Over the past week I’ve noticed something that seems to have gone viral here in Beijing. It’s something that’s not uncommon, but I only now seem to be seeing it everywhere I walk.

Nail clipping.

Seriously, what possesses people to cut their nails in public?

Last week, outside the Science and Technology museum, I sit outside to catch my breath after a long slug around the complex (it’s big) when some 40-something husband and wife sit opposite us and start taking out their nail clippers and cutting their nails. When I say nails, I don’t just mean finger nails, but also toes, too.

I must have seen this at least 20 times in the past week, I kid you not, and haven’t seen this intensity of nail clipping in Beijing before.

When you really think of the life of a finger or toe nail, the last thing you want is to have random people’s discarded nails flying around the place. It’s just dirty.

I really do like Beijing, but I’m glad to be getting a few weeks away from it soon.

I don’t often get the opportunity to cook much these days, but when I do I like to make sure I’m spending my time cooking something nice. After a terribly long day in meetings yesterday, I found myself walking home from the subway early in the evening with the feeling that I could devour something a lot larger than myself. Despite feeling drained, I had a sudden urge to cook something because I really felt like some home cooked grub.

There’s a relatively new supermarket that has just opened not too far from my place, on the way to and from the subway, that I’ve always wanted to check out. With the opportunity yesterday to do so, I discovered that is mainly a foreign goods supermarket filled with some very nice products, most of which were well out of my budget.

I did find a few things and decided to cook not one, but many dishes for last night’s dinner. It’s not unusual in Korea for me to cook many dishes for a meal, to be consumed with fresh steamed rice. It’s the Korean way to fill the table with as much banchan (반찬) as possible and I often find myself these days’ trying to figure out where I got the time and energy to make so many dishes most nights when I lived in Korea, seeing as I finished at 9 o’clock every night.

So below are a few of the dishes I put together.

From left to right: spicy tofy knots, coleslaw salad, hot spicy chicken sausages, honey soy chicken, eggs with mayonnaise yolks, curried chicken and egg, fermented tofu, and steamed rice.

Of course a lot of things I didn’t make from scratch, like the sausages, but they are easy to cook and don’t take up too much time. For the above, about 30 minutes all up. Even now, it still surprises me how fast I can work in the kitchen when I want to.

And of course Em was over the moon to have a long over due banchan dinner!

I really haven’t been writing much here over the past 6 months or so for many different reasons. I guess the biggest factor is that I rarely have the time to sit down and write about what’s going on in my world, and the world around me.

I don’t feel the need to write as I once used to. The feeling that I wanted to write something every day has long since left and I doubt it’ll ever come back with the same ferocity it once had.

And really, what’s there to write about?

Starting from the top let me go into a bit more detail. Since being placed in charged of my own school, a lot of my focus and energy is squarely aimed at it. It’s not easy having to manage 10 teachers, as well as keeping an eye on the sales and administration team. This whole ‘management’ thing isn’t as easy as I thought it would be and it’s taking longer to work through certain things than I anticipated.

It also doesn’t help when I’m short staffed, spending a little too much of my time in the classroom rather than the office, getting through the piles of administrative work that awaits me. I can’t tell you how much time it requires to prepare, conduct, and process tasks such as teacher observations, appraisals, schedules, parent communications… the list goes on and on.

And they’re just my weekly tasks; you can dump my list of personal work projects on top of all that.

For the most part I’m working a 9:30 – 8:00 day, solid. It sounds a lot, but the days seem to always go too quickly for me. When I have my two days off (which usually requires some work during them) I really enjoy spending that time with Em or doing absolutely nothing. There’s no shame in the later. 

As mentioned above, the itch to write has certainly diminished over time. In many ways it goes hand-in-hand with having little time for anything away from work so Em and I rarely travel these days due to both our work commitments. Time together at home is precious and there’s nothing else we’d rather do together.

I never feel the urge to write anything on the blog, unless it’s for my family, and even then it’s a bit of a stretch using the blog when a phone call is so much easier.

Finally, there isn’t a great deal to write about these days. I’m set in my ways and life, dare I say it, is starting to quiet down a little. People don’t want to see a post about my adventure walking to work, or the latest episode of China Supermarket Travels. It’s really just not that interesting.

The big new, of course, is that I am soon to be married. October this year to be exact. Just a small ceremony for family and friends here in Beijing.

It begins a whole new chapter of my life, which in turns closes another chapter. I tend to think that this blog falls somewhere in the previous chapter category and would best be left behind. I’m not sentimental about closing off my blog, but it’s coming up to that expiry date where it doesn’t give me what I want any more.

For the past 15 years (at least) this blog has connected me with some amazing people and allowed me to share myself to a bigger audience than I thought possible (believe it or not, I used to get close to 500 people a day visiting here!). Not that I ever thought more than family and friends would read it, but I was flattered that so many other people thought it was worth the read in the first place.

That’s long enough, I think, so it’s time to think about moving on.

In fact my last post I plan to be the day before my wedding. I couldn’t think of a better time to wrap the whole show up then on the verge of one of, if not the biggest, moments in my life so far. Besides, I have to admit, Em is an excellent sounding board for all my thoughts and opinions and, unlike my blog, will always give me some response (sure, ‘That’s nice sweetie’ is still a response).

From now until the wedding I’ll try post some interesting things about what I’m doing, but it wouldn’t be the same volume as before (look above for all the reasons why not).

It’ll also be nice to reconnect with some older blogs I used to connect with all the time, but more about that at a later stage.

So there you have it. In a way it’s sad to end something that’s been so significant in my life, but it’s even more special knowing that I no longer require it to be there.

6 months and counting.

I’m kind of all over Instagram at the moment, so if you would like to follow some of my photos (well… there’s only two there at the moment) my user name is dehere or just try my email (dehere(at)iinet.net.au).

And yes, I do need to post a lot more, just so busy with life. Everything is sweet.

I don’t even know where to start with this one… so I’m just going to let the story read for itself.

Chinese police have seized more than 3,200 tons of a new type of "gutter oil" made from decomposing animal fat and internal organs, said the Ministry of Public Security.

Previously, the phrase "gutter oil" referred to the reprocessing of used oil and even restaurant leftovers, which were then resold as cooking oil.

However, the new strain is made from meat that was past its sell-by date and of low quality, and even rotten animal fat and internal organs, according to the statement.

Thankfully this is not happening in Beijing, but after the gongbao chicken I had over the weekend, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was! That’s not to say living in Beijing is going to mean clean food. Far too many times I’ve walked past restaurants and had the misfortune of looking inside their kitchens. Not always a pretty sight. And you would expect people to be fuming over reports like this, wouldn’t you?

Hotpot devotee Fan Jing, a 27-year-old Chongqing resident, said she was not surprised by the case, and added that she will choose more expensive restaurants in future to minimize the risk.

"I can’t live without hotpot, even though I know many restaurants use gutter oil," she said.

Fair dinkum, that just ain’t right.

Can’t wait to get back to Australia and have some some real grub (but you know… not real grubs)…

Yesterday was of course White Day in both Japan and Korea, 30 days after Valentine’s Day. I’ve talked about White Day in the past, but traditionally it was a time where partners do something nice for each other (although I noticed it was more or less for the men to make up for screwing up Valentine’s Day).

In China White Day doesn’t exist, nor does Black Day, 30 days from now for single people to celebrate not being with someone. Although I did see an unusually higher number of street vendors selling flowers and roses, perhaps a sign of commercialism creeping into Chinese culture (although that ship has long sailed into port).

I was quite surprised when Em came home last night from work that she had bought me some roses. I don’t often get flowers and roses, so the very fact that Em got me some was a very heart-warming experience.

I thought I would share the picture with you for no other reason that I’ve had a rather tough day at work (which I won’t get into, but feeling rather dejected) and the sight of my roses and magnificent fiancée  makes me feel significantly better. After all, work is just work, and at times like this, I’m really happy I have someone to come home to to take away my troubles.

Ladies, I know it’s not manly to buy your man roses or flowers, but it sure does make us feel great.

I hope my Korean audience has a nice White Day.

The other night Em and I went out to dinner with a group of people to say goodbye to one of my good workmates. She was one of the people who really looked after me at the job when I first started and was an inspiration for me to really put  my best into the work I did. I like to think I modelled myself on her work ethic, although I doubt it would stack up to what she was able to accomplish in a very shirt amount of time.

As life dictates often dictates to us ESL teachers working overseas, saying goodbye is something of a regular occurrence, but I was glad we’re able to do it in a very cool buffet teppanyaki restaurant last Monday night. With 12 of us there all sitting around a crescent shaped hot table, it was an extremely nice night.

Being able to order endless amounts of raw fish, steak, drinks, and salads, was as close to being in paradise as one could expect. It really wasn’t that expensive either, and Em and I are planning another trip in the not so distant future.

With all the wonderful food, the highlight was at the end with the caramelized banana with brandy sauce, covered with ice-cream.

Bloody good stuff. Em and I both ended the night with round stomaches and big smiles.

 
Keep it coming my friend. Nice juicy steaks.

My damn freaking eye.

Over the last few months my right eye has been causing me some trouble. Every now and then, usually in the morning after my shower, I feel like there is a sharp piece of grit in it that I can’t get out. The more I try, the worst it gets, to the point where I just have to close my eye, wait for about an hour, and it feels a little better. Every time I blink it’s annoying, and surprisingly the most comfortable position it can be in is open.

What I have is something like a scratched eye, but its not. I don’t recall the medical term, but it would appear that at some point I did badly scratch my eye, and my eye hasn’t been able to heal properly since then. The thin membrane that covers the front of my eye us weakened t the point where it easily breaks and any form of touch in the area feels as if there’s something in my eye.

Most of the time it heals up well and it’s not an issue for many weeks, but over the last couple of days it hasn’t been healing as well as it should. As always, I’m reluctant to want to visit the doctors here in Beijing, but I’m sure they’ll prescribe a million forms of herbal tablets and creams that will either not work or set of an allergic reaction causing my eyeball to explode (however unlikely that is).

No doubt I’ll probably go see my doctor when I’m back in Australia next and they’ll prescribe a simple cream to put in my eye that will do the job in a matter of days. No dramas.

I really love my smart phone.

It’s not an iPhone, nor is it a pricey Samsung, but a very modest Motorola 525 that does everything I need. I can make calls, surf the web from almost anywhere, and stay in contact with both home and personal contacts when on the move. Not to mention some of the exciting games that help eat up those extra minutes of me waiting around for people who always turn up late.

As of late, my phone has started slowing down, to the point where it would take 2 or 3 seconds to even pick up a call. I’ve used different apps to try and speed it up, but nothing was working. I thought it may have been a virus, but my virus scanner hadn’t picked up on anything unusual.

So I begun the task of removing apps one at a time to see which one was the culprit. Can you guess which one it was?

My anti-virus app.

Yes, the one app that is suppose to prevent bad apps from being on the phone and slowing it down was the one app that was on my phone slowing it down.

Oh, the irony!

Anyway, my phone is back to normal and working at the lightning speed I have missed for the passed few weeks.

Last week I went with a friend to the local art district in Beijing, 798 District.

You may recall I had visited the area about 18 months ago and took some very nice pictures of the area. In an old industrial area, it has many works of art distributed throughout the few gridline streets it covers. Its one of the popular spots with tourists and locals alike, and it really is a nice reflection of how modern art has forged a unique space in Chinese culture.

Joe, my friend and work colleague, is an avid photographer, so I was able to ask him for some advice to help with my ailing photographic skills. After having a look at my photos, I don’t think any of his advice really sunk in, but I did touch up some of the photos in my photo editing software, and I do have to admit they have a little more life to them now.

Enjoy the photos and the brief commentary; Read more…