Well, I'm on my own now for the first time in a month. I'm okay, but it just doesn't feel right making hot chocolate for one, you know?
P.S. Claire's hot chocolate (new recipe): tons of cocoa, a little sugar, extra-creamy milk, and fresh grated ginger. Careful, the ginger makes the milk froth to twice its volume, so be ready to swipe the saucepan off the stove while bleating "Ahh! Ahhhhh!" like I did the first time.
A dash of cayenne is fab as well.
So, Mom and I had a great time in Beijing, Qingdao, Hangzhou, and Xitang. We spent most of her last two weeks in Shanghai finding new cafés, doing in-depth research on local foot massage establishments, and cooking soup. I am now the proud owner of a Westinghouse rice cooker that also has a darling steamer attachment. Rice cookers are amazing! I've been eating brown rice with milk and cinnamon and raisins for breakfast, and stirfry with white rice for lunch. Will experiment with a combination for dinner and report on findings.
I'm going to post my favourite pics from the first part of our trip; Mom, I forgot to get the Shanghai ones from your camera before you left! Oh no!
Thank you to everyone who is still following me after these weeks of erratic posting. Laura and I will be sure to get our pictures up ASAP!
Photos:
1. The beautiful Lama temple, apparently one of China's most important Tibetan Buddhist temples.
2. Beijing duck (the close-up)!! Yummy yummy yummy. You take a little piece of duck and put it in the middle of a warm, thin pancake (plucked from the slightly limp bouquet on the right); then you add hoisin sauce and onion, roll it up, and EAT IT. This was a contemporaryish place, which meant they gave us three sauces and tiny slices of interesting fruit to put in the pancakes. Mmmmmm.
3. Mom dug it.
4. Bug kebabs at the night market. Eughhh
5. Lovely candied fruit sticks. Those I can handle.
Mom and I are sitting across the table from each other typing on our respective Macs as countless firecrackers and fireworks explode just outside the window. Chinese New Year kicks January 1st's bum all over the place - we ran outside at midnight to see fireworks exploding from at least twelve points in our neighbourhood alone. Sadly, my USB drive doesn't seem to be receptive and so I can't post pics - I'll try to rectify this ASAP.
Beijing and Qingdao were fab, especially our four-hour hike of the Great Wall that ended with us ziplining across a giant river valley in the freezing cold. The two-day colds that followed weren't so hot (pun fully intended, ha, ha) but Qingdao was small enough that we didn't feel bad about lying in our hotel beds all sniffy. Pics also forthcoming. How does Bluetooth work? Do cameras use it? How can I get my pictures from there to here without my USB ports? Darn, darn, darn.
Much love and further posts to follow. Happy Year of the Ox!
I bet you for sure thought I'd gotten permanently lost in the metro system or swallowed by the crowds on Nanjing Road. Not so, my dear readers; it was simply final exam stress that kept me from my computer. If you're reading this, I want to tell you how much I appreciate you coming back after two full weeks of non-posting.
First: finals. Under the exceptional tutelage of my friend Eric, a comp-sci grad student at Donghua, I studied like I've never studied before. Eric tells me that Chinese university hopefuls study for 16 hours a day for an entire year - no weekends - in preparation for the entrance exams. Only about one in fifteen make it. So I think he was a little surprised when I assured him that six hours of studying per day was a lot by Canadian standards, and that 12 would be pushing it. Anyway, I made Starbucks my second home and worked my butt off, memorizing about 400 new characters, an entire textbook of grammar concepts, and four Speaking mini-speeches on the topics of:
1. My favourite restaurant
2. My ideal husband ("All around me are handsome men and rich men, but looks and money are not as important and morals and a good education")
3. My views on interracial marriage ("Cross-cultural marriages may have some disadvantages, but mixed-blood children are almost always more beautiful and smart" [this was straight from our curriculum])
4. My opinion on old people remarrying ("Old people who want to remarry may worry that their neighbours may say this or that, but happiness is more important than what the neighbours think")
I can't wait to apply my new conversational skills to real-life situations, in the manner of "All I want is to marry a man who can pay for one vacation per year."
/
MOM IS HERE! She arrived last night at the Pudong Airport and came home to fill my cupboards with organic peanut butter, popcorn kernels, gourmet crackers, Panda licorice, goat brie, and other yummy foodstuffs that make me feel ten bazillion more times at home. Today we hit Nanjing Road - see mom brandishing her first Uniqlo bag - and went over to Fuzhou Lu, two blocks away, to the amazing paper stores there. Mom loves bookbinding and got totally giddy about how ridiculously cheap paper is here compared to the overpriced paperies at home, kind of how I got about scarves and Fineliners.
Tomorrow we're going to go to Taikang Lu and reprise today's amazing foot massage experience - it's seriously a good pain. It's so great to be on holiday and I can't wait to go to Beijing on Monday! After five days there, we're on to Qingdao, former German colony and home of China's most famous beer.
Back soon!
Photos:
1. Crazy bamboo scaffolding by the university
2. Shanghai cultural immersion: shopping
3. The beautiful paper Mom bought. Three dollahs!
4. The paper place. 
