This is a photo I took outside my office building today in Beijing. The building management is preparing to decorate for Christmas. This shall be interesting…
Archive for November, 2007Thanks to my colleagues at work for suggesting, I have started using a new theme called Mandigo. This replaces K2 which I found to be buggy and a bit boring / over-used. I also upgraded Wordpress to the newest version, 2.3.1. The changes are a work in progress - I’ll be tinkering with things over the next several weeks. Sorry if I break something… Tags: themes, Website, wordpressRemember the trouble I went through to get my Pumpkin Pie supplies on Wednesday? It was totally worth it. My pie won “Tastiest Dish”. And my last-minute vegetables? Because I took a seemingly boring food and made it tasty, it won “Pleasant Surprise”. How do you like them I want to give special thanks to Melanie for helping when needed and putting up with my high levels of lack-of-time-induced stress. Folks, I’ll be upgrading this site in the next few days to the newest version of Wordpress. I’ll probably also change the theme as K2 seems to have quite a bit of scripting issues…. Those of you who use IE (shame on you) have probably noticed some odd problems with the site… I have been assigned to bake pumpkin pies for my Toastmaster’s club Thanksgiving day party (that’s tonight). A little background, my toastmasters club decided to have a sort-of Thanksgiving feast instead of our normal Thursday evening meetings. Just so happens, Thanksgiving is on Thursday. Works out well. Well, it was decided that the Americans in the group do the cooking to show our non-American club members what an American Thanksgiving would be like. (well, we’re going to try!) So, Wednesday after work (that’s yesterday), I decided that I’d better buy my pie baking supplies (as I had two pies to make before Thursday!). “How hard could it be?”, I thought. I decided to go to Jenny Lou’s, which is, may I say, the most popular, and extensive, import goods grocery store here (they have several locations around town and completely blow away their smaller rival April Gormet, and the big boys’ [Carrefour, Walmart, Tesco] sorry attempt at selling import goods.) I also have seen baking trays and already-made pie crusts (just in case) being sold there. Well, I go to one of the larger Jenny Lou’s in Sanlitun (on the way home from work) at about 6pm as I thought that would increase my chances. I get there and begin looking for the stuff. OK, first, let’s find the crust. Well, I looked all over the shop, and no already-made crusts. Hmm, I guess no one ever bought them. Well, is there any pie crust mix? Man, that was hidden! Took me 20 or so minutes to find that. And there were two boxes left (each box makes 2 pie crusts). I decided to take both, just in case (sorry guys). “What the heck does Pumpkin Pie mix look like?!” Crap. After another 10 or so minutes of looking down the aisles and a few phone calls to my girlfriend, I finally found the Pumkin purée in a can. It was in the jam section (I think). Thankfully, the import company didn’t put the stupid ingredients translation sticker over the Pumpkin Pie recipe. I needed to get ground cinnamon, ground chives, and ground ginger (all n problems at Jenny Lou’s - they sell this stuff by weight) and evaporated milk (also no problem). I had eggs at home, as well as salt. I’m in business. Pie Dishes! Doh! I went upstairs where they normally sell this stuff. Lots of cupcake dish options. Some square dishes. No round pie dishes. Crap. I decided to pay for this stuff and check the lousy April Gormet just down the road. Not surprisingly, they didn’t have what I wanted. I then decided to drive to the Jenny Lou’s at Chaoyang Park West Gate - thinking maybe the Sanlitun store was just out of stock of round pie dishes. I was wrong. The Chaoyang Park store has identical stock. Now, I’m getting a bit desperate. I decide to go to the Carrefour near my home. That was a complete waste. I forgot that pretty much no one here has ovens - thus no one bakes! I try a last ditch effort to go to the Jenny Lou’s near my home at Jianwai SOHO. Nothing - even worse of a selection than the first two. I get there around 9:00 or so. Not many people there at that hour, so it was a breeze. In, Out. Got my pie dishes! Now time to get home and actually make the pies! Well, I’ve got the goods, now I am sure you want to kno just how far I drove, and in what wacky order! Here’s the map! Note: I didn’t put my return route on the map as I pretty much followed the going-to-IKEA route to get home. Do the math. This is what I ended up with (actually two of them). It worked well in my small oven.
I checked the IKEA site this morning and found this pie dish. This one probably would have been better, but I didn’t see it at IKEA. Oh well…
Note: Images “borrowed” from IKEA China’s Website. This post is several days late. Sorry. I went to Shanghai on Sunday (Nov. 11) to attend a BCP (that’s Business Continuity Planning, for the 99.99999% of you who don’t know) conference. The conference lasted 2 days (Monday and Tuesday). Normally I’m not a huge fan of Shanghai, primarily for two reasons:
But I have nothing against the city itself (in terms of buildings, layout, etc.). But the airport… My god…. I’ve been to Shanghai 3 times. 5 of the 6 legs I went through Hong Qiao airport (the old one that is now pretty much dedicated to domestic flights). I flew out of Pudong (the new, International Airport) once. (An aside about Pudong: Reminds me of a bigger Beijing Airport Terminal 2 - large, grey, baron) The main thing I don’t like about Hong Qiao (and I can’t comment on Pudong as I never arrived at Pudong) is the taxi queue. I arrive around 10pm or so Sunday night, and this is what I was greeted by:
That’s an overflowing taxi queue. This airport has one taxi queue. One. It took 40 minutes to get through this dang thing. (Beijing’s airport had a disaster Taxi queue up until last year sometime when they overhauled it. They now split it into 3 or 4 queues, it moves much faster.) God… 40 minutes to wait for a freaken taxi. Meanwhile, you’re crowded into this queue, people are smoking all over the place- you can’t breath…. “Enjoying Shanghai” Shanghai was ok… Getting Back I had a 9pm flight Tuesday night back to Beijing. I, being paranoid about missing flights, managed to get to the airport around 7:15pm. I really didn’t want to wait for almost 2 hours so I tried to change my ticket to an earlier one. Lucky for me, there’s a new partnership with the 5 major airlines that fly between Beijing and Shanghai that makes it easy to switch flights, check in, claim baggage, etc. That’s the theory any way. After being told to go to 4 different counters, I managed to get to a counter where somebody would help me. Long boreing story short, I got on a 7:55 pm flight. Sweet! Whoa there son, slow down for a moment! I got on a Hainan Airlines flight. I’ve never been on a Hainan airlines flight. These guys 2 years ago added a multiple-times-a-week direct flight Beijing to Budapest, so they must be legit, no? Chinglish Prevails even at 30,000 feet I rarely look at the emergency evacuation brochure as probably if we’d every need to use it, we’d be dead already. But for some reason, I decided to check it out. I just had to take a picture:
Ok, it’s a 737-800. And the title of this brochure is “Just In Case”. As my dutch friend said, this is the “Just In Case Special Edition of the 737-800″. Clever… Airplane Food is Good! Normally I don’t complain about airplane food. It’s not supposed to be gourmet. It’s supposed to take care of your hunger. Now, with this being an 8pm flight, I was expecting a somewhat-proper meal. Hey, I got on on my flight to shanghai on Air China… This is what they served:
Some grape tomatoes, a roll, a muffin, and pickled veggies (with 2 slices of some meat on top). Needless to say I was still hungry… Oh, and to make matters worse, they don’t have beer on this flight. grrr. Sick People Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Fly And baby’s too! But I didn’t have any baby problems this time around. No no, it was much worse. My plane had a considerable number of, what I think were Eastern Europeans (or maybe East-Central?) - I couldn’t decipher what language they were speaking… Any way… I was way in the back - I mean, the last seat. Right in front of the aft restroom and galley. One of these foreign guys was quite sick - Just after take off, he went to the restroom, and his friends, after a while, went to check on him. He eventually emerged, but he looked like shit. They had him sit on the other side of the aisle from me due to the close proximity to the restroom. I thought “crap…”. Most of the flight, he looked o.k…. That changed as we started to descend. Minutes from touching ground, we hit a little bit of turbulence and he started shifting in his seat a lot. Eventually he decided to run to the restroom - at this point, the fasten your seat belts light was on, so of course the flight attendants went a bit nuts but eventually let him get into the restroom (thank you!). Moments later, he was vomiting with a lot of emotion (this is hard to explain in words… let’s just say most of the plane could hear!). We touched down… On taxiing to the gate, he emerged from the restroom and sat in his seat. There was no further excitement from him. I wonder what was wrong with him… Did he drink too much? Was it food poisoning? I just hope that won’t happen again - I consider myself lucky though as I wasn’t used as a projectile vomit target… I’ve decided to stop using Netvibes in favor of Google Reader for my feed reading purposes. Google Reader has improved quite a bit since it was first released (at that point I deemed it as unusable). I liked Netvibes’ customizability, in teams of colors, etc. But the “openness” of it is of no use to me (using 3rd party apps, etc.) I essentially just used it for reading my feeds. I much prefer the way Google Reader formats my feeds (I used to use NetNewsWire back in the day when I used my mac, and liked it) - Google Reader sort of follows the method of NetNewsWire. Sort of… The two features I have been waiting for Netvibes to introduce, and ultimately what made me finally choose to switch, are star and share. I often forget where I read something, and most of the time, can’t find it when I try looking for it. The star feature shouldhelp me in that area. Share is a nice-to-have - in case anyone out there is at least somewhat interested with what I would like to share. We’ll see. So, sorry Netvibes. You guys were quite good at innovating in the “start page” arena and 3rd-party interoperability, but I’m looking for more Feed-friendly features. Google Reader satisfies my needs now. Now, if only Google would let me change the color schemes of their apps - I prefer dark backgrounds, light text. I ran out of deodorant, so while shopping at Carrefour (the French Walmart) on Saturday, I thought it would be a good idea, since I was there. We searched everywhere in the cosmetics/personal supplies area for my brand, and couldn’t find it. COuldn’t find most the other brands for that matter. We asked an employee where it was, and they told us: “Oh, that’s a seasonal product.” So, people don’t sweat (and smell) in Winter? I beg to differ. Luckily, I found another brand that was pretty well hidden… Essentially, you can, and (potentially) profit from it. Those of you who hold a negative view on China, your time has come. There’s a new ETF called ProShares UltraShort FTSE/Xinhua China 25, which, according to ProShares’ Website:
That (basically) means - If the Shanghai market falls (ok, the Index, but Indexes are supposed to follow the market, no?) by x percent, then the value of the ETF goes up 2 times x percent. So, if the index falls 10%, the value of your ETF goes up 20%. Of course, if indeed there is no end in sight for the Chinese market, (meaning, up, up, and away), then this certainly would not be a good investment choice. If the China markets are headed for a major correction, you could make a lot of money. Think about it… Not only are people smoking in the men’s room, but they ash their cigarette on the partition wall. Arggghhh! |
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