tbaroundtheworld

It occurred to me tonight that I might have lost most favored patron status at Starbucks. I ended up there following a quick trip to the department store to collect a bottle of wine for a dinner invitation (tomorrow night) and a box of grape juice to get me through the rest of the week. I’m down to one last liter of Blutorange and I hate to open it knowing full well that whatever is left behind will almost certainly not survive the 5 weeks I am about to spend in the US. And given that to me it’s a treasured resource, I’m not about to sacrifice the lion’s share for a single glass on Friday morning. So out I went to pick up those items and to have an iced Americano. The traffic for tonight’s commute was absolutely horrid, a combination of an uncountable number of company owned commuter buses hogging the center lane, a single dead car and the normal amount of crazy Chinese driving. It was tough too because I had a passenger and so I was unable to spend any time talking to Jiang. He dealt ...

Unlike a regular US Thanksgiving, our Chinese version turned out to be a moveable feast and a pretty full weekend to boot. A day of work after our great expat evening out led to a night of music and Sichuan cuisine. I had plans to attend the most recent installment at the Kai Fa Qu theatre, a string group by the name of Trio Broz. According to the musician’s biography, they are specialists in arrangements of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which I thought sounded pretty intriguing. When my regular music companions were laid low with what seems to be getting everyone around here I made plans with some other friends to pick up tickets and for them to collect me about a half hour before the concert for the short ride down the road. Normally I’d walk, but we were in the middle of a wind enhanced deep freeze so I though a ride might be in order. As it turned out I would have been better off on foot since standing in place outside your building in the sub zero temperatures and a roaring wind whi...

Tonight was my second Thanksgiving in China and it made me think about how that had come to be. Last year Thanksgiving fell about a week after I’d arrived, and it was the topic of one of my first serious essays telling the story of my China adventure. I remember that I was just getting my feet on the ground and making the transition from the natural born isolated, anti-social me to the expat me, one with friends and a social calendar. I debated at the time whether or not going to someone’s house, a co-worker to boot for such a traditional holiday was something that I really wanted to do. But at the urging of My Lovely Wife I decided to do it and so I arming myself with 4 or 5 bottles of wine and a big bouquet of flowers for the lady of the house and off I went. As it turned out, I had to be the “dad”, the carver of the turkey and the organizer of the dinner because no one else there had ever filled that role. And I had a great time; it was a true family day and just what I needed at th...

It was nice to be home even if most of my time was spent fighting off some strange Chinese flu-cold that would not respond to even the most nuclear medicines. Now normally I see some improvement in symptoms from any of the regular suspects – Benadryl, Alka Seltzer, decongestants – but this disease had a mind of its own. It laughed in the face of single doses and chortled louder when I doubled them up. And when My Lovely Wife came down with it and had the same response, well, I pretty much understood right then that we were not dealing with a dime store variety head cold. Who knows what it was, but at least it’s mostly gone. I suppose it didn’t help my case that I laid around on the couch for a couple of days and then went off to a hotel in Phoenix. Even then things might not have been too bad had I not been given a room that had clearly suffered from some sort of environmental disaster. My guess is that a smoker used the room before me and the hotel responded by fumigating with some so...

I suppose a truly superstitious person would go into some sort of anaphylaphobic shock spending what seems like 48 hours stuck in a perpetual Friday the 13th. It makes me wonder why the producers of that particular horror movie franchise didn’t think of that - have the plane leave Asia and fly eastward into a perpetual date and wrap the hacking and slashing abound in the parts of the plane where drinks aren’t free and seats aren’t big. In other words the place I just spent the last 11 hours. Lately when I’ve failed to hit the business class lottery I’ve made sure I had a nice bulkhead seat at the front of the expanded economy cabin. The upside is no one jams there seat back in your face and your leg room is bounded by a wall and not a low hanging metal bar on the bottom of the seat in front of you. The downside is that I rarely can avail myself of one of the little known perks associated with my status – empty seats are generally laid out next to people with lots of miles in the bank. ...

Some call it madness, others say it's so outrageous as to wrap around into being a good choice. Whatever it is, my luck today has been pretty mixed, but at least the bad stuff has been funnier than maddening. I'm not particularly triskedekiphobic so I generally don't care, particularly if it means going home. I left work a bit early yesterday to commence the Ritual Charging of the iPods. I travel with three Nanos, a Touch and an iPhone so I have to set aside a few hours just to fill everything up with electricity. I spent the afternoon doing that and watching the weather - a steady downpour that promised to add some color to my trip to the airport. I left instructions Jiang to come early if the roads were bad, but they weren't and he didn't and by dawn they were pretty much dry. After picking up a friend we made good time to the airport, delayed only by the time it took to get a boarding pass. Ironically, the plane was leaving from Gate 13. I've been sort of a C...

There have been some pretty big changes around Jun Yue Ho Ting, my home away from home leading me to believe that either someone new acquired the building or that they’ve been reading a book about modern apartment building management. First of all they have seriously upgraded the trash situation. Previously we had a trash can down by the front door and it wasn’t much of one, the type you’d have in typical American pantry although just a bit taller. And of course that wasn’t nearly big enough to serve the needs of the 112 apartments in my tower. It always paid to get your stuff down there early lest it end up having to go on the sidewalk. And in the summer time it was pretty rank. When I first moved in my relocation consultant stood in my doorway and stared at my hallway and told me that I should just put the trash in the stairwell. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me but sure enough a couple of days later my neighbor had a demure bag of wet garbage sitting on the floor outside their ...

I returned to my apartment after flying half way around the world and walked into an ice box. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration but it was 17 degrees C and in our western nomenclature that spells C-O-L-D especially when you’re tired, frazzled and 15 hours out of sync. Although some might consider 62 degrees to be just about right, I suppose it is if you’re sitting outside in the sun. Part of the problem was that I had left the air conditioners running which although now pumping outside air had certainly contributed to the super-cooling that had occurred over the previous two weeks. Capping the enjoyment of my arrival was the fact that the place smelled like a combination of dirty babies and a fish fry. Imagine a diaper pail next to the deep fryers in the kitchen of a seaside restaurant in the Florida summer time and you get the idea. It wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t enough to make me throw up on the spot. Now my apartment has no indication of any kind of central heating and we know it...