I carry napkins, tissues and toilet paper all the time. Half of the toilets I have encountered are the squat-holes, including the student toilets at school. The school floors are washed daily: with a mop that has been rinsed in the filthy canal water that wends its way around the grounds. If I accidentally put a piece of cutlery down on a table or counter my friend Susan, a vet, yanks it out of my hand and says, "Never touch that again!"
Yesterday I went to the school cafeteria (one of several eating outlets) and had little rib things and rice for under $1 and then for dinner went with some people to a Japanese restaurant - all you can eat and drink for the shocking price of $25. (The restaurant food was beautiful, as you can see.)
Below are Jeremy and Benson, both from Vancouver, eating at a Japanese café where the food rolls by on a conveyor belt - to pay, the waitress just adds up your stack of little pink dishes. See the small black faucets - tea on demand!
I have avoided eating any seafood, as the water contamination is outrageous, but as a colleague said - nothing is safe. Even the veggies have been irrigated with the same water. There is an upmarket (expensive) delivery service from Shanghai that trades in organic foods; hat is where I will be able to get my whole wheat bread. I am still hunting for brown rice. Oh, it seems I am on about food again...
Tomorrow is Friday and I will be taking the 1pm student school bus in to Shanghai (multiple actually, as we have 1000 students who will be heading home) and then I'll take the Metro to IKEA to get a much needed stand-up lamp. It is supposedly the busiest IKEA in the world. I will regular-bus it back "home" in the evening.
My initial IKEA trip in Germany is etched indelibly on my memory. I picked up a rolled-up twin mattress that, because it was rolled up, I thought would be manageable, but the weight and awkwardness of the thing! I schlepped it back in the absolute pitch dark and the rain through an unlit graveyard (crying with the frustration/difficulty/misery of it all) only to reach the (far-off) bus stop to find I had missed the last bus. So not fun. We will see if tomorrow's China IKEA adventure can match the German IKEA one for grueling-ness (new word). I shall gird my loins.
KAREN
Cute old trucks, and not in a museum.
Yesterday I went to the school cafeteria (one of several eating outlets) and had little rib things and rice for under $1 and then for dinner went with some people to a Japanese restaurant - all you can eat and drink for the shocking price of $25. (The restaurant food was beautiful, as you can see.)
Below are Jeremy and Benson, both from Vancouver, eating at a Japanese café where the food rolls by on a conveyor belt - to pay, the waitress just adds up your stack of little pink dishes. See the small black faucets - tea on demand!
I have avoided eating any seafood, as the water contamination is outrageous, but as a colleague said - nothing is safe. Even the veggies have been irrigated with the same water. There is an upmarket (expensive) delivery service from Shanghai that trades in organic foods; hat is where I will be able to get my whole wheat bread. I am still hunting for brown rice. Oh, it seems I am on about food again...
Tomorrow is Friday and I will be taking the 1pm student school bus in to Shanghai (multiple actually, as we have 1000 students who will be heading home) and then I'll take the Metro to IKEA to get a much needed stand-up lamp. It is supposedly the busiest IKEA in the world. I will regular-bus it back "home" in the evening.
My initial IKEA trip in Germany is etched indelibly on my memory. I picked up a rolled-up twin mattress that, because it was rolled up, I thought would be manageable, but the weight and awkwardness of the thing! I schlepped it back in the absolute pitch dark and the rain through an unlit graveyard (crying with the frustration/difficulty/misery of it all) only to reach the (far-off) bus stop to find I had missed the last bus. So not fun. We will see if tomorrow's China IKEA adventure can match the German IKEA one for grueling-ness (new word). I shall gird my loins.
KAREN
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