the last of Shanghai

Lunch at Kommune

Our two weeks are up!  Friday night we flew back to Chiang Mai, and the heat!  Well, the heat really hasn't been that bad, but it definitely feels like the hot season.


I've included a few parting shots.  Above is a picture from our lunch while shopping in the Taikang Lu area.  Very cute artsy neighborhood.  

view from the Shanghai
World Financial Center

The picture to the right was taken from the highest observation deck in the world, located at the top of one of the buildings in the downtown area.

We just got back on Friday and already there's another set of plane tickets ready to go - this time back to Seattle. :)  I'm counting down the days until June 8th! 

Until then, I'm going to enjoy the sunshine and time with family here in Chiang Mai.

Real Food

Looking at the food served in Asian cultures has shown me just how far from “home-grown” my diet truly is. In Thai (and Vietnamese) cultures they will sometimes have a large bowl of miscellaneous greens as part of the meal. Thin leaves, fat leaves, big and small, bitter and bland. They could have been plucked from the side of the road and I wouldn’t know the difference. Mushrooms are another food that escapes me – all sorts of different shapes and colors and textures.

Coming to China just ups the ante. I ordered lunch at a place where you select ingredients from a salad-bar-type set-up and they mix it all together and cook it for you in the back. I recognized maybe half of the options, only a handful of which appealed to me.

But moving from plants to animals is where things really get touchy. Fried chicken in the US comes in shapeless crispy batter-covered pieces. At the Yu Garden street markets in Shanghai, tiny birds are submerged in oil and served still intact – beaks and all. In Maine, grocery stores have tanks of live crabs and lobsters to take home and eat. In Pudong, there are tiny turtles and toads bigger than your fist.

Instead of the usual chicken, pork, or beef when ordering a dish at a restaurant, your choices are
expanded to include options like ox tripe, eel, and octopus. For the adventurous, there are fried honey bees, scorpion, and even live “drunken” shrimp swimming in wine.

In America, food is processed and shrink-wrapped in pretty packages kept at controlled temperatures. In an Asian open-air market, you can select from several squalking chickens, or ask the butcher for just the right cut of pork off the slabs on display under the fans keeping the flies away. Blood and guts aren’t Hollywood special effects creations used to get an R-rating, they’re in a bucket next to the counter, or used for delicacies like blood pudding or the tripe mentioned above. Death is so much more real. And maybe that’s really what it comes down to in the end. We don’t like to think about the messy parts of life, and about what people have been driven to try. Or maybe that’s my own interpretation. I’d like to think the situation was desperate when the first person decided to make a meal out of chicken feet or pull a frog out of the mud. But it may just be my own lack of imagination – too conditioned to think of larvae as gross and baby turtles as cute pets.

Shanghai

Have I died and gone to heaven?

That was my thought a week ago as I prepared for a 40 minute massage after an obscenely luxuriant shower.  My aunt and uncle not only have a shower head that feels like you're under a waterfall, they also have a masseuse who comes to their apartment once a week.  Breakfast was two slices of thick, hearty bread toasted and topped with blueberry jam and Nutella, respectively.  Lunch, at the Carrefour foodcourt across the street, highlighted some of the local dumplings, along with some chow mein and a slice of the chocolate indulgence cake at one of the Western-themed (and priced) bakeries.  I'd been introduced to the fitness room for the apartment complex and having put in some time and broken a sweat I felt a hot shower and a massage made a fitting end to the day.

It's now a week later and I've become quite accustomed to that bakery-made bread, the glorious showers, and many wonderful meals.  A few of the highlights:

• Annie whispering that our taxi driver sounded just like one of the creatures in Star Wars 
• Lunch at Shanghai Grandma near The Bund: sweet and sour shrimp, eggplant and roasted vegetables, and a noodle dish
• Annie getting red Converse-knockoffs for less than half the price the woman wanted (the fact that it was all the cash we had on-hand worked in our favor when it came to bargaining)
• The full-scale model of Shanghai on display at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum

...and lowlights:

• walking along The Bund (the picturesque riverfront) on a cloudy day in the freezing wind
• getting a cold and staying home sniffling and feeling blah
• seeing people with little birds that had been deep-fried whole (this was in the crowded market streets and I didn't actually see how they went about eating them - it was just a shock seeing the little head and beak sticking up out of the paper tray!)

More stories to come...