Alleviating myself of all the crap around me has been liberating as it always is. I’ve never had a lot of “stuff” and it is refreshing to realize that there are precious few material belongs that are vital to my happiness.

This year has been nice in that winter was long and up until today things have been alright. Today however it’s finally hot and humid and I’m not ready for it. I may end up turning on the air conditioning tonight just so I can sleep. The smells of the city are ripening and my clothes are starting to stick and it never really feels like I’ve stepped out of the shower.

I’m not ready just yet for the summer as much as I hated the winter. It’s just there aren’t any beaches near by and diesel fumes seem much more tolerable when it’s freezing outside than when it’s boiling.

I got asked quite a few questions about how my vacation was when entered “What a Long Strange Trip it’s Been”. Upon further inquiry it seems the Grateful Dead are complete unknowns even to this day in China. Same thing with Jimi Hendrix, a complete unknown, since when I posted “All Along the Watchtower” people started asking when I became a Jehovah’s Witness.

It never ceases to amaze me the things I assume are common knowledge that in actuality are only known in my little part of the world. Sure It’s a Small World Ater Al, but it’s also a Big BIg World.

The metro system in Shanghai is amazing. I ride it daily. It’s cheap, clean, fast, regular and available all over the city. Enough lines have opened up in the past few years that I no longer know all the stations or even where all the lines go. The most amazing thing though is even though the trains run 3-5 minutes apart and there are 420km of metro line in use, every single day for the bulk of the day, you’ll be crammed in the subway like a can of sardines

Pineapples are incredible at the moment and I’m looking forward to fresh lychees, waxberry, loquats, and tasty watermelon. I’m probably leaving out a few fruits, but I’ll stop now before those of you not in China get jealous.

The fresh vegetables are even more stunning. A variety of leafy greens with unknown English names show up at all the markets, meanwhile the regular veggies like tomatoes and beans just get better.

Now that your mouth is watering I’m going to mix up a Korean pomegranate vinegar drink I bought today at the Japanese grocer.

As it turns out I don’t care much one way or the other but I think that everyone is following the same script as we go from one event to the next whether it be China’s birthday, the Olympics, the Expo or something else.

It goes like this:

1. Everyone starts talking about said event
2. Visa restrictions are tightened up before the event
3. Bars, DVD shops and other seedy venues are shut down or restricted before and during the event
4. Expats start complaining about visa restrictions, bar closers, and how hard it is to buy a fake DVD
5. The event happens and everyone survives
6. Expats keep complaining about additional restrictions, traffic or something else
7. Visa restrictions let up, DVD shops open once again, a new set of bars take the place of the old ones
8. Everyone is happy once again until the next big event

Just my observations.

Recycling is a weird thing in China. An army of underprivileged civilians sweep the trash bins throughout the city on a regular basis removing anything of value. Some collect cardboard, others collect plastic bottles, still others collect glass. Later at the landfills, others pick through the freshly dumped garbage like vultures scouting for their product de jour.

It’s a sad state of affairs for those working on the front lines, but it’s undoubtedly better for mother nature that at least a bit of our past refuse might make it to our shopping carts once again.

Your first foot massage might be a little rough though. As it turns out, walking around for hours and hours everyday doesn’t prepare your feet very much for the hands of a good masseur. Applying the smallest amounts of pressure at various points on your foot can have you scrambling away in pain.

The trick to the foot massage is that you need to get them often, otherwise your feet go soft. Keep to a regular schedule of at least one foot massage a week and they become relaxing. Get a foot massage once every few months and it’ll feel like you are paying for torture.

Tomorrow I think I’ll go in to get one of my teeth fixed. Best case scenario it’s a repair job and a crown. Worst, and in my opinion most likely scenario is a root canal and then a crown. Once that is finished I have an old wisdom tooth to pull out and hopefully my next visit to the dentist will be painless.

Luckily my dentist is a little bit more sterile than this, but dentistry all seems primitive to me with the pliers and drills, sure doesn’t feel like modern medicine. I go to a Japanese owned and operated clinic in Jing’An and they seem clean but they still have the pliers and drills.

Fun times ahead for me, Oh joy.

I bought the bike about four years ago and rode it to work pretty steadily for a year and then used it a fair bit since then all with minimal maintenance. Unfortunately the last 9 months I’ve used it minimally and it’s sat outside the whole time. At this point the seat is swelled and contorted and cracking from the weather. The rust is thick along the wheel rims and both tires are flat. Several spokes on both wheels are missing or damaged and the chain hasn’t seen oil for years.

All in all the bike is in bad shape, but it’s time to dust it off, roll it down to the neighborhood bike mechanic and have him go to town.

Previous cooking parties were great fun and I expect this one will be no different. Now I have to start thinking about what sort of main course I’ll put together next month.

I’m not a fan of taking horse pills filled of antibiotics or hanging out at Chinese hospitals so it’s always much better if I can cure myself or simply not get sick in the first place. It seems those scientist types were right when they suggested that plenty of sleep and relaxation staves off illness.

And evidently the picture above doesn’t have anything to do with getting sick or spraying for pests. It’s part of an anti-drug campaign with the poor caterpillars representing ecstasy, heroin, and crystal meth. Really makes the picture all the more amusing.

I’ll have another food up tomorrow if all goes well so be on the watch for that.

I’m on a mission to cook a bunch of these in the coming months. Most of them seem straightforward and easy to prepare once everything is identified. I’m a sucker for dessert and these seem a trifle more healthy so they are regret free. Pictures and recipes to come.

In other news there is no other news.

I’ve been frustrated with iPhoto for a long time. I have a lot of photos and they span a variety of subjects and countries and time frames. iPhoto is a decent enough program, but I don’t think it is very capable once thousands of photos are involved. I could go on and list the things that really annoyed my about iPhoto, but with Aperture 3 I’ve moved beyond iPhoto and very soon my wallet will be $199.00 lighter.

Aperture is much faster at previewing photos, even when there are thousands, and this helped me initially get my photos into appropriate folders and projects. In Aperture I’m able to manage photos using folders and projects and smart albums. I can group photos together into stacks, and reject photos that simply don’t make the cut, and the rest I can rate using simple keyboard commands. Making the whole process move extremely fast.

Once I’ve added faces, places, ratings, and groupings to my photos I can take organization to the next level by adding tags and titles and even color codes. There are a number of built in photo editing functions that allow me to adjust a photo in a myriad of different ways.

Like other photo programs, Aperture 3 uses a lot of memory. My meager 2GBs of RAM is not sufficient and my upgrade to 4GBs is already in the mail. Aperture has crashed on me several times in the few weeks, Apple recently released a patch that should help, and the additional memory will likely solve some of the problem.

Aperture 3 has fired up my OCD and it’s made me excited about photography again. It’s going to take me long time to become an expert in Aperture, but it’s straight forward enough that I already feel like I can use it.

You have probably noticed that things look a little different around the website the last few days. I was a bit bored with the uninspired stock website and decided to spend some time and money making things look a little nicer. I hope this is an improvement over the way things used to look and I’d be delighted to know what you think. The re-imagining process was a real learning experience for me and I’m quite glad I undertook the adventure.

Kung Fu Eats has been going strong for about two months now. I’ve been posting on a regular and dependable schedule that keeps me busy without overwhelming me. I’ve learned a lot about food in the process and I’ve learned a lot about managing a website. The site has been visible in China for about a month now, the first month it wasn’t.

Unfortunately I promised I’d be posting some recipes from time to time and so far I haven’t lived up to that promise. I’m aware of this and I am going to rededicate myself to this goal. There are some great seasonal vegetables that should be appearing in the weeks ahead which taste great and would be excellent dishes to cook at home.

I’m still having fun, which for me is most important, and I hope readers are enjoying learning about the variety of Chinese food out there. I’m going to keep improving things at Kung Fu Eats over the coming months, so stay tuned.

This is all well and good unless your website shares an IP address with a website that China doesn’t like. China using their filtering software will simply block that IP address, thereby blocking that website and solving their problem. Unfortunately doing this also blocks the other websites sharing that IP address. This was the situation I found myself in when I renewed my hosting account. The new IP address was blocked by China and therefore my website was not accessible. Considering my content this was amounted to a show-stopper issue.

I decided to deal with this issue recently as it clearly wasn’t going to go away on it’s own. I tried to get the hosting company to move my site or allow me to change servers, essentially anything to give me a new IP address, unfortunately there was nothing they could do. Eventually I discovered that my viable solution short of changing hosting companies would be to move to a dedicated IP address where my site would be assigned it’s own IP address.

So, for a dollar or two a month my site not sits on a dedicated IP and is once again fully accessible in China. It would have been nice to come up with a free solution, but I just view it as a part of doing business in China. Sure I can eat out every night , hire a maid and taxi everywhere, but I can’t order books from Amazon, I need a VPN to access Facebook and my site needs a dedicated IP address.

For the last several years I’ve been leaving China for CNY and this year is no different, I am headed to Seoul, South Korea. Getting out of China for a short time allows me to recharge in a way that’s not possible in Shanghai. It will be nice to forget about Shanghai for a week and see a new place.

As usual, I don’t have an itinerary. There are a few site I feel obligated to see, but largely I’ll be relaxing. I want to sample a wide variety of authentic Korean food, read a few books and generally be lazy for a week.

Along the way I’ll be taking quite a few pictures. Currently I have a Panasonic LX-2 that I’l be taking with me. It is 10.2 megapixel compact camera modeled after the Leica D-Lux 3. It’s a tiny camera with a lot of power and because of that it’s what I take most of my pictures with. The battery will stay charged long enough to take several days worth of shots and the 2GB memory card rarely fills up.

When I get back to Shanghai I’m going to dump all my photos into the Apple’s new Aperture 3 and within 30 days I need to decide if it’s a worthy investment. Currently all my photos are managed in iPhoto which is fine, but lately it’s become cumbersome.

I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures of food while I’m in Korea but I’m not sure any of those dishes will make it onto Kung Fu Eats, but the pictures will certainly appear in Flickr. Wheel’s up in just a few days, and it’s looking like a fun ride.

Since I don’t routinely cook in Shanghai I post few recipes on Kung Fu Eats. I am determined to change that. Recipes allow the more adventurous to sample a bit of China in their own homes.

Unfortunately, I think the vast majority of recipes out there today limit people’s creativity. Cooking has become little more than a mundane manufacturing task in the modern home. The mass market pre-packaged plague of modern civilization removes all the enjoyment from an otherwise creative adventure.

Expect to see more recipes on Kung Fu Eats. I won’t be adding them for every dish, but they will appear from time to time. The recipes will be left a little vague so there will be ample room to add your own flair and adjust them to your liking.

Cooking should be a challenging and creative endeavor. Along the way though, be sure to have fun and try to learn something with each exciting escapade.

My apartment is located right in the center of downtown Shanghai. Busses, metros, and taxis are plentiful and yet most nights I eat within a ten minute walk of the place I sleep. I visit two particular restaurants two to three times a week while half a dozen others few times a month. I’ve been living in the same place for over three years and visiting the same few restaurants. The wait staff recognize me and know the dishes I like. The food won’t win awards, but it is good wholesome fare.

Is this a bad thing, definitely not. It’s nice to be known and it’s nice to be in familiar places and around familiar faces. But sometimes I do think maybe I’ve become too much a creature of habit. I should eat more adventurously, the selection is innumerable, there are hidden gems all around the city to be discovered yet I rarely try to seek them out anymore, instead I covet the gems I’ve discovered.

When I was first finding my legs in Shanghai, everyday was an adventure of one sort or another. If I want an adventure now I need to seek it out. I’m going to try taking up the call to action and rediscover parts of the city I’ve lost and along the way I’ll be eating and I’m excited of the discoveries I’ll be making.

I started Kung Fu Eats back in 2006 to try to help newcomers in China. I was hoping to provide all the basic information to people so they could eat local food with confidence, that’s why the Chinese characters and the Pinyin have been included with every dish.

After an initial run of some great dishes Kung Fu Eats fell into a long dormancy. I always felt that Kung Fu Eats was a great idea, but that it was missing something.

The relaunched Kung Fu Eats focuses a lot more on the food. I’ve always been fascinated by the stories behind food and each dish I bring to you will come with a story. I want to introduce you to all the bizarre food facts that excite me. You can expect to learn something interesting about food each and every time you visit.

These days I’m trying to bring you one new dish every Monday and Thursday. I’m also going to be here once a week with the latest news from Kung Fu Eats. I have some big things planned over the coming months that are very exciting.