big william's world

but not here! - take a look at my guest appearance on bensbreakfast.blogspot.com - somewhere on your screen

KP

In Boulder today - surprisingly warm! :You must all know these are the Flatirons by now. Off to a cooler England for a week tonight so need to pack warmer clothes and gifts.
two days in London two days in Bicester two days in Oxford and two days on planes so blogging might be a bit sparse. There are so many blogs to read now - perhaps we should consider a family blog in which we each have a column - then the comments would be easier to understand and contribute to.
Naming such a blog might be difficult though! - how about "The noble Millards" - somehow I don't see that lower case noble being accepted!

Frogs for the table - alive in a market in Shanghai.
Dumpling production-line at a restaurant in Shanghai - pork dumplings with hot soup inside the skin around the meatball - very nice!
You'll never guess! -----------------------
Fighting crickets - these are the most expensive ones - they come in these clay pots with lids.
They put two of them in another box to fight and the first to jump out of the box looses.
Just an excuse for gambling really.

Born in the Chinese year of the Rat here I am in China with the Rat
Skysraper-high tv screens in Shanghai

13 hours seems to be about the worst jetlag can be! - night is day - everything looks chinese
I see tangled cables in front of everything
Arguments about motorcycles on blogs.
This beauty was in Shanghai and I don't even know what it is. Yes a BMW style but there are many such styles. The writing in the distributor cap was Chinese.
Everybody is too busy writing blogs to read them these days - me included.

This part of China has many navigable rivers with lots of these Venice-like water villages on them. We drove out of Shanghai for two hours to this one called Shuzhua (or something)
The guide said that this is the most fertile, developed and nice parts of China.
To get there we drove through many huge, new industrial developments "the workshop of the world" as he put it. Factories owned by Japanese (Pioneer), US, UK, Japan all with living quarters for workers and many with water as well as road transportation

The water villages are only recently turning to tourism - fishermen are hanging up their nets and paddling gondolas instead.
The food here has been very good - the best Chinese food I have eaten - much tastier than the stuff in UK or US. Sweet and sour pork was not very sweet at all like I was used to but quite sour.
Lots of dumplings - some with hot soup as well as meat inside.
Looking forward to home tomorrow - Sunday - as I write this it is Saturday in UK, USA

You would not believe some of the houses in the shadow of these skyscrapers!
The smog has improved a lot since Sunday when we arrived gloomily.

On an even lighter note - went to a b-boys versus ballet event last night - believe it? - they were pretty good. I am working on spinning round on my head upside down!

Went to the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South yesterday

The version of a little boy who hated history at school:
After World War 2 which Germany and Japan lost - they were punished by having land taken off them. Germany lost half of Germany to the Communists (who helped the allies win the war) and half of Korea (which Japan had invaded and colonised in 1905) was taken off Japan. A struggle between communists in the north and Koreans became the Korean war in the early 50's when the communists almost took over the whole Korean peninsula.
The solution was to divide the county with a line from coast to coast and install 1.5 million land mines and fences and lookouts. Not a thought seems to have been given to the people of Korea.

Panmunjom is a small area controlled by the UN - not North OR South Korea - where meetings take place in the slow slow quest for unification. Went in the room under strict orders - do not point at anything, to not talk to soldiers or pass in front of or behind them. Do not wear sneakers or jeans or short sleeves or open shoes. The last incident in the area occurred in 1994 which suddenly seemed quite recent. Not much sign of this larger size equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down any time soon.
It has been in place and guarded by soldiers from both sides for over 50 years. The most constructive thing that has happened is that a wonderful nature reserve has created itself in the no-mans-land.

There are some aspects of the human race that I just have to hide from. I can remember as a child telling my parents that I would never want to be a soldier and fight wars and kill people. They told me if the need arose then I would stand up and fight for my country but I still feel the same even now.

I cannot understand the constant need man has to fight with men. If I was dying in the road in North Korea - I think people would stop and help me (maybe not in Baghdad) there is an instinct not to hit the body in the road be it rabbit or man. But when two or three are gathered together in the name of capitalism or communism - a killing instinct takes over.

We crawled in tunnels under the DMZ which the North Koreans had dug - reckoning that they could get 30,000 armed troops per hour through them in an invasion of the south.

I could ramble on all day about this but I can hear the snoring already - even though I am a day ahead of my readers - it is Thursday here.

On my third dinner alone I returned to "Muscus" where I went on Sunday night because I enjoyed it a lot.
It's a large seafood buffet restaurant that seats several hundred people and you can sit and eat all night for $26 including sushi of many kinds, cooked meats and fish, MUCH kimchi and many things I don't know what they were.
Not a word of English is spoken and scoring a beer (excellent local brew) was a challenge.
Suddenly while I was eating somebody started talking loudly over the public address system. I thought they were never going to stop and the waitress came to me, speaking Korean and making rectangle signs about the size of a handkerchief - I just shrugged my shoulders. She came back with a small square of paper like a postage stamp with Korean writing and the number 35 on it.
The talking over the speakers continued and I realized it was a raffle - I waved the ticket at the couple on the next table, pointed my fingers in my ears and made circles - trying to imply - which they probably already knew - that I did not understand what the numbers were.
Of course they must have called 35 so they gestured to me to go get the prize and it was a plate of, obviously very special, mushrooms with a small bowl carved from daikon or turnip or something containing some little yellow berries. I ate half the mushrooms (with chopsticks of course) and gave the rest to my neighbours who seemed to really appreciate them. I think they might have been king mushrooms or something.
On a menu earlier in the day I saw the translation quote of the week "cold raw entrails"
Tonight they had "sea squirt sushi" - thoughts of little boys at the seaside?
When I Googled "Muscus" for the pictures it said "did you mean mucus"

One of the main contributions to world cuisine from Korea is kimchi - which appeals to an Englishman about as much as sauerkraut or (for that matter) the cabbage he was made to eat as a kid. It is (for the fortunate ones who haven't tried it) raw cabbage, and other barely edible vegetables, pickled in red chili paste and other things to give it flavor. Unfortunately it is still as hard, crunchy, cold and sour as raw cabbage.

Anyway they have, fortunately stolen some Japanese dishes to eat with it - like Shabu Shabu - which is what I just had which is very thinly sliced beef, cooked very briefly in boiling vegetable broth - with tiny mushrooms, green leaves unknown, pumpkin and unknown other things.

Cooked at the table. Unlike the picture I did not have beer but Chianti.

For thoughts occurring during dinner see "a whey with words" clickable to your right - or is it the left?

Which I have always believed means "The truth you tell when you are drunk"

I just had my second dinner alone - the other half is earning the money to pay for it!

only 50 lengths of this by my estimate for the morning mile! - definitely the best hotel pool I ever saw and it opens at 5.30 am daily.
I am still hoping to add Seoul to my list of olympic pools I have swum in - after my failure in Athens.
This place is just like Japan - including incredibly high prices - I LOVE it!
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It rained all day yesterday but seems to have stopped now.