton soup I had in the states. So you can imagine the wonton soup at a semi decent restaurant here.

This week I was pretty useless. I found a great website called www.waiterrant.net. Talk about a good blog. I mean I literally killed hours on this. The guy is an excellent writer, he’s got great stories, and throw in any biting angry streak and a dashes of tenderness and maturity, and it is literary cauldron of deliciousness (um I think you carried that food metaphor thing a bit too far there Shakespeare). I wish this thing I write was half as good as his. So I need to work on my writing. I need to have more dialogue with people. I’m too much of a loner. Always have been, but that’s a different story and I need to just start doing random stuff. At work, I don’t really have that much contact with other people. Work has been slow. So our local Chinese interns went back to their schools. We had a 2 hour lunch, and then to top it off, we had a meeting at 5 about presentations we have to do. Unreal. Took a couple of the interns out to dinner. Because of the vacation situation, I missed out on a hiking trip with some of my colleagues. I am so jealous right now. EGH.

Saturday was cleaning the apartment, working out, ultimate, and a fantasy football draft. Probably one of my worst performances to date. So Sunday, I had planned to play basketball with Lee, one of the guys I met here. He’s an A.I fan and when I saw him, he was a walking Nike Ad. So just as we meet, it starts to rain, and it’s been raining off and on, but we both want to play really bad. Now after I saw a guy land flat on his ass trying to attempt a layup back in the day when I was a younger much better looking man (before my nose decided to exchange DNA with freaking Pinocchio), I decided that I would not play on a wet court. Well I guess there goes that decision. So we get to one of the free courts, and we play, and my man and I ran the pick and roll to death. He’s got great vision and got the pass to wherever the hell he wanted to. Shit I lost count of how many easy bunnies I missed and the passes that bounces of my hands cause I just wasn’t expecting it. Man that was fun and our team didn’t lose, note that the competiton wasn’t really that good. I’ve gotten my ass handed to me here by some locals. One guy I guarded was like 6’2-6’3, and he stepped on the court, no warm up shots, gets the ball and I let him get the shot, and he fucking nails it. I couldn’t give him an inch of space. He was just good. His team spanked ours everytime. So I’m fighting for a ball and I hit a slick spot and one leg goes one way and the other another. Messed up my hip. Mr. glass strikes again, hey at least the ankles were safe this time around.

So I met a couple of guys from South India and they work for a company that produces the machines that make solar panel crystals. Interesting stuff, so meeting other Indians is always nice. Of course, I’m more American than Indian, and they know it and aresurprised that I still speak my language which is similar to theirs. I speak Malayalam and they speak Tamil. So if you look at the map of India and go to the very southern tip, on the Arabian sea side is my state, Kerala and on the Bay of Bengal side is theirs, Tamil Nadu. Our language is very similar, something like Italian and Spanish, so we can understand each other for parts of the conversation, but we leave it at English just to spare any misunderstandings. So one of the guys, Nadhan, is with his wife and 15 month old daughter and the other guy is married, but solo in Shanghai. Really nice guys. Mr. Solo invites me over to dinner at his place and he cooks chapattis and curry, and Nadhan’s wife comes with a crab curry she made at her place. You know I’m usually good with butter and lemon, but I’d say the south asian style of cooking crab in curries like India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, is probably the best. The curry just seeps its flavor into every nook and cranny of the crab. It’s fantastic. So Mr. Solo made his vegetable curry and he and I are eating together as Nadhan is waiting for his wife, and he asks me if the curry he made is too spicy. Now I’ve been Americanized so my tolerance of spicy food is somewhat oh how do I say, okay I’m a sissy little girl now, okay, is that what you wanted to hear, are you happy now??!! But at the moment, I wanted to him that my palette is as tough as they come and damn it, I can handle it. So as my tongue is slowly catching fire and the lava is slowly making its way to the rest of my mouth, I say “oh it’s fine, no worries, no problems” and he goes, “yeah it’s a little spicy for me.” Do I need to say anything more?