My mission here is nearly complete...

Dave and Leksvik, originally uploaded by zawelski.

(posted by - well, guess...)

Yes, after only four months here, I have realized one of my major goals - to have an IKEA product named after me in China. Now if I can just track down this Leksvik guy and figure out why his table is worth almost five times as much as my chair...

Unblocked!

Jane and I bit the bullet last week and signed up for a VPN, which, as we all know*, is a Virtual Private Network. Meaning that our computer thinks it's a part of a network in San Francisco right now instead of in a network in China, meaning that we can now get around the Great Firewall a whole lot more freely. Also meaning that we'll be spending lots of time on the computer this weekend checking out Facebook and other stuff we've missed out on.

Who knows, I might even get around to getting the blog spruced up a bit, now that we can actually post to it without having to go through a third party site. Any votes on a new color scheme? I'm thinking greens and purples, except that it would clash with our bright red couch...

*As we all know, it is considered proper academic form in China to say "as we all know" when referring to common knowledge, even if it isn't shared by everyone in the audience. Makes everybody feel a little more valued, don't you think?

Steel and economic power

IMG_6211, originally uploaded by zawelski.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/world/asia/10jakarta.html

This article is full of facts and figures that are just so interesting! I never knew, really, where nails come from, and now I know more about them and China’s steel industry than before. Check it out!

Purple Fries

IMG_5910, originally uploaded by zawelski.

(posted by Dave)
Okay, sorry all you vegetarians and vegans out there - this post should come as a bit of a palate cleanser for you. I have the great fortune to be married to the one woman who can find the only organic farm offering CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) shares in all of Southwest China within three months of moving here.

Since it never really dips much below freezing here in Sichuan, the growing season is year-round. We thus get a big bagful of fresh organic veggies twice a week, delivered to us every Tuesday and Friday by farmer Gao right to the university gate, a minute’s walk away from our apartment.

One thing that happens when you join a CSA is that you immediately notice your diet start to change. Instead of choosing what you would like to eat and then picking out groceries, your food chooses you instead. You tend to eat fewer elaborately prepared concoctions, and instead, make more simply prepared dishes with the vegetables that the season has given to you.

In China, this gets more interesting, because the “what the heck is this vegetable?” factor is even bigger. Every day, we eat a big huge batch of greens that we don’t know the name of. Jane is also now pickling radishes and garlic and many other yummy things. (If you ask her really nice, maybe she’ll write you a blog post about it.)

Another example is purple yams, which, as you can see above, are like sweet potatoes, but, yes, bright purple. So, what do we eat? Purple fries! Simply chop up your purple yams into strips, heat up some oil to smoking on your industrial-strength kitchen burner, throw the yam strips in with a bit of salt, stir like crazy, and five minutes later, you’ve got a dish featuring purple vegetables that your kids will beg for. (Okay, having ketchup also helps a bit here.)

Sichuan Sausage Season

IMG_6035, originally uploaded by zawelski.

(posted by Dave)
Ah, December, when the air turns deliciously crisp, you can see your breath outside (and in), and people’s thoughts turn to ... hanging long ropes of sausage outside their windows. (Vegetarians, my sincere apologies. You can skip to the next post now.)

Yes, up and down the streets of our campus, entire apartment blocks are festooned with hanging meat products of all sorts. Mostly sausages, but also what looks to be hunks of bacon, fatty pork, and at least one lower leg and hoof that I spied yesterday.

As we may have mentioned, our family is pretty much vegetarian at this point. Ysa and I are the late adapters, still eating some meat on occasion, so it was up to me to go out and try some for the record. I went out with Johnny and Owen, two other American teachers on our campus, and am happy to report that Chinese sausage tastes like - bacon. Or more specifically, very good Canadian bacon crossed with pepperoni. I was halfway through a dish of it stir-fried with fresh greens before I realized that that’s what I had been eating. Silly me, I had been expecting links or something, but around here, sausage is sliced almost paper thin and fried up with veggies. The sausage with hot green pepper was the best - started up some really good eyeball sweat.

This might be a good time to insert a thought or two I’ve had about meat in China. In many ways, the way the Chinese prepare it makes much more sense (if eating meat does indeed make sense, which is, of course, up for debate) than the way meat is prepared in the States and elsewhere.

Portion size, for starters. A “normal-sized” American single serving of pork, say, will here be sliced or diced or chopped into a dish that, in combination with rice and fresh vegetables, will easily feed six people. Parts are also more important here. Everything is used, not much is wasted. Entrails, feet, brains, tongues - all the stuff that is ground up into budget-brand hot dogs, or worse, fed back to feedlot cattle in the States goes straight onto the menu here.

Most noticeably, here the is meat often staring back at you. Upon reflection, I think is a good thing. You can’t keep the common American illusion that meat comes from neatly wrapped packages at the supermarket. “Throw away the head? How could you - that’s the best part!” (Did I blog about the time that I ate a big chunk of chicken only to notice that there was a beak poking into my cheek?)

Thanks for tremella!

IMG_6305, originally uploaded by zawelski.

Tremella: fungi with yellowish gelatinous sporophores having convolutions resembling those of the brain. That dubious-sounding dish is what our neighbors told us this afternoon they would make for us at “Chinese corner” tonight. Fortunately, what we encountered was a soup made of a mucous-y sort of broth with the long yellow soft strands of tremella, goji berries, and a sort of date thing floating all around.

And we enjoyed our Chinese corner, the second of what we hope are many to come! Last week, it was at our house, and I’d made an apple pie.

The topic tonight was how to say, “First, second, then, next and last:”

We also talked about Xander’s fever, cough and runny nose. He woke up today with a fever, slept 3 hours mid-day, and is back in bed at 8:15 p.m. Who knows if it’s a flu or that shall-remain-unnamed type of special flu, or another bug... Point is, we actually had a good, mellow day together. He learned to draw airplanes in different ways. He watched a video. He ate boiled pear. We engaged in our nightly ritual of reading a chapter from the Chronicles of Narnia.

And at Chinese corner tonight (I went first, then came back to watch X while Dave headed over), I learned that I should stir fry orange for Xander. Well, I’ll give it a go first thing in the morning! Thanks for friends and tremella.

We went to Xi'an...

IMG_6165, originally uploaded by zawelski.

...for the weekend. We had a conference. We saw the Terracotta warriors. We did other things. We came back.

We taught all day today. I planned on blogging. We spent fifty minutes on Skype with our credit card company trying to resolve a billing issue. This warrior is now going to bed - details later!
(posted by Dave)

Jane here! I’ll add: We flew on an airplane! We stayed in a nice hotele! We shopped! We bargained! I invoked making a Chinese salary, living in China, in order to justify paying close to what I found out was the price Chinese people pay for cute hand-stitched fabrics.

We balanced out all the warrior stuff with our retreat on peace. Here’s a story: A long time ago, there lived a tailor who was also a great sage. The king wanted to present him with a gift, one that hearkened to his tailor craft. He presented the tailor-sage with a pair of diamond-studded scissors. The sage said, “I cannot accept these.” “Why not?” cried the king. The sage replied that a scissors divides. He asked for a needle instead. Why? Because a needle binds fabric together. Yes, it jolts at first when joining the two different elements. But it passes through, unites and is, in fact, often forgotten once the product is finished. But it is the needle that can bring peace by uniting.

Okay, that’s my story, one of the two aspects of hand-stitched fabrics from this past weekend.