19 November 2004

Wok 'n' Woe

Yesterday was one of my more interesting days in Shanghai. It started innocently enough with a trip to the market to buy ingredients for my lunch, the first time I tried cooking since I got here two weeks ago. After buying some utensils and junk food at the supermarket (mmm....Peking Duck flavoured potato chips...), I arrived home and started work on my culinary masterpiece. Needless to say I'm now paranoid about when the food poisoning is going to strike. The meal was meant to be fried noodles with Chinese barbecue pork (cha siew/cha shao), but it ended up more like a sticky paste which coated the bottom of my wok in something that had the appearance and consistency of plasticene. Obviously, this little escapade has deterred me in no small amount from cooking in any form outside of a microwave, so it'll be fine dining Shanghai style from now on, as long as I can keep the price of the meal under $2nz. After that Gordon Bleu experience, I managed to tear myself away from the bathroom and haul ass to school. Lesson went pretty well, though student numbers are dropping. Apparently this happens all the time, and it's not in fact due to my magnificent fashion sense deterring all the male students due to jealousy. Nothing hugely eventful there. Post-class, a few colleagues and I went for a drink at a local watering hole called Windows. For the first time since I got here I felt like I was back in the West, except, that is, for the price of the drinks. $2nz per bottle of imported beer. So much for the guidebook warning me of the strain on my wallet that boozing would cause. The bar was pretty empty, probably par for the course on a Thursday night, but the few people that were there were mostly westerners. Played a few rounds of pool and got pretty merry, and somehow managed to avoid starting any fights this time. We went to the bar with a couple of Chinese students, one of whom was wishing that her ex-boyfriend would vanish from the face of the Earth. At one point one of us turned around in their chair and noticed that the same scooter that had been following us a while ago was still following us. Lo and behold, it was the scary ex-boyfriend/stalker tailing us. Luckily we managed to lose him, but I'm now a little paranoid about going out in Shanghai. Twice I've been out, the first time leading to blows (though not to me, thankfully), and the second time with a crazy moped-riding stalker following us. Perhaps it's just me being a bad omen. I've given up trying to finish these things with a nice ending. I seem to have lost that skill lately. Any ideas on how to regain it?

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