How we roll, Part 2

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A regular day

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A word or two about food. In China, dinner is a completely different event than what we are used to in the west. First of all, large quantities and a vast selection of food is brought to the table. Secondly, you don’t take your “share”; you eat a little, spin the Lazy Susan and rest a lot between mouthfuls. It’s all about turning dinner into an event for visiting. And you order so much that you leave some behind, as a gesture to the host indicating that you have been served plenty. The last two meals for me have been grand repasts. Last night the IT team went out for a traditional Shanghaiese meal in a 1930s converted row house. The trip in to our private room was down a multitude of halls and up continuous little staircases that evoked the passage into Gryffindor Tower in the Harry Potter books. The room we had was more than likely a bedroom in the home of a prosperous, pre-war family. As always, the food was delicious and interesting. A mixture of hot and cold dishes comprising the f...
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NO8DO

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Last fall I decided to get a tattoo - not so much to express my individuality (as just about every other person has now done) but more to have the experience of getting needled as well as to see how having a permanent piece of portable art would make me feel. The problem was what to get. Tattoo shops are loaded with catalogs of both standard drawings and freelance work. The breadth of options is staggering if you only want something canned. My thoughts went in the other direction - I wanted something that meant something to me, characteristic of my life experience. So I thought about meaningful statements, written in Sanskrit or some other obscure language, or maybe something to do with a bicycle. Or maybe something Chinese. Or who knows, the only thing I did know was that I didn’t want a giant orange Japanese Koi wrapping around my biceps. One day it came to me. While wandering around Sevilla last year, we saw the same logo over and over, on anything that had to do with the m...
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Home again

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It's always great to be back, despite the slog it takes to get here. This trip was particularly mundane, despite the length and the 24 hours of awakedness it required to complete it. On the plane I was lucky enough to have an empty seat between me and the other person in the row. Sadly she was a space-hog who assumed the gap was for her personal use and filled it with computers, blankets, reading glasses, other stuff and a 1/2 full glass of water. Did have one little traveling oddity though. When I left two Saturdays ago I sat across from a couple on the ABQ to SFO run. They were well-dressed and of an age, the kind of people I might hang out with in real life. Sitting in the SFO waiting area and munching on a turkey-avocado sandwich on a chewy croissant, I looked up and there they were, sitting across from me. We boarded the plane and once again, they had the row opposite. This being too serendipitous, I excused myself and told the man the situation. He said he recognized me but t...
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