How we roll, Part 2

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Have a lumpy roux? Use a cheese grater.

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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
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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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