Massages are all the rage here in Shanghai. There are parlors just about everywhere. You can get a massage in your motels, theres a place here in our compound and you can even get a masseuse delivered to your home. Everybody loves them, or so it seems.

Amy is a long time massage fan so she often goes and gets them. I've never really had a desire for one and have up until last night declined all offers for them. Last night our friends Laura and Thomas called wanting to get one. Amy agreed immediately, but I said no. Then Thomas brow-beated me and I reluctantly said "yes."

We went to a little shop down the road and contemplated which kind to get. They had full body massages, full body with oil, foot massages, head massages and all sorts of other things. I decided I would go all out and get a full body with oil.

It was a little weird at first stripping down to some little shorts they gave me and getting rubbed by a stranger, but it was ultimately nice. Very relaxing and invigorating even if the ladies thumbs were a little harsh.

Today though my back aches, and there are big bruises running up and down my shoulders.

Ouch.

Who Cares If I'm In China?

The other day while listening to a radio show a friend of mine hosts he made the following statement, "shut up Brewster, nobody gives a @!?# about what time it is in Shanghai." At the time it is true that I was heckling him and it is also true that our friendship is born from hassling each other, but the thing is, this time, it kind of hurt.

When Amy and I lived in Strasbourg I swore to myself that I when we returned I would not spend my days talking about living in France. When we finally did return to the States I found this promise was entirely difficult to not break.

Think about it a moment, how often do you talk about the events of the last year? Over the next couple of days when you are talking to friends or coworkers notice how often you mention something you did or experience over the last year, or any time in your past. We are nothing if we have no past. We are made up of nothing but our memories.

And we like to talk about them.


So it was with France. I constantly said stuff like "When we were in France," or "the French do this..." etc. I wasn't trying to be pompous or cool or anything. I had lived in an exotic (at least to me) place for nearly a year and it had a great effect on my life. In conversations these things naturally came out.

And so it is in China. I am sure that when I go back home I'll talk about Shanghai. I already do talk about it in this blog, in e-mails, on the phone and chatting with my friends elsewhere. Again it is not to say that I am better than anyone, but simply a part of my circumstance. I mean I cannot pretend I am not in China and in general conversation weird tidbits of my time here are going to come out.

Like the difference in time zones. Honestly I think it is really kind of cool that I am 13-14 hours ahead of most of my friends. It is completely fascinating to me. When my friend made his jibe it stung because I know that I have brought up the difference in time several times.

At first this was true because of my fascination with the science behind it, but now I am simply stating facts. The radio show my friend hosts is on blogtalkradio which is an internet radio dealie, and each show has its own chat room. When I listen to his show I hang out in the chat room.

The show runs from 11-noon my time and somewhere in the middle my wife calls me about lunch. We usually do lunch together and I always have to leave the show early. When I leave I generally send a message stating that I'm going to lunch. This isn't because I'm trying to be cool because I'm lunching while everyone else is preparing for bed. It is because I'm going to lunch, period. It seems rude to just disappear, and it is natural form me to let everyone know I'm leaving, and the reason behind my departure.

Wow! That's a pretty big whine in a pretty small box. Sorry if that's nothing but a self pat-on-the-back or something. The comment was harmless enough really, but it kind of got to me and I have only this to explain myself.

Stinking Coffee

The Chinese love their coffee. I mean L-O-V-E it. They put it in all sorts of things - cereal, pretzels, candy, ice-cream, drinks (!) and crackers amongst others. Name a snack food and they've probably got a coffee flavor of it.

Me on the other hand simply hate it. I hate the smell, I hate the taste, I hate the way it looks. I hate every flavor and variety of it. In college I used to hang out with a lot of coffee drinkers and without fail whenever we'd go out one of them would try to get me to taste some frapa-crapa-mocha-chino thing. They'd always swear it didn't tastes like coffee and it always did.

Lousy so and sos.

Needless to say I hate coffee flavored snacks. Yet I keep eating them.

Obviously I don't speak Chinese. Obviously I don't read it either. Which means shopping is always a strange and sometimes difficult experience. Most things you can figure out - an apple is still an apple. Coke still looks like Coke. And even things like pasta and potato chips or cereal are pretty easy to figure out. The packaging is similar and the insides of course are the same.

But flavors are a little tricky. I might grab a bag of bbq potato chips and not know it. My milk choices are still skim, half and super flabby fat, but I'm never really sure which version I buy most of the time.

That brings us back to coffee flavoring. Way too many times I have picked up some pretzels, or a candy bar or an ice cream bar only to realize (way too late) that it is coffee flavored.

Gag. Yuck. Gross.

Just now I piced up a little ice cream bar and was so looking forward to the cold, sweet goodness when - lick - ugh - oooh it's stinking coffee flavored.

Curses.

To my embarrassment, I'm leaving something out. While I can't read the Chinese labels on these products, most of them do include a picture to tell you what flavor they are. Pick up some tomato flavored chips and you'll see a little tomato on the package. Want some chocolate milk tea? Look for the label with a pure white stream of milk and another flowing of chocolate.

And yes, if you're looking for some coffee flavored something, you'll most certainly see a picture of a coffee bean on the package.

I'm stupid. I'm a dunce. I don't look at labels very closely. I'm just not used to looking for pictures of coffee beans on my ice cream. Thirty years of life tells me the brown stuff around my chocolate bar is chocolate and nothing else. Or if it is coffee flavored it says so in big letters. Who looks for coffee beans on their package of ice cream?

Me, I guess from now on. Unless I want an ice cream bar that I can't eat.

This Kitchen Is A Mess (And I Want To Go Home)

We finally took a trip into Shanghai proper and I took some good pictures around the Bund. Those will go up hopefully in the next few days. But for now some more complaining.

We have ants. Lots of ants. Bunches of them sneaking and crawling across our kitchen counters.

We had them pretty much from day two crawling around the dirty dishes in the sink. We moved everything out of the kitchen and I laid down some heavy duty ant spray outside the door (for their is a door that leads to a little balcony from the kitchen) and all over the trouble areas. This seemed to work.

It worked for a few days in fact and I moved all the stuff back in. The nearest supermarket is a ten minute taxi ride away and so we can only buy food and things in small batches. At this point the batches were pretty small indeed. I had all of our non-refrigerator food in one little cabinet.

Then the cabinet go ants. It was weird because the ants would seemingly have to go across the counter where I sprayed, or at least underneath the counters where I also sprayed to get to the food cabinet. Yet they were doing no such thing, they just seemed to magically appear in this cabinet.

Again I cleared everything out and sprayed like crap. At this point I'm beginning to worry about the effects of the poison as I'm pretty much layering my kitchen in it. This is doubly concerning as our little apartment doesn't really move air around much. But it was poison or ants and I chose poison.

Again this worked for a few days and I started putting food back. Again the ants are back, this time back to the sink again. They aren't in the droves they were before, but they are still her. Laughing at me. Mocking me.

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I woke this morning to find my kitchen floor full of water. Well, it was more like I awoke, checked my e-mail, played a game, piddled around and eventually went into the kitchen where I found several puddles of water across my kitchen floor.

Curses were uttered and I began to look for the cause. The problem with the kitchen floor is that it isn't exactly level so it wasn't like I could follows the trail of water to the source. Like I said there were several puddle of water all clumped together, but no real trail. I checked the water bottle and found nothing (in fact we ran out of water yesterday.) I checked under all the counters and again found nothing.

Amy came in and said she heard a dripping noise last night, but thought it was the water bottles heating mechanism (I guess she didn't know it was empty). We continued to look and eventually found a small drip underneath the gas water heater.

Our kitchen is absolutely horribly designed. Every single cabinet has piping or duct work or something really obnoxious in it that should have been hidden inside the wall. In one of the upper cabinets is our gas water heater and all the pipes leading out of it. This is doubly obnoxious because every time you turn on the kitchen sink to a hot water setting, the gas ignites in a giant WHOOSH right next to my hear. I duck every time.

Anyways, one of the pipes was leaking. After a lot of sleuthing we decided the drip was seeping into the side of the cabinet, down through the wall behind the lower cabinet and out onto the floor. Sure enough the wall down by the floor was soaking wet.

We stuck a glass underneath the drip and went to complain to the LQ. We are amazingly lucky in that most of the folks at the LQ speak some amount of English. While this can be very frustrating when we want to explain in detail what is happening to our kitchen, with our complete lack of Chinese we are thrilled we can at least explain that there is a leak.

This explanation rendered an appointment on Monday. As the lead was pretty small we figured we could glass it until then. When we reached home the leak had increased. It was dripping very heavily from two places now. I called Brian and he called the LQ saying maintenance was needed now.

The guy came quick and fixed the leak (which was now back to a drip and thus made me feel stupid.) I tried to explain the whole leaking through the wall thing, but he speaks no English and I still speak no Chinese so it was pretty much impossible.

Thus the war with the extra water is not over. Not by a long shot.