Tibetan food and about two hours of biking in the rain

Somewhat of an exaggeration; the biking did take about two hours and it did rain, but far from all the time. It just started as a drizzle when we came to the restaurant, that was actually not the restaurant that we, that means Aaron, intended us to go to but we waited there for him to find the place he was looking for and when he found it closed we ate there anyway.

Tibetan food is quite nice; we had yak-butter tea (weird), potatoes that were pretty much the same as Swedish potato buns with meat in them (really good), some bread with jak-meat in it that reminded me of pita-bread back home and for once I got real bread in China which is rare (also good), a jak-yogurt with rice dish that tasted just like sourmilk (filmjölk), a pork and green pepper dish that only had pork fat so I wasn't too happy about it (not so good) and finally a jak meat curry dish that tasted ok but I think the meat was a bit over-cooked, it should probably be like that but I never really liked it that way. The potatoes was definitely the winners anyway, we Will try to make potato buns some day, should be too hard; just mashed potatoes that you fry in butter or something, put some meat in it or whatever and voila!

When we were going home it had really started raining more seriously, and it had gotten cooler, luckily I had brought both scarf and gloves and my rain poncho thing, so both me and Jane were pretty covered up (I was giving Jane a ride because the bike she was supposed to borrow from Aaron had a flat tyre).

Fakking 93kg

So it has happened; I bought a scale at IKEA yesterday and when I came home and could weight myself without too much clothes I found it, I have now lost more than 10kg since I left Sweden, that is rather cool.

To prevent loosing too much, or actually it was more to impress my friends, I made meatballs and mashed potatoes, complete with lingon-berry jam, cream sauce and all, last night and with Jane's inexperienced help they turned out perfect. Aaron and Kelly came and ate them with us and then we watch the latest South Park, lots of balls humor, hehe.

I would post a meatball picture if I had remembered to take any but I didn't.

A horrible day...

I had the worst day ever today,or at least the worst since I came to China; from the very start of the day I had problems, problems waking up, I wanted to sleep longer so I skipped breakfast, which I actually do way too often now, I did eat some buns with honey on on the way to Wen Jian where we worked today. The primary school we worked at today is one of the worst I have, the classes have really bad discipline, and today was worse than ever before, at least for those classes, I'm alternating between two sets of classes every week, and add to this I was really really tired and Betty, my assistant, was following Gosha, my co-worker, instead of me since her assistant (and our boss), Ivy, was late and missed the ride. The classes I had was close enough to impossible to control and I nearly started screaming at several points, damn horrible.

When I got home after lunch I basically just crashed, after starting the Heroes download of course, and took a 20 minutes nap. When I got up I had to hurry but for once I was sure I would be on time for the afternoon classes, it is usually very hard to be on time on Tuesdays because we get back from Wen Jian really late, at around 1pm, and with lunch and getting back home I don't have much time before we start in the afternoon at 2.45pm, but the second my door closed I realised my keys where still inside. Now this shouldn't really be a problem but it is because the door locks itself, for some damn stupid reason, but all the doors in China are like this, unfortunately my bike-keys are on the same ring as my house key and after spending about 5 minutes to contact Betty or Ivy to contact the landlord and 5 more minutes to find a taxi and of course taking the taxi there which takes about twice as much time as biking I got there late.

Tuesdays are always bad, the primary school in the morning is horrible and the kindergarten in the afternoon is possibly worse, maybe because I'm always exhausted after the morning classes, the kinds are difficult to start with and with time, like 1 minute, they lose the little concentration they have when we start, and after that it starts getting bad, sigh. I did survive though and Betty went with me to meet the landlord, who doesn't speak English of course, and to help me with some other things, a weird bill where it seems I use more water and electricity in 10 days than I used for a whole month before, among other things.

Add to this a phone that had to be recharged and a landlord that was 45 minutes late and me just getting more and more tired by the minute, ARGH!!!!

Oh, I'm in much better mood now, just sitting here for an hour writing about all the fun that have happened in the weekend helped a lot, I'm not coming home yet, haha.

Kaj

Bad planning and misinformation led me to arrive at the airport about 15 minutes later than planned, and since Kaj had landed about 10 minutes ahead of time and gotten is luggage faster than you can imagine (my imagination cant handle fast and airport in the same sentence) I managed to let him wait for me about 30 minutes, it was good to see him anyway, and what was even better was to speak Swedish with someone you could actually see. We took a taxi back home and started with unloading all the stuff I had asked him to bring; shirts, warm sweaters, gloves and candy, a lot of candy, mostly liquorice and some chocolate that mom called about to remind me not to let Kaj eat it.

We went to have brunch, due to my bad planning I hadn't even had time to have breakfast and dad's flight was so early so he hadn't had any either, at my favourite close-by place, it's actually a hotel but they have a nice Chinese restaurant at the first floor, the restaurant actually covers two floors but it's not nice on the second. Of course dad wanted to have a lot of seafood but with some mistake from my side and quite a bit of reluctance to even order seafood we didn't get any, it was actually an honest mistake, the food was still really great, we managed to get some really nice stuff, and the service was better than it had ever been there before; I think they saw two Americans in us and with dad's age they probably expected a lot of money, not that it makes any difference since tipping doesn't exist here.

I had made some preliminary plans, just thoughts really, for the weekend, and when I laid them out for dad we changed them immediately, he figured if we took a taxi around instead we could shorten the times of my plans so we could actually manage to do something that afternoon, and so we did; I called Jane to help us around and from that point she was what everybody thought she was, our private translator, even though it was not really as professional as everybody thought. We went off to the Panda research base that is in the suburbs in the northeast of Chengdu, just about 20-30 minutes by taxi from my place. Now when I say suburbs I don't mean the American kind of suburb, I have been thinking about this a little and that association is just wrong, suburb just means something that lies around the city, not really part of the city core but almost, and I think in most cities in the word that means some kind of semi-city, or almost-city, half city- or town- like buildings and half countryside. The Panda base was quite nice, I saw more pandas than I had expected, and especially more kinds of pandas than I knew there was, that is to say we saw two kinds of pandas; of course the traditional giant panda and also something that is called red panda. Now here is another misconception, the giant panda is not giant at all, it's actually not even big, it's like a larger size dog actually, or a tiny bear, so I was rather disappointed about that, and they are stupid and lazy, the only thing they do is eat and sleep, and one of the teenage ones was just scratching his balls all the time. The red pandas were much cuter, they look like bigger size red raccoons, or maybe something between a fox and a puma, with bear like ears and a long, thick tail.

When we came back we had a short rest back in my apartment and then we met Aaron close to my building and the four of us had dinner. This time got his share of seafood at least; we started with having some barbecue, shaokao (or however it should be written), and dad made his selection of weird fishes and an oyster, I just chose some normal pork, beef and vegetables, after that we had some Chinese dishes and dad got some seafood dish there too, I don't remember what it was and I don't care much either, I still don't like seafood.

After dinner we went to Paname and met Lily and Kelly, Bella was also there but she left quite soon, we had some drinks and shared a bottle of wine and then went home not too late, it had been a long exhausting day after all, especially for Kaj.

We had been considering some plan to go to a Leshan, a place that is quite close to Emeimountain where I went last weekend and that has a big Buddha statue, it's said to be VERY big, we changed our mind about that though, that trip would take about 9-10 hours in total and we simply didn't have any energy for it. Instead we stayed home resting just about the whole day, we actually didn't go out until after 5pm when dad had starting to complain about lunch, he probably thought it was around 2pm still. We went out to an area close to my home where there is a monastery and some old style Chinese buildings and a lot of small restaurants, old style and not old; they were actually celebrating the one year anniversary for that area this weekend. I think dad was very happy there, we walked around and tried all sorts of small cheap snacks that we could find, mostly barbecued stuff but also some deep fried dumplings and some fried minced meat in bamboo leafs. When we finally were done with that we went to another area in the south part of the city where they have some nice hot pot restaurants, I had to take dad to hot pot here, and there he got even more seafood, squids and seafood dumplings and I think some shrimp and other stuff, I gave up and just didn't eat it.

We finished our day at a big store where I could recover the so rare bread that I had given dad for breakfast, I got some cheese too and I guess it might be rather interesting for dad to compare prices of whatever and see what kind of weird stuff we have here, the store has lots of imported stuff, that's why we could find bread and cheese there, but of course also local stuff; I think what he found most exciting was, sigh, the seafood; they always sell it fresh here, that is it is still alive when you pick it out, so loads of aquariums with different kinds of weird looking fish and shellfish, dad got the pictures of those but I crashed when we came back home so we never uploaded them to my computer.

Remind me to cut and paste the movies I took with some nice music so I can upload it here.

Snor

I've had some new kindergarten classes that I didn't have before, one is a kindergarten not far from where I live where I had two classes on Wednesday morning last week. There was a bogger incident, a small girl, apparently Korean so she didn't even understand Betty's, my assistant, instructions, she was running around a little bit too much and when she run up to me one time she ended up with her nose covering my thumb for a second, luckily she didn't get hurt and it only lasted for the blink of an eye, suddenly I just stood there with my thumb covered in bogger, NASTY.

I didn't have much on Thursday either, only two classes in the afternoon, so I went out to Paname on Wednesday night with Lily and Aaron, quite relaxing, but since both of them had work in the morning and I was rather exhausted we didn't stay out very late.

On Friday we went out to a city North of Chengdu, the same place where I had the Swedish boy in my class, but I didn't have that class this time. During lunch, of course the four hours long lunch, we went to a park in the city, it was rather nice so I took some pics with my mobile, it's not the best camera but it works quite well in daylight at least.

Mt. Emei

Very early Saturday morning, around 6am (and that after biking home from The Bookworm at 11.30pm and not sleeping until around 1am the night before) I woke up and tried to force myself up. I actually managed to get myself out to where I would meet my friend at around 6.50, only 10 minutes late and Lily (not the same Lily that got me the job here) was even 5 minutes later. We took a taxi together to the Chengdu South train-station and arrived there about an hour before the train would leave - taking trains in China is much like flying I think, it's not exactly necessary to arrive like an hour before departure but close enough, and they have some kind of security check even though it feels totally unnecessary, they basically just put your bag through an x-ray and i doubt that anyone even looks at it, and no one checks your body anyway, it makes no sense but people do it anyway.

The train took 3 hours and was probably the least comfortable train ride I have ever taken, it only cost us 9kuai though, Imagine going to Göteborg (or rather Halmstad at that speed) for 8kr, and we arrived in Emei (the city/town/whatever) at around 10.30. A girl that got on the train two stations before Emei told Lily how to go around to get to the mountain so we could avoid the probably over-expensive tourist tricycles that attacked me the second we came out from the train-station. We took a bus instead, 1 kuai, to the center of the town and had our lunch there and bought some food in a super market, the girl told us that the food on the mountain was both bad and expensive. Another bus, this time from centre to mountain bus-terminal for 2.5 kuai each.

The mountain bus was not that cheap though, and took a lot longer than we had though, we took a bus to what we though was the highest point we could, it is rather confusing there actually, a stop called Leshan I think and that cost us 40 kuai each. It was already after 12pm when we started off and the bus ride up the mountain took around 2 hours. It was a rather interesting ride though, with the vegetation changing the higher we got, not the way you would think though, mostly in color; from a green that came in an unnatural shade which you would only think you could find on an oil-painting but still with the exquisite detail of a pencil and turning to greens and browns that is more like the crayons we played with when we were kids and finally showing some yellow and red at the higher points of the mountain, unfortunately the speed of the bus, really uncomfortable speed under those conditions, and the overall humidity and impossibility of taking photos through the dirty windows of the bus prevented me quite efficiently from taking photos of all the wonderful mountain views we passed by, and the few times we stopped for, I think, refilling the water in the bus there was no view at all. The only thing that was as expected was that there were more pines higher to the top, but where Swedish mountains change from trees to only undergrowth to nothing at under 2000m above the sea you could still find tall tress stretching for the sky even at the summit, 3077m above sea level, of this mountain.

120kuai more to spend to even enter the higher areas of the mountain, a typical thing here actually, if there is something people likes to see, even if it is something totally natural like a mountain or a forest, they will charge you for it, and usually a lot, exploiting things seems to be second or even first nature to the people here. We still had to pay though, we couldn't well turn around and walk down at this point, which was probably why no one had told us about this fee before (I think Lily knew about it but she hadn't mentioned it either). By the time we reached Leshan it was already after 3pm and beyond time to start climbing - climbing a mountain in China is not like what we think of as climbing, as every park in China comes paved and with "do not walk on the grass"-signs mountains comes with stairs, and so does mount Emei (of course) - and climbing we did, in the Chinese way of course. It took us nearly 3 hours to get to the top and through all that time the most interesting thing we saw was a monkey stealing Lily's coke bottle when she turned her back to it for me to take a picture of them, I suspect it was rather used to stealing bottles like that because it already knew how to get the drink out of it, it pretty much only bit a whole at the bottom of the bottle and drank through that, we only saw 3 monkeys on the whole way though so it was rather disappointing.

Our trip was probably really bad timed, I think that this time of year it is usually the same; the top of the mountain was covered in a cloud and no matter how marvelous view you could imagine at some points you still couldn't see much further than ten meters, so we basically just walked (climbed) further up. In total the climb was about 7km long and with about 500 meters elevation, but it felt much much more, I would have thought we were walking at a 45% degree all the time but that is impossible. I was still soaked with sweat when we finally reached the top, passing by two smaller temples on the way up and ignoring the cable-car ride they had, we still kept climbing the last bit to the main temple at the summit where you are supposed to have all these marvelous view that you can read about, I guess some of the pictures I took there turned out quite ok anyway, but as I said I was soaked to the bone and it was freezing cold so after a short time we tried our way down to where the hotel (rather hostel) was.

We managed to negotiate a two bed room for 60kuai but no private toilet, the room was pretty much just a walled in area with two beds and no heating, I'm guessing the insulation for our room was still comparably good since we didn't have any outer wall. We had dinner at the hotel, which cost us another 60kuai, which seemed to upset Lily, but it was actually quite good, really good even, it was freezing cold though. Later Lily made friends with two girls, Sue and Linger (probably the funniest name so for, except may miss About) who had been climbing the mountain the whole day, they could speak some English too. We planned to watch the sunrise together in the morning, apparently one of the things you have to do there even though we all had our doubts that we could see anything in the cloud.

We slept quite early, around 9pm already, but neither of us could sleep well, I went up to the toilet like three or four times, probably because of all the hot soup I had had for dinner, and Lily said she couldn't sleep because of my snoring, very likely since my nose was totally plugged, and that was one of the other reasons that I couldn't sleep. We managed to get up at around 6.30 and managed to miss the sunrise, it was even more cloudy in the morning than it had been the night before so I doubt we would have seen anything remotely like a sunrise anyway and that despite the freezing cold - cold is not like cold in Sweden, I'm guessing with the lower pressure and stuff it could have been as low as -5 degrees without forming much ice but it was humid, extremely humid, so you cold feel the cold in a way that is difficult to describe, and well it is the top of a mountain so you can imagine that it's rather windy, it was COLD, I took it better than the girls though. We still did run around taking photos for a few hours though and then the 4 of us took the cable-care - also a funny thing, where normal people try to have the car running as often as possible with a normal amount of people (like the cars in Hong Kong where they have 8-10 people in each car and cars running constantly) the Chinese build ONE large car and press in ONE HUNDRED people in it, running only for 5 minutes down it was still ok, but I really don't get the packing.

We said goodbye to Sue and Linger and tried to find a bus to a middle of the mountain stop where Lily wanted to do some more "climbing" and see more monkeys, I was just hoping to catch a better view without a cloud in and around it but we found that we had to walk down the 15-30 minutes climb to Leshan again. This was the path where we had seen the monkey before and this time we saw a lot more of them, maybe 10-20 of them in total, and we fed them some crackers that only the smaller stupid ones accepted (they really tasted bad) and got some nice photos with us and them and everything. After the monkeys we caught up with Sue and Linger again and we walked down to the bus stop together and said our goodbyes again. We bought a bus ticket to mid mountain place but when Lily realised that we would have to buy another ticket for the same price to get down from the mountain we gave up and used that ticket to go down instead, it seems they only have one ticket down and one up no matter where you are on the mountain, and this ticket cost us 30kuai each and that was about what Lily had left after paying 30kuai for the cable-car, besides we turned out to not have much time left. The cheap train we took only departed twice per day, once in the morning and once at night, 9.30pm I think, and we came to the train-station at around 3pm, we took a much more comfortable and expensive, 36kuai each, bus instead and ended our journey in central Chengdu at around 6pm.

"Thai-food"

I have never had Thai-food in Thailand so i won't claim to know what Thai-food should really be like, but I've had Thai-food in Sweden and other countries and it has been made by real Thai people, and I have gone to a Thai restaurant with a Thai girl and eaten what she said was Thai-food, so this should at least give me the right to complain.

So we came to this high class central restaurant that I think is the only Thai-restaurant in Chengdu, it is actually a really nice place, they had some staff walking around and having people wish for songs that they would sing, and they were really good at singing too. The first thing that surprised me was how hard it was to find the standard Thai-curry soups or dishes that they usually have on the first page for main course dishes, I did finally find two dishes that seemed to fit the description and that had nice pictures in the menu, a green-curry-soup-thing with chicken and a dry-curry dish with beef that we ordered. Second surprise was when we got the dish, the green-curry-soup-thing was green for sure, but no curry, and the green was... well... rather synthetic looking, as if they had put in some coloring to make it green, and it tasted neither of curry nor the normal coconut-soup that they always use, the other dish just tasted soya. So we asked them to add a bit more curry, mentioned that we like the curry to be spicy and they went off with our dishes to do what we had asked, about five minutes later they came back with them with only one new addition: chili pepper. I doubt they have any idea of what curry is at all.

By the way, I hate Emilia's Big big world.

Failed scones

I made scones this morning but it didn't go that well; I forgot the oven timing for them and had them in 20 instead of 15 minutes, I used too much salt, I think because the butter was salted too and the bicarbonate I used instead of baking-powder and that I made half a batch which made the proportions all wrong, it was only half ok anyway but still eatable, at least to me.

Flying Jacob

I have bought an oven, it wasn't cheap but I think worth it anyway, 878kuai and including two gifts worth around 100-200kuai; a coffee maker that I gave to Jane, partly because I don't drink coffee but mostly because she has helped me out so much, and Chinese teacup thing. I bought a rice-cooker too, a cheap one but more than enough for me I think, it can both boil and steam stuff so I can eat more at home now.

And that's what we did last night, at first it was just Jane and I but Aaron called to ask me to join him for drinking at the Bookwork so I invited him as well. Jane and I had spent the afternoon after we bought the oven at a store called Metro; a place that has just about everything and have lots of imported stuff, and I found a lot of the stuff I needed and wanted there, among other things all I needed to make my chicken-rice-curry-banana-peanuts dish Flying Jacob, except that the curry wasn't really the kind of curry that I wanted, too sweet, and the cream for the sauce was too sweet too. Both Jane and Aaron liked the dish though and it was pretty good, just not exactly the way I wanted. I found some other things I wanted, and some things I wanted when I saw them; English tea, chocolate powder, real bread and best of all New Castle brown ale, of which I bought a six pack and shared with Aaron over the dinner.

Now I just need to find yeast and baking-powder, have already found dry yeast but I don't really trust that so dad will bring real yeast and baking-powder if I can't find it, so that I can bake, I want to make scones!

IKEA

First, or actually third but for most it's first, day of the holiday, I went with Jane to IKEA and bought a lot of stuff; more kitchen stuff, a cover mattress, a blanket, which turned out to be the most expensive blanket I have had but that doesn't matter since I can keep it after I leave China. In total I spend way too much, around 2000kuai on the stuff I bought in the store, nearly 300kuai on food and candy and we had breakfast in the restaurant there too, Swedish food :), so maybe I spent too much there to buy the oven I want for my apartment. We are going out to have something like fondue or hotpot now, I don't really understand but it sounds really good.