a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here’s Friday night’s dinner menu from the newly remodeled Wild Seafood Restaurant across from the Sheraton Hotel. We ordered all the items shown here except the chao fan (fried rice). And we did have seafood – a big grey, flat fish from the restaurant’s fish tanks as usual – a little bit like a sole, which is cooked and served up with a soy-sesame oil-green onion sauce.
Our bus is approaching the toll booth for the Yanba Expressway on the way back to Dameisha from the offices at Daya Bay. 收费 ‘Pay toll’ says the big yellow lettering on the road surface. (As far as I can tell the car is a Ford Focus ‘Classic’ .. an older model of the Ford Focus that is sold new in China. Ford announced in April that it would build a $760 million assembly plant in Hangzhou, two weeks after announcing another $600 million plan to expand an assembly plant in Chongqing, and less than six weeks after completing a third assembly plant in Chongqing. 
But they are a little late to the party enjoyed by General Motors, since car sales in China increased only by about 2.5% last year after a decade of 10%+ growth every year.)
So! These are the biscuits that came out of the Especially Thick Biscuit box. The biscuits are in the mold of ‘rich tea’ or Marie biscuits. They are good and ‘super big’, but not thick in dimension. It turns out the thickness refers to the consistency of the biscuit.
This cardboard box with the cute translation is from the grocery store at work. I will see if I can find some of the ‘especially thick biscuit’ on the shelf tomorrow !
Monday morning was very wet.
This is the Dapeng Fortress billboard at the entrance of Da Peng, the town where we work, seen through the bus window.
The rain showers from Saturday gave way to nicer weather here today. It was still cloudy but in the mid-80s. So there were plenty of visitors to the Dameisha beach, and the sellers of swimwear and swim floaties were out in full force as well. This sea turtle was one of my favorites.
I found this picture on a side door of a restaurant I walked by here in Dameisha on Saturday night on the way to dinner. The warriors are from the Three Kingdoms period, the period 220 A.D. to 280 A.D. immediately following the loss of the Han Dynasty rulers. The red in the picture may well symbolize blood, as the Three Kingdoms period was one of the bloodiest in Chinese history. Still : books, television dramas, films, cartoons, anime, games, and music on the topic are still regularly produced in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and Japan. [Information from Wikipedia].
These are Chinese bayberries (yáng méi 杨梅) from the fruit market close to where we work. They are about the size of a US quarter coin, sweet, tart, and have a round seed in the middle of the fruit.
We flew across Japan and approached Seoul from the south this time. The connection time there was just right : stretched my legs, brushed my teeth and then boarded Asiana’s Boeing 747 that took us to Hong Kong.
It was only three hours to Hong Kong, and we arrived there at 10.30pm Thu night. That made for my usual midnight border crossing into mainland China.
I made it to the airport with two hours to spare before the flight to Seoul departs. I usually try for three for an international flight. I had e-mails to send off and I almost left my electric toothbrush in the bathroom – not a calamity to leave it behind, but still. And as always : don’t forget the charger. Below is my flight from Flight Aware .. the usual trek across the Pacific to Seoul, and then down to Hong Kong for a late Thursday night arrival.
I am getting ready to go out on Wednesday for my next trip to China. It’s a new project. So last chance for anything that needs to go with to make the cut and jump into my suitcases. (If only it were possible to snap my fingers and the suitcases just assemble themselves! ).
The limited catch of wild salmon from the Copper River in Alaska arrived in Seattle on Friday. ‘Copper River’ salmon is not a species .. the salmon from there could be King, Sockeye or Coho, as explained on the web site http://copperriversalmon.org/facts/species
And check out this picture (from Associated Press) with the Alaska Airlines crew showing off a big old salmon that has just been flown in. Makes me wonder if they had it on board inside the plane. And better watch out! those uniforms may need to be sent to the cleaners immediately!
Here are a few pictures from my neighborhood walk last around Capitol Hill on Friday night. The streak of summery weather is coming to an end with rain in the forecast for Sunday.
Alright, I confess : I watched CNBC-That-Wall-Street-Cheerleader-Channel for coverage of the Facebook open and for the close. The close turned out to be more exciting than the open. It would have been bad if the stock price had not stayed above its initial offering price of $38 on its very first day .. but then again, that $38 share price is stratospherically expensive.
Here are the rounded price-per-sales ratios for
Facebook Google Microsoft Apple
25 5 3.5 3.5
Yikes. So now the 8 year-old Facebook public company is worth $105 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s share of that is $19 billion.
I have been battling a sore throat all week but felt well enough tonight to meet my friends for our weekly beer-and-a-bite at The Elysian Alehouse here on Capitol Hill. No beer for me tonight, though – so I chose a cucumber flavored ‘dry’ soda (=has very little sugar) from Seattle-based DRY Soda Co. It was quite nice! And my dinner was curry chicken stew with cauliflower, rice and pita bread.
There is a annular (ring-shaped) solar eclipse due on Sunday that will start in southern China, be visible over Japan, and then over parts of the western USA as well.
We may even see a partial eclipse in Seattle but I’m not counting on it : there is rain in the forecast for Sunday! (But don’t feel too sorry for us .. we have had spectacularly sunny weather for the last several weekends here in Seattle). Below are some cool pictures I found on-line that shows what’s going to happen.
The NASA picture is at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/ASE2012/ASE2012.html
P.S. The answers for Monday’s Mazda picture : 1. Guy with Bugs Bunny tie has ‘big hair’; 2. Hot dog eater gets ‘stabbed’ with beach umbrella anchor; 3. Shark ‘eats’ surfer; 4. Guy ‘grabs’ black bikini gal’s – um – top; 5. The Titanic ‘sails again’. Yes, it wasn’t too difficult, but it was fun, right?
Check out this old but cool Mazda print ad from a South African magazine that I found in my study while cleaning out some boxes with magazines today. ‘Spot 5 things that are not what they seem’ says the ad, and enter the answers on-line to win the Mazda. (Ignore the green line in the middle – it’s where the pages from the print ad meet). I will give the answers tomorrow.
Happy Mother’s Day to all moms!
It was a perfect weather day here in Seattle. The blossoms are from close to my house.
I found these very very blue trees today in downtown Seattle, across from Westlake Center. The blue was applied by Australian artist Konstantin Dimopoulos and is a mixture of powdered azurite (a vibrant blue copper mineral rock) and water. The big chess game took place close by.
I had to drink a lot of yucky electrolyte before going to the clinic here in Seattle for a routine check-up today. The pharmacist suggested that I could flavor the stuff with Kool-Aid if I wanted to. So I bought some ‘Lemonade’ .. but the electrolyte on its own was not that awful and I didn’t need to flavor it after all. But it made me look up where the phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ came from.
‘He drank the Kool-Aid’ suggests that the person has mindlessly adopted the dogma of a group or leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications (from Wikipedia). And so it turns out the phrase refers to the infamous 1978 Jonestown Massacre where religious cult leader Jim Jones’ followers followed him to death in a mass suicide. A shocking 909 people died in Jamestown that day. All the Peoples Temple members drank from a metal vat containing a mixture of Kool-Aid (that some say was actually a different brand called Flavor Aid), cyanide, and prescription drugs Valium, Phenergan, and chloral hydrate.