sleep deprivation

is the root of all evil, and all ridiculousness that one writes about in a half-delirious state after a loooong week where sleep was only optional.

I managed to hurdle past the economics exam from hell on Wednesday, and was rewarded by poutine (!!) that night curtesy of Cat, who's parents kindly brought us authentic cheese curds and packets of gravy during their visit from Canada because that's just how much we missed poutine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! if you are not Canadian and do not know what I'm talking about, you should be booking your flight into Montreal quicktimes for a tasting of Canada's finest. You can say it is a staple food. Like rice to the Chinese, or naan to the Indian. Or maybe it's just mine...

Thursday- my chill day, it was raining farm animals from the sky and I didn't feel like going to work, so I called in sick with food poisoning. Teehee. Yes I'm a terrible employee, but trussssst, I was in desperate need of some R&R. Lounged in bed and caught up with my gossip girl episodes. Can we just talk about the reDONKness of the Nate and Blair reunion?? There is about as much spark between them as Brad and Jen. It's OVER palllll....

Friday- took Clare on a culinary hutong walking tour, the same one I was trained for earlier this week. The two of us together is bad news, we shop, and we eat, with no apologies. I took her to my favorite shopping area in Beijing, the vintage punk rock chic boutiques at Nanluoguxiang and its surrounding hutongs. Think Queen W.W. but half the price. Purchased a sickkkk one piece shorts suit reminiscent of my blue jumpsuit in the summer with the panda pin. A leopard print ballerina tutu, so grunge, so sick! I am also debating on getting nerd glasses in either red or black. It's all the rage now to sport these clear non prescription glasses with thick nerd rim. It's sooo next levz to look like you had have no social calendar and suffer from severe stigmatism. All the cool kids are doing it!

The Glass Table and Bleeding Butt Cheek Episode - Later that afternoon, I stepped into a tiny cafe in Houhai with Clare, I was having massive bbt cravings and I was going to take a hit of hk milk tea. I placed my order and turned around to rest gently on a glass surface that was about the height of a bar stool. Naturally, I deduce that it is a bar stool, placed next to the counter, for guests to rest as they patiently await their beverages. So I lowered my bum with my usual grace and levity, ONLY TO HAVE THE GLASS SHATTER IN 400 PIECES UPON CONTACT WITH SAID ASS. !!!!!. No, it was more like an implosion, a detonation, with a thunderous roar that made everyone in the cafe stop. turn. and gawk at me as if I were some kind of barbaric moron who needs to lose a few or thirty pounds off the hips. So of course the glass slashed through my leggings, my underwear, my shirt over top and scratched me bum as well. It was a good look. And it made going to the washroom a lot easier, I can finally identify with the split pant fashion trend on all the Chinese babies! Just squat, and go.

Saturday- I got paid to read French out loud. I do not know French. Oui oui!

Sunday- went on my second culinary tour tonight through the night market at Wangfujin. I met with the owner of the culinary tour company/cooking school along with three American clients and hit the wild and wonderful tourist trap known as Wangfujin snack street. Instead of showing the laowai an accurate roundup of Chinese food, I think I succeeded in frightening them out of the country with the wild items I force fed them. Snake, baby shark, silkworm, tripe and fried milk anyone?

Inner Mongolia tomorrow morning yeaa ahhhh! Yurts, yak milk, grasslands, horseback and sand dunes say hiiiiiiiiii

be back soontimes with pics.

meanwhile,
peace on tha streets and in the middle east!

chomp chomp

It's 1:30pm and I'm T minus 1.5 hours from getting off work, booyakasha.
The good thing about the recession is that there are no guests on the executive club. So I check my email instead, and blooooog.

I worked the morning shift today, woke up at an ungodly hour to set up the buffet breakfast. Plates and pots of bacon, eggs, saussages, veggies, pastries, fruits, seafood, sushi, juice, and exactly three guests who showed up. Not gonna lie, I pulled some stealth snacking moves and ended up filling my daily caloric intake before 11am. Oye. Free food is not my friend.

Since I had to study for my exam and was NOT about to commute last night and back again this morning, I got the manager to hold to his promise of giving me a hotel room when I worked overtime. There's nothing worse than sitting in a five star hotel room with free HBO and a jacuzzi tub and have to get down and dirty with a macro economics text book instead. FMLEH. Yes, extra hard.

I want cookies.

Oh, I am training to become a culinary walking tour guide! I go on my first tour this afternoon through the city's hutongs and will be helping a gourmet cooking school set up its first operating studio and food store over the next months.

Shit, all I talk about is food.

And booze.

Twiddle sticks.

I can't see it coming down my eyes, so I gotta make this song cry

Woke up this morning to the bleakest, most depressing sky I've ever seen. I guess spring has arrived, because it rained for the first time last night since I arrived. The rain hit my face as I was eating ma la tang, these hot pot style veggies and meat on a stick, the best street food on this side of the wall. It was 2 am and we had been celebrating the birthday of a friend in Shanlitun, a concentrated stretch of laid back bars where drinks are cheaper than water, people spill onto the streets, and chaos is the order of the night. We started the night in style at the grand opening of The Emperor bar, the rooftop terrace of a boutique hotel located in a hutong overlooking the forbidden city. BAAAM. It's as sick as it sounds. Atmosphere was Malibu meets Tang dynasty, people just stepped out of vanity fair. There was a free flow of champagne, wine, and martinis, with delicious canapes that I could barely keep up with. But I did. And I would have done better if every time I had a drink in my hand, the birthday boy hadn't taken it from me and pounded it back in the blink of an eye. I'll let it slide for the occasion, but you all know better than to steal blinis out of my hand!

The night got progressively sloppy as we ended up wolfing down fries and 15 kuai mojitos on the street in Shanlitun. Then we danced obnoxiously on stage at a seedy joint called Bar Blu and when our exchange theme song "I will survive" the final fantasy edition came on, the noise we made was next levz.

Yeeaaaaaaahhhh.

Some time later I got hungry and tired and that's how I ended up sitting on a wobbly stool in the rain dousing hot sauce on my skewers. I'm pretty sure everything tastes better on a stick. And when it's spicy TOFUUU and soysauce eggggggg its just stupid good. Like, honestly... you're blowing some serious mind in my mouth right now good. After I got my fill, I was sufficiently wet from the first rainfall of the year that I smelled like dog and smoke. Then I found Cat and we made the obligatory Bellagio stop to round out our evening with delicious Taiwanese shaved ice dessert goodness. Mmmm tower of finely shaved ice doused in condensed milk and showered with red beans, tapioca, and candied pineapples. Best and surest way to brain freeze.

Earlier this week I started my job at the hotel. First day was intimidating as hell, as I was passed off from manager to manager until finally I found my place in the executive club, where I was to do my first rotation. The manager looked visibly annoyed at the prospect of babysitting me and sighed extra loud as he brought me to get my uniform (Yes I wear an outfit that looks like memoirs of a geisha as a sanitation worker) and sign my forms at HR. But I worked my charms and spewed some brilliance in our conversations and he realized that I wasn't some freeloading brat who got away with 3 days at work each week just because I knew the CEO. By the end of the week he was practicing English on me, taking me on his smoke breaks, which were every thirty minutes, to ask me about management advice and getting me to interview new candidates for the job. Not a bad job, but definitely showed me some subtle and not so subtle nuances about working in China versus the west. Such as the rigid hierarchies, and the implied rather than the vocalized.

Wednesday night I went to the 2nd annual Beijing Contemporary Dance festival held by the school where I'm taking classes. It was the most spectacular display of expressive dance I've ever seen in my life, and the best part was they were all Chinese dancers. That's what I mean about this city being world-class, none of these dancers are famous on the international sphere, but they are the top class in China, and number and calibre of them blow my mind. Contemporary dance in China is also interesting because it is so emotional, and in a country where communication is supressed more than encouraged, watching the dancers express such raw emotions with fluid grace really stuck out for me. Then on the way home I met up with friends Dan and Henri for drinks at a bar for Henri's birthday, which quickly moved to a seedy student club downstairs that is infamous for being the mother of all evil hangovers this side of the student ghettos. Wednesday nights are open bar nights with a five dollar admission for girls and about 15 for guys, and no joke the booze they serve is more or less lethal. Clearly second grade stuff poured into the real bottles, but ask any of the hundreds of people mauling the bar on Wednesday nights if they care and the answer is helllls no. Somehow stumbled home and relished my glorious morning of NO WORK the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Now I sit here on Sunday night, with my macroeconomic book opened to page one, thinking that I should study for my exam on Wednesday, blogging instead, and dreading the thought of WORK IN THE MORNING.

In other news, I made me a delicious meal of mung bean clear noodles, dried tofu, and pickled vegetables in a sweet and spicy black bean chili sauce today. All in five minutes and without turning on the stove. I'm such a cordon bleu chef in training. The food network is already lining up a show. It will be called The Naked Szechuan Contessa. Pay per view only. byaaaahhhhhh.

le whif

Two years ago, a friend was recruited by her professor at Harvard to work in an idea lab in Paris. The task was to brainstorm ways to marry art and science, and create a reality from the seemingly outlandish idea using all the resources at the professor's disposal.

The students explored the concepts of culinary art and molecular gastronomy and came up with Le Whif; inhalable chocolate in a pipe. The struggle was to overcome the obstacle of making food particles small enough to get airborne but not enough to become a choking hazard.

The product launches this month. Take a look at the website and press.

I want.

tweet tweet

You've probably already seen this if you're an avid tweeter. The 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates

It astounds me how tweeting has given us a new set of vocabulary, and transformed communication as we know it, just since its conception in 2006. Even the Dalai Lama is on Twitter. I know... I'm just waiting for Wen Jiabao and him to have a tweet-off. I havn't used mine much to date, but just set up my mobile account, so may get into the groove. Anyway, check out the link, some of the updates are truly extraordinary.

Stick to the B.E.A.T, get ready to ignite!

1. It is warm in Beijing. I thought I'd never say those words. It was last week that a thin blanket of snow covered the dull landscape just outside the city, last week that I stayed in bed for three days nursing a cold as vicious as the wind outside my bedroom window. Big brother shut off the central heat in the entire city three weeks ago, and our alternative to freezing in our own home was to turn on these electric heaters that suck up the energy bill like hideous energy goblins. Electricity is pay-as-you-go here and more than a few times we have been rudely awoken by sudden pitch blackness, cold water, and no wi-fi. Oh the things we take for granted back home. In China, everything is pay-as-you-go, and if you don't pay, the service gets cut off. Just like that. I guess that's the only way to make sure 1.3 billion people pay their bills.

2. Beggars. Panhandlers. The homeless. There are so many it's dizzying. At Wudaoko, the highly saturated student neighbourhood where I live, there are no less than ten, shaking the coins inside their tin containers with vigour at your side. The first week we got here, an American we met told us not to give these guys money because they were involved with the mafia and were being punished for wronging someone in the gang. The most creative excuse I've heard for not being charitable, but nevertheless I have not given away any change to date. Then I noticed that they all looked very similar and dressed the same. Duh you say, they're in rags, not a fashion spread, but no joke they look like they are in uniform. Second, I never see them all at the same time, some are there in the day, some at night, I'm not saying they're taking shifts but uh, it's like they're taking shifts.

Then there's the variation of old blind man and singing woman or vice versa on the subway. I encounter these duos at least every other time I ride and it is an uncomfortable 5 minutes while they sing and wail their way to the next car. I am against giving money to the poor/homeless in general as it is a unsustainable and damaging sort of charity that perpetuates poverty, but today I looked up from my book to see how other people were reacting. In three minutes, the duo had picked up about 10RMB and were moving on to the next car. Quick math in my head predicted that in the time it takes them to move from one side of the train to the other, they'd could pocket 150-200RMB. For less than hour of work, and considering how many trains they could transfer to on a one-way fare (2RMB) in a day, this is hustling at its finest.

I read on the web that Beijing's beggars are part of a large ring called the Beggars Federation, and 85% of them are professionals who live very comfortably off their earnings. Kind of like the shaky lady in Toronto. But I'm still undecided, when is it right to give to a beggar? Why do people prefer to give food over money? Does that not still encourage dependency and keep people on the streets? People use age and disability as factors when giving, but 5 dollars later, the kids and the disabled are still destined for the same life. I worked at the Scott Mission once upon a time in Toronto and can guarantee that a dollar donated towards outreach programs like that makes a much larger ripple in the pool of charity than a coin in their hats ever will.

3. I went to work today at the hotel I told you about. The CEO was the one who brought me in the company and he introduced me to the head of the Sales department, with whom I'm doing my first of many rotations to get to know the hotel. In China, everything is political, everything is about who you know, not what you know, and that scares me a little. I will be watched like a hawk, because CEO brought me in. The older people will look at me and say whothefuck are you, whatchuknowaboutthat and I will stammer to find the words in Chinese. CEO is also one of the scariest Chinese men I've ever met. He mumbles his words like he got shot in the mouth 8 times, sort of a cross between Fitty and Al Pacino multiplied by Bruce Lee. I realize I am going to get served a steaming rice bowl of whoopass, but it's too late to turn back.

4. I discovered today that I am a lump and about as graceful as Herbert the pig pictured below in the post about Green Cow Farms. I went to a dance class tonight taught by one of Beijing's most regarded contemporary dancers, and was a massive hazard unto myself and my surroundings. Granted I have never taken a single dance class in my life (other than the one time I was four and my mom spotted me in the back of the room distributing candy and distracting other girls around me- she promptly removed me from that class) and tonight's class was "Advanced Contemporary Technique". Apparently the body can move in wonderous ways that I am yet unfamiliar with, and it was a great course in human anatomy 101. But there is no excuse for the excess area codes my body is currently inhabiting, and I am newly inspired to get in shape and D.A.N.C.E! I love D.A.N.C.E! I will be pliéing and reverse turning the next time you see me.

I have been praying for this

Some throwback to "Below the Heavens" as Blu collabs with Exile in "LoveLine(s),DedicatedToLastFe'vrier". This duo is beyond genius.

jjjen

Sancha