plants and shame

somewhat unsurprisingly, my post about my plant received much more interest and many more notes of concern than when i almost killed myself. but i am happy to report that my plant has rebounded, sprouting some new leaves and even some flowers (blurry in the photo) that are very fragrant already. i still have no name for the plant, but am open to suggestions.

in other news, i can check something else off my list in china: i was told that i was "hurting the feelings of the chinese people." it actually took me a while to figure out that was what my coworker was saying to me. the short of it is that this developer in beijing is offering a discount on units in its new development if the buyer manages to woo and marry one of the sales girls. so of course i had to write that up as a headline for our monthly news publication, and when i passed it to my coworker for translation he informed me that i was bringing shame on 1.3 billion people. though my protestations that it was already in the news fell on deaf ears, he dutifully translated it. hopefully it will make it through the censors in our shanghai office.

weekend picture

workers cleaning the side of SOHO shangdu

life and death in beijing

i got a sweet osmanthus plant a few weeks ago for my room, so it will have something alive in it besides me. it only is supposed to be watered a couple times a week, so i figured that when i left on a trip for four days it would be ok. unfortunately when i got back the pot was bone dry. i watered it immediately but then a couple days later about 80 percent of its leaves fell off. here's what it looks like now:

durrell says this is exactly what happened to audrey, but i refuse to believe it is going to die. it is merely toughening up for the harsh realities of apartment living in beijing, shedding poorly performing leaves. there are already a few buds and new leaves sprouting. nevertheless, like peasants back in the day in china who didn't name their kids when born in case they died, i haven't named my plant yet, so i won't be too attached if it does die.

another hike, and doing stupid things in china

durrell peer pressured me into doing something pretty dangerous today, and like any good friend caught it on video.

i'm down-climbing that rock (after climbing up) using only a bit of dubiously anchored webbing that had probably been sitting in the snow all winter. in case you can't hear it over the waterfall, at 0:47 i say "this is one of the stupider things i've ever done in my life."

other pictures from the hike can be found here: baiquanshan hike

at this stage, i have a phd in powerpoint

anybody want to be my boss? just make sure you have a master's degree in microsoft office:

http://dimension.jobsdb.com/career/Default.asp?PID=3&AC=JLL&EC=JLLCN&GC=&JobID=1002&LID=3&HKB294070070981980

but seriously, let me know. there's a substantial referral fee.

putting it bluntly

though those of you that follow my google reader shared items (namely, durrell and conor) may have already seen this, i felt this was good enough to share here. well, that, and it's been a long while since i've posted anything.

those that know me from college know that, despite writing a rather lame music column for it, one of my favorite pastimes was criticizing the campus, the student newspaper. those that have known me even longer know that the habit extends all the way back to the mirador, which somehow hasn't made the jump online (i even had to create its wikipedia page). in dc it was whatever that paper is called that they give out on the metro.

now in china it is the people's daily, perhaps the best of the bunch. the paper is the official mouthpiece of the chinese communist party, and the english language version is a clunky attempt to showcase china to the rest of the world. and by the rest of the world, i mean tourists who come to china. and me. because i read the headline of every single story posted to the website every day. which lets me pick up some choice articles, like this awkward attempt to be relevant on valentine's day, this bizarre art choice on a christmas story, or this hard-hitting reporting on people being "fussy" because they can't watch more tv post-Olympics.

the article that prompted this post, however, was actually quite interesting and well done, about how the government is planning to end guaranteed lifetime employment for civil servants. (to my former coworkers: you thought you had it good!) it starts off talking about potential changes, like actually firing people for poor performance, moves to some background about the number of civil servants, and then ends with a bang:

More people consider jobs in the civil service as easy option.

"I would like to trade my current job, even though it pays better, for a government job because I want more personal space," Beijinger Xiao Liu, who sat the entrance exam last year, said.

In the past, government positions guaranteed workers cradle-to-grave employment and basic welfare. But the central government is keen to introduce new rules to ensure public sector employees actually work for a living.

bam! someone doesn't think highly of government workers, though it's funny to think that whoever wrote that line works for the official newspaper of the communist party, which isn't exactly the cutthroat private sector either. makes me wonder if some english polisher snuck that in under the editors' noses, though he/she seemed to miss the mistake in the first sentence.

in other news, this blog's biggest fans came and visited me in beijing last weekend. here is a picture of them in one of the gallery spaces in the 798 art district. the vaulted ceilings are excellent in bringing in natural light. those east german architects were smart.

baghdad back to beijing

Ben's sharp video and mapwork has inspired me to do some of my own.

During the Chinese New Year I hung around Beijing. I don't think I'll be the same again. A large component of the celebration is the lighting of fireworks and firecrackers in the streets. Throughout the weekend there was a steady crescendo of local Beijingers igniting their contraband -- a symbolic gesture to scare bad luck away for the coming year. On the eve of the 15-day celebration families gather to watch a cherished 3 hour variety show featuring all of China's most popular (and CCP-accepted) celebrities (think Dick Clark New Year's meets Lawrence Welk).

The video below documents the first evening when it was legal to light the things inside Beijing (not to say they weren't going off beforehand).

Our bathroom window allows access to the open roof of the building next to us, offering a nearly 360 degree panoramic view of our neighborhood in eastern Beijing. Throughout the evening, we continued to crawl out there to observe (until the cold air would send us back in). In the hours of the early evening, things were already impressive. But it wasn't until around 11:30pm -- when the variety show had ended -- that things started to become insane. It felt like every single family in Beijing, if not China, had taken to the streets to light thousands of kuai worth of fireworks, some no more than 30 meters away.

A vivid childhood memory is watching the Gulf War erupt on its first night -- as CNN correspondents Bernad Shaw and co. hunkered down in the Al-Rashid Hotel to film those eerie night-vision images of tomakawk missles bombarding the city. Well standing on our rooftop, wondering if it was actually safe to be standing there, and ready to bolt back to the window at any moment, is probably the closest I'll ever get to what thos men must have been feeling to know that hundreds of F-15s were bearing down on them. Ok, perhaps I'm exaggerating, but to this war-zone ambience, the firecrackers relentlessly continued throughout the week -- often beginning as early as 7:30am -- and random intervals. I was becoming crabby and irratable -- shell-shocked if you will. It was impossible to watch a full episode of TV without pausing at least once, if not three times, to allow the roar of a 10-meter bianpao string to subside. These things are LOUD!! Let's just say that as special as this experience was, I'm glad that it's over and life has returned to normal.

last post about japan

as durrell may or may not have promised in a previous post i've made a map of our crazy trip across southern japan. i originally meant it to be all fancy, with little pictures of all the stuff we did, but you'll just have to settle for this.

as an added bonus, here are some videos from the trip [UPDATE: videos hopefully fixed]:

I Give Myself an Award Winning Interview about My Trip to Japan

Because I do not want to write a real post, I decided I would interview myself about the Japan trip I just went on. Here is a transcript of the interview I gave myself. It was a thrilling and hard hitting interview (I went Larry King on my ass).

How did you prepare for the trip?

Wikitravel

Most useful thing you brought with you?

A Japan Rail pass (you can't travel around Japan without it, seriously, I think it might be financial impossible) and Golze, because he told me what trains to take.

What did you see?

I forgot look at the pictures from the previous post

Where did you go?

Japan, I think Golze is going to make a map of where we went but too many places to list in one interview.

What was your favorite place?

I don't remember much of the trip anymore, but I did like the ninjas and the onsens in Beppu were awesome, except for that really hot one.

Least favorite place?

I don't think I had one, but sitting on the train station platforms kind of sucked after a while.

Best thing you saw?

Japanese people doing 50's music and ninjas.

Worst thing you saw?

A monkey dropping a deuce.

Weirdest thing you saw?

The weirdest thing I saw was something I didn't see, and that was trash cans. For some reason Japan does not have trash cans, but its one of the cleanest countries I have ever been to, scratch that, it is the cleanest in the world (just wikipedia it). Also, it was weird to see that Japanese girls don't believe in winter, because almost all the school girls I saw were dressed for summer.

Favorite thing you ate?

Okonomiyaki (which I am trying to figure out how to bring to Beijing, because it would make a killing) and inari-zushi (I can't get enough of the stuff, just like my grandma used to make) and last but not least SUSHI fresh from the Tokyo fish market. The sushi was so fresh that you could still taste the sea and the old man who caught it.

Least favorite food?

Do they have bad food?

Any people you would like to thank?

I would like to thank Steve and Caitlyn for hosting us at there place and feeding us and driving us around and showing us their hood and translating and everything else they did that I forgot. It was great thank you. Also sorry about the stickers.

If you have more questions about our trip post a comment to our blog or email Golze and he will answer all your questions.

pictures from japan

durrell and i just got back from a whirlwind tour of japan. because i know there are probably some people (my parents) itching to see the pictures, i'm going to throw a slideshow up here while we work on a longer post or two. pictures can also be perused here for those that are interested in more leisurely viewing: japan pictures!

in search of beer bottles

eventually you need to put the beer you brew in bottles. while the three of us can certainly hold our own when it comes to drinking, consuming five gallons of beer to save the bottles between every time you brew can be a bit challenging. one option to make up the deficit is to buy the empty bottles that the little convenience stores are planning to recycle for about 0.5 yuan, or 7.5 cents, each. however, there's inevitably great confusion while trying to explain that you want to buy empty bottles, and some people will just refuse to sell them to you because the idea of homebrewing is just a bit too mind-blowing for the average beijinger.

the other option is to get them from bars, who mostly don't bother with recycling. first of all it's free. the other plus side with bars is that they use the regular 12 oz bottles we know and love in the states, and not the huge 600 ml bottles you get at the local stores. so last night out in sanlitun durrell and i decided to give it a try. luckily durrell had also brought along a giant red bucket we may use for bottling, so we had somewhere to put the bottles.

it was a little early when we started out, so there weren't many bottles around. the first bar we went into was friendly enough. we asked the bar tender if he had any empties, and he showed us a box with about five or six, and said sure we could take them. but then his buddy at the bar, who may have been the manager, stopped us and asked what we wanted them for. "are you guys going to fight with them?" like we were going to meet the rockets for a choreographed scuffle under the bridge later on. we told him we needed them to bottle our own beer, and they happily let us take them.

we eventually ended up at the tree, a place known for good european-style pizza and a large selection of belgian beer. we parked ourselves at the end of the bar, luckily, we found out later, because that is where the waitresses came to deliver their orders from the tables. we ordered two beers and then asked if the bartender if he had any empties. he gave us ours, we told him we wanted any others that came through, and the stream of love began. he never even asked us why we wanted them, but handed over every single bottle that he poured for the rest of the night (about 50).

the waitresses were a bit more inquisitive, and shrewd. one discovered that we were taking bottles from the bartender and putting them in a giant red bucket next to our bar stools. she then began playfully harassing us, demanding payment for the empties from all the orders she brought to the bar. she eventually let every waitress in the bar know, so we racked up a "tab" of 45 yuan that we owe to the waitresses at the tree the next time we go back there.

soaking the labels off bottles of belgian beer from the tree

brewing notes for first brew (alpha)

Cooked on Sun, 1.11
Total brew time: about 4 hours

Recipe

3 kg of malt (12 tubs)
3 oz (85 grams) of Cascade Hops (1.5 oz at 0 min, 0.75 oz at 30 min, 0.75 oz at 50 min)

Prep

Prep time about 45 min.

Need a big spoon for stirring, preferably carved from an even bigger spoon. Used spatula this time. Worked OK.

Get cleaning solution together during prep, need it when removing cap of water bottle

Cook

4:48. Started boil

5:40. Water (about 4/5 of bottle) boiling

~5:54. Finished adding malt, had to wait for it to start boiling again

5:56. Added 42 grams (1 oz) of hops, start 1 hour boil time (smells great!)

Forgot to wait for foaming to start before adding hops, added 1st hops when water + malt reboiled

Went to buy extra water, needed about 2.65 litres, bought 4 litre bottle

Figure out how to dry hop!

Cooling and transfer to fermenter

Tried to add extra water to boiled wort right at end to help with cooling. Added about 2 litres

When cooling manually added cold water to top of bucket, took lid off and stirred (about 1/2 way through cooling time)

Amy cleaning fish bowl in kitchen while this going on, possible contamination!

Forgot to shake up (aerate) water before recombining with wort

Using hand to gauge the temperature probably not sufficient, need to figure out a place to buy a thermometer for possibly a more accurate temperature reading.

Screen filter most effective in 2nd half of transfer to fermenter

Used siphon to aerate wort

2 layers of seran wrap and 2 not very tight rubber bands on top of water bottle

Finished at 8:08 pm

16 hours in pingyao

though i had no actual vacation days left over the the holidays, i did end up with two four day weekends. our managing director graciously gave us the 26th off. the government gave everybody the 2nd off as well, and my company doesn't truck with most other firms that made people come in to work on sunday the 4th. therefore, i figured i'd head off somewhere to kill some time and get out of beijing. that somewhere was pingyao.

pingyao is a small city in shanxi province, to the southwest of beijing. as far as i know the city formed during the ming dynasty (1400s-1600s), but rose to prominence as a banking capital during the qing (1800s). the place has been preserved well, with complete city walls and several sites of old banking houses, temples, and government offices. an estate nearby was where raise the red lantern was filmed. nowadays, shanxi province is known for its coal industry, an aspect that was fully apparent while we were there: pingyao is the most polluted place i have ever been. it smelled like sitting behind a diesel truck whenever you were outside. beijing seems like montana in comparison.

as a result i'm still not sure how i feel about the place. i had a good enough time, and have conditionally recommended that others go there. but would i go again? definitely not.

Eggnog Is The Mother Of All Invention

My Christmas day started out quite lazily because I didn't have to work. I woke up around 11 and logged on to my computer to try to kill some time before my Christmas party. As I am checking my mail, Golze sends me a chat message with a great idea. "We should make some eggnog." I am like that this the best idea I heard this Christmas, let's do it. Some sends me the recipe. I give it a cursory glance and tell him to come over, so we can pow wow and make a game plan, this was necessary because neither one of us has ever made eggnog. So he comes over and we determine, yes! we can get all these ingredients here in China, especially the all important nutmeg. We also read the instructions, but don't quite understand what they mean, but we figure we have at least one college degree between us and we know how to use the information gatherer we can figure that out later. After taking a quick trip to the store and buying all the ingredients, plus some extra eggs in case we messed up the seperating the egg whites process (for some reason we thought this would be the hardest part of the whole recipe, followed by folding the egg whites in, boy, were we wrong; who knew that beating 12 egg whites by hand would be hard), we begin trying to reconstruct this eggnog recipe. The separating the the egg whites and yolk goes over relatively smoothly, only a couple yolks fall into the the whites (this taught us valuable lesson as well, knifes and forks don't fish yolks out of the whites as well as spoons). Once the whites and yolks get separated. I begin the task of trying to beat the egg whites, while Golze does everything else and uses the information gatherer to look up what soft peaks means, (you don't really learn that at Middlebury for some reason) I spend like 20 minutes trying to beat these 12 egg whites into whatever soft peaks means. The closest thing I get to soft peaks is a little bit of bubbles in the egg whites. So Golze and I switch and I do some other random task of the eggnog process. After he is beating a way at it for 15 minutes, like my ex chinese co-worker, we decide to switch again. As I am doing this, Golze goes and looks up what folding egg whites in means and my roommate comes home. And looks at what I am doing and says, that's impossible, you will never be able to beat 12 eggs into soft peaks. Golze and I assure her, we are men, we can beat these eggs, and we have a lot of time before the party, this will not be a problem. She just kind of roles her eyes and says okay. But after another 10 minutes of beating these eggs, begin to realize that she is probably right, these eggs look in the exact same state as when I first started to beat them. Then, I have an epiphany, something like the Virgin Mary appearing to me in a water stain and saying, "on this Christmas day, I present you with a gift and a secret that will help you make great eggnog, and baby Jesus in her hands saying to me, "drill, baby, drill." At first I don't understand this message and I say to Golze, "I have a drill?" He takes this as an affirmative statement and says, "Yes, use it." And I am like oh I have drill, thank you baby Jesus. So we take my Black and Decker and attach the end of the whisk that we are using, see video; and in no time we have soft peaked egg whites.



We then add brandy and fold in the egg whites and let that chill for three hours, and did some other steps after that, that also involved the Black and Decker (this whole experience made me realize why and how the electric hand mixer was created.) To make a long story short, the trick to great eggnog is a power drill and nutmeg, oh and our eggnog was great. I highly recommend the recipe. Happy Belated Christmas and Hanukkah everyone, enjoy our Holiday party photo montage.



Highlight of the Day: Finishing the apple pie with digestive biscuit crust that I baked yesterday. And knowing that I still have gift cards to starbucks and subway to use; thank you very much Smith family for the lovely present, I can't wait to use them.

I Make Less Than a McDonald's Employee

It has been a while since I wrote a blog post and there were several I wanted to write about for example: going to the Kanye West concert with the guys and girls, our financial crisis themed Halloween, Golze's awesome Uncle Adam (I am pretty sure is name was Adam, if it wasn't it is now) visiting Beijing and Golze taking him to get a happy ending (don't worry it was just a suit, that's what I call suits), and other stuff that I have already forgotten because I didn't blog about it. Maybe I make a photo montage to make up for it some time. I think the topic of this blog will supplement the over all theme of Golze's last post and I believe that theme, all though I could be wrong, is that the ECA doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. I have recently started a new job( which I will use as my excuse for not writing a post that and the government has blocked my laptop from accessing blogger) and recently decided to calculate my new salary. I know this is rude to be bragadocious about my salary, but I make 8000RMB a month. I decide to breakdown my salary to an hourly wage because I wanted to see how undervalued I was and because I recently read something on salaries in Beijing. So I don't consider myself that valuable here in China, I value my time about 200RMB an hour, which is about 30USD an hour at the current exchange rate. But to understand how far away I am from this goal which is obvious I am far away. I did the complete calculations. My working hours are scheduled from 9 to 6, but on average I have to stay past seven, so I considered I work 9 hours a day with an hour. Thus, 8000/4 is 2000, 2000/5 is 400, 400/9 is 44.44 which is roughly 6.5USD. And I am pretty sure that is less than what people at McDonald's make. I never worked at McDonald's but I am pretty sure they make more than that. I know it sounds like I am knocking McDonald's employees and assuming that their job is not really hard, and if it seems that way it is because I am doing that. This global financial recession is screwing up everything. I really picked a shitty time to quit my previous job. I think I had a point of for writing this, but I don't remember it. Oh yea, It was if you are thinking about making donations this year, make them to me, because apparently I live in the most expensive city in China or something and I make less than a McDonald's worker.

Highlight of the Day: Walking down the street listening to the bugle on ipod and giggling every 30 seconds while old Chinese men stared at me crazy every thirty meters. Yeah that's right meters, I have converted to the metric system. Celsius is coming next, wild card bitches!

living it up

the inimitable people's daily (the communist party paper) put up another hard hitting news story friday on its english language web site. surprisingly, this time the paper itself didn't do anything confusingly hilarious; it's the subject of the story itself that deserves posting here. beijing more expensive than hong kong, shanghai and singapore? it seems like eca international spent a bit too much time handing out their survey in shunyi and central park:*

Cost of living for foreigners in Beijing continues to rise
by People's Daily Online, December 12, 2008

According to Shanghai Morning Post, a survey carried out by the ECA International, the world’s largest human resources consulting firm showed that Tokyo is still the city with the highest cost of living for foreigners in Asia. While Beijing, by beating Hong Kong for the first time, became the city that is most expensive for foreigners in China.

According to the ECA report, Beijing ranks to 31st this year, while Shanghai is the 35th. Hong Kong climbs to 33rd from its previous position of 88th.

The appreciation of RMB and inflation helped raise the cost of living in Chinese cities, Beijing in particular. The survey shows that cost of living for a foreigner in Beijing is 15% higher than that of Singapore, which ranks 95th this year.

Luanda, the capital of the oil-rich African country of Angola, ranks number one this year. Tokyo follows Luanda closely in second place. Russia’s capital replaces the Norwegian capital Oslo to be the European city with the highest cost of living for foreigners.

granted, eca does seem to have some sophisticated indices and caveats that get lost in the people's-daily-english-reports-shanghai-morning-post-publishing-survey-results procedures. but i'm just glad i'm not living in luanda, for a variety of reasons.

*shunyi is the home of the central villa district, aka american suburbia in beijing, and central park is a luxury apartment complex in the cbd.

back in business

sometimes living in china just beats down upon you with all its hassles, only to lift you up again with something that goes surprisingly well. this past week was one such week. first my tailor was being a dick about two shirts he made that didn't come out well, refusing to remake them and instead adjusting them and giving me a discount on a new shirt that i wasn't planning to buy anyway (he is shrewd, i'll give him that). next, i lost the atm card to my bank account that my company opened for me. this required me to hike out to the original issuing branch of the bank, which is inexplicably far away from my office, and wait a week for a new card without any access to my money.

and add on to that computer problems. as i may have used earlier as an excuse for the few posts here recently, my computer has been dying a slow death since october, with symptoms that i chalked up to an acknowledged defect in the video card. after lengthy chats with sandeep and rahul at dell tech support, we established that hardware needed to be replaced and that it was against dell policy to ship my system outside of china, though they did give me a number to china tech support. after being rebuffed by a recording of what i can only guess was "you are outside your warranty country," i poked around the site online and found there was a dell repair center across the street from my office.

so it was with cautious optimism that after looking up the words for motherboard (主板), video card (显示卡 or simply 示卡), and warranty (保单), i went to get my computer fixed this week. but my lifelong policy of lowering expectations paid off! they took my computer, which isn't even sold in china, replaced the video card (i gained some smug satisfaction on being right about that), and turned it around in two days. best of all, it was all free! and just in time to download this week's episode of 30 rock.

view from the roof

the weather was particularly nice today, so i took the opportunity to head up onto our roof and snap a few shots. views to the west, north, northeast (across our development) and west, respectively.

to the hills

panorama

a few weekends ago, in a bizarre bout of fitness, clark, durrell and i decided to head out hiking in the hills to the west of beijing. we abandoned an initial plan to head way up north, and instead after aggressive use of google earth we managed to decipher some guy's blog, at least by picking out the names of the places we were supposed to go and the bus we were supposed to take.

king coal in western beijing

the pingguoyuan subway station was as crowded as ever with people dressed to the gills in all the latest hiking outfits out for a saturday. our bus was jam packed with a group of twenty or so people that had met up online on a hiking web site. i chatted with one young guy i was squeezed up next to on the bus who spoke near perfect english. he said he was a tour guide for more adventurous foreigners. i said that sounded like a fun job, and he said not during a global recession. he hasn't had a tour for two months.

building new houses in jiuyuan

luckily, the blogger posted lots of pictures, because we hopped off the bus really in the middle of nowhere. from the picture we were able to identify a decorative archway over the road we were supposed to take, as well as the mysterious "pointing tree" that showed the way. where we were was an easy access point to this ancient road through the western hills, and the small town at the base was clearly attempting to reinvent itself as a local tourism point. several small "resorts" were being built, the road was newly paved, and there was a row of villa-style houses being built. the place i believe is anticipating rising local affluence leading to more people driving out there for something to do on a weekend afternoon, and i think they bet well. there was a good number of other people, mostly families, that had drove up to see the sights.

durrell tries to make his way through the underbrush

unfortunately, the sights were not quite what we anticipated. after about five minutes up the road, we reached the top, an arch that i think i read online might have been part of a qing dynasty nunnery. it was here that we made the worst decision of the day. based on past hiking experience in guangxi, we decided to just head out off the trail and make our way across the terraces on the hills. unfortunately, from far away what looked like grass and shrubs turned out to be six foot high weeds and impenetrable brambles. we spent a good hour stumbling around off the trail, at times fashioning crude weed whacking devices out of sticks. at one point we saw people hiking high above us in the mountains, clearly enjoying the unimpeded freedom of a trail.

durrell was making this face for most of this part of the hike

eventually we stumbled out of the brush and back onto the original road, at which point we fortuitously noticed an actual path off the road. after a quick break, we set off up a steep access trail to perilously placed high tension power wire towers. the trail ran straight up a ridge, and we probably rose a couple thousand feet over the valley floor before it flattened out into a rather nice trail that followed the contours on one side of the ridge. we eventually ran into some guys eating lunch (and throwing their garbage everywhere), who directed us down a different route we had taken up. after a steep descent we popped out into a terraced persimmon orchard and the town we started out in, ready to take the bus back. also, it snowed! pretty exciting stuff, even though the flakes melted as soon as they touched anything.

finally enjoying the view

politics by other means

Recently, Ben and I were discussing the United States Postal Service. I think it's rarely considered that this is a government agency whose executive, the Postmaster General (awesome name by the way), is endowed with the extra-constitutional ability to negotiate treaties with foreign powers. After all, I can only assume that it's the Postmaster General who decides whether little Julio or Ahmed can or cannot receive tins of American cookies while abroad in Cuba or Iran (China is not part of that axis, fyi, wink wink...) Ok, so we're talking postal treaties here, nothing too sexy, and of course the embargoes on Cuba and Iran were in fact decided by the president and congress, but just think of Tuvalu -- we send mail there and someone has to decide whether and how we should do it. So I think the principle is very intriguing and deserves some more aimless open-mouth daydreaming -- which I'm good at. Just think about it some more and you'll begin to see the implications with mail exchanging hands between two countries. Tampering with mail is a federal offense. Is it still a federal offense to tamper with mail outside US borders? Are there extradition treaties to handle this? It's a hypothetical black hole (which are, by nature, hypothetical...)

So you can imagine that I found an article in today's New York Times announcing that the FDA will open a permanent office in Beijing to be both interesting and relevant. Again, I'm not certain what the precedent is here, but to me it seems to be a rather significant event for American foreign policy. A Secretary of U.S. Health and Foreign Services is quoted in the article sharing this belief: "We're opening up a new era, not just new offices."

What will be the mandate of these officials, described as "inspectors?" How is this fundamentally different than the UN installing weapons inspectors in a sovereign country -- surely something that China, as well as many other nations, would not agree to. What does the Chinese government think about this new office? Clearly they're not wholly opposed to it if office plans to open soon. Perhaps this is a bit of good PR and also a chance to inject some new ideas and manpower into the unfolding and ongoing food safety crisis here.

This article also seems to dovetail nicely with recent opinion piece in the New York Times suggesting that problems with melamine contamination are not limited to China -- although the issue is much less severe in the US, and arises for far less nefarious reasons.

I do hope that this new FDA office is successful in at least beginning to address the problems with food safety here. It would be nice to be able to pour some milk in my coffee soon without thinking twice about it. And God forbid I start to take my coffee black.