I don't know why but the formatting of my blog text is completely removed when it is published. I do actually write in paragraphs, I love paragraphs. Sorry for the huge chunks of text. Maybe I'll start using a symbol to show my paragraph breaks!

I listen to Chicago Public Radio over the internet everyday. The election coverage by US news and the BBC, as played on CPR, has been of interest to me. I voted two weeks ago and mailed my ballot back to Chicago, so I'm not really campaignable anymore. One thing that is mentioned over and over again is becoming really irritating to me though. Barack Obama may be the first black president. But wait a minute, he's only half black. His father is from Africa and his mother is a white American. So, that makes him half black and half white. Yet he's billeted as a black candidate. So he's just as white (genetically) as he is black. So if being half black makes you black, doesn't being half white make you white? If you were one quarter or one eighth black, would you be classified as black? If you were one quarter or one eighth white, would you be classified as white? Is it based on visual cues? If a one quarter black, three quarters white, person had no visual characteristics typical of black people, would that person be black? Maybe it's based on the vanilla theory, something I've noticed about vanilla ice cream. Many people don't consider vanilla a flavor, it's more of the base, or blank page, compared to other flavors. Are white people the blank page in American racial issues? Do we consider white to be the default when referring to race, resulting in the mention of someone's race only if they are not white? Does classifying races into two groups, people of color, and white people, indicate that white is not a color? Personally I think that vanilla is a flavor and that white is a color. Why can't Americans get over their fixation on race. I think focusing on it in some ways makes it worse. Only in America are black people called "black people." European society has either overcome, or never had, their fetish with race. In Europe people of any race are identified just as people, maybe along with their nation of citizenship. In America no one is just a person, we're a black person, an Asian person, a Pacific islander, a Native American, etc. etc. If we want to focus on race so much, let's start recognizing that Barack Obama is just as white as he is black, and while we're at it why not look into John McCain's genealogy to see if he has any amount of "color" in his genes. Enjoy your vanilla ice cream America.

Should I feel bad? My sister-in-law gave birth to their third boy!!! So exciting. I finally saw some photos on the blog of another sister-in-law. The feeling bad part comes into play because no one in my family told me about my nephew's birth until 9 days later, when my mother mentioned it in passing in an email. This used to happen quite frequently but hasn't happened in several years. Past examples are events like siblings moving to a new house, receiving mission calls, and a parent in the ICU after a late night ambulance ride. I'm not saying that anyone in my family does this deliberately because they don't, but should I feel bad for being forgotten? When have you been forgotten by loved ones because of physical proximity? What are the kinds of things you expect to be made aware of and/or would communicate to your family? Google translated "out of sight, out of mind" into 太棒了，记住了. When using Google translate I usually feed the Chinese back through to see what the English says. This one came out as "Great, keep in mind the." This helps me know when I need to revise my original English text. 你将被遗忘的人没有谁可以看到你 means: You will be forgotten by the people who cannot see you.

Several weeks ago a large portion of the block next to mine was vacated by all of the businesses and residents. It took a long time to remove all the windows, salvageable materials, and anything that might pose a risk, before they could finally raze the buildings. Now the block is very empty. An excavator with a long pole (possibly a bit jack-hammerish) slowly knocked down the buildings over the course of about three days. It was very dusty and loud (they stopped around 10PM). I was at the office late one night waiting for the elevator and looked out the window to see someone with a small fire in the piles of rubble, behind the “barrier.” The construction/demolition fence was funny. Initially it was the outer wall of the buildings that they left up after taking down the rest of them. Then it was a tarp like material, striped. The third incarnation was a row of used and broken furniture (need a free desk?). Workers sorted through the piles, stacking usable bricks, a pile of rebar, etc. etc. The final version of the construction fence was a brick wall they made with the left over bricks! It looks like it might fall over in some places. I’m curious to see what new development will be built here. The Chinese people can do AMAZING things with concrete.

20 October 2008 Office hours at the Hualan Group are 8:30 to noon, and 2:30 to 6:00. I was groggy this morning and virtually useless! I had lunch with Fu Zhaohua in our company cafeteria or “canteen” as people here call it. There were the usual foods, pig intestine, whole fish, cabbage, blood tofu, roast duck, bitter cucumber, cooked melon, omelets, noodles, string beans, broccoli, etc. etc. I went home and took my daily nap. When I got back to work people were eating candy. One of my favorite co-workers, Li Yana, brought a bunch of small coconut flavored hard candies to share. She wasn’t in the office this morning and I was wondering where she was. She was gone for her wedding but came back after lunch. Seriously. I congratulated her and took some pictures to celebrate. Chinese weddings typically have two parts, first the couple goes to a government office, our equivalent of the “Justice of the Peace” I guess, to become legally married. The marriage license costs 9 yuan, about $1.25, and then they’re married. The celebratory part of a marriage comes weeks or months later when the bride’s family hosts a huge banquet. I attended one recently and will post more on that later. I hear a variety of music in the office. One of my co-workers has “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” as her cell phone ring tone, and another has his set to “Oh Susanna.” This afternoon I heard music playing from the primary school across the street. It was the Enya song from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, played on the outdoor speakers at what I assume was the end of their recess at 4:30 (Chinese students go to school all day long). They also play the national anthem every morning. My work today was research for an article I’m writing to be published in an academic planning journal. It’s about how the different ownership and property rights laws in China and the US have shaped public and private urban spaces. It’s so much easier to focus and get a lot done after lunch. I took Chenyu to dinner. It’s the Chinese custom for one person to pay for dinner when you go out with friends, and the next time it’s someone else’s turn. Tonight was my turn. We went across the street to a popular restaurant that is owned by the sister of one of my co-worker’s wife. We originally sat at a table with a woman and her two-year-old son, but moved because I was scaring him!! We ate across from a kid who was maybe 10 years old. In Chinese restaurants it’s normal to share a table with strangers. The kid was the son of my co-worker’s wife’s sister, his nephew. His mother, aunts (possibly), and other employees were trying to get him to practice his English with me. All he said was, “hey hey,” “oh yea, oh yea, oh yea,” and “do you like dolls?” He brought out his English books (more like magazines really) and we looked through them. They don’t teach the most accurate English in China. I ended up singing several of the songs in his books there in the restaurant while we ate. There was happy birthday, the wheels on the bus, I can sing a rainbow, Old MacDonald, and head shoulders knees and toes. They were slightly different versions, but the same songs! After dinner I came home, put a load in the washing machine on the balcony, and decided to finally blog again. I need to buy more hangers.

Foods continue to be an adventure for me. I was able to take some pics with my phone at a banquet, because it was very informal. The snake soup looks just like it did the first time. This time I actually tried to eat it but it is too much work, the only meat is a very thin layer between the ribs and the skin. I took one of the fried sparrows (that’s what Chenyu called it but I have no idea what kind of bird it was) from the bowl full of them. I went for the breast, thinking it would be the largest piece of meat. I couldn’t find any. It was all fried skin and bones. Just for scale, the plate the sparrow is on is about 4.5” in diameter. Corn, along with beans, can be made into so many different kinds of sweets. I tried some corn candy, and actually found corn ice cream!!! I wasn’t really corny, just creamy and rather plain. I don’t think I would have guessed it was corn ice cream if I had tasted it before knowing what it was. Long yuan (dragon eye) is a seasonal fruit similar to lychee, but long yuan is smaller and much easier to peel. I would buy a kilo or two once or twice a week and go to town on them in front of the TV. They come on branches and are called dragon eyes because after you peel it, they resemble an eyeball, with the red pit in the middle appearing to be the pupil. Very dragonlike. I had turtle for the first time and wasn’t really impressed, or grossed out. It was all chopped up very nicely. Anteater tastes like beef. One of my bosses claims that it was really pig breast (as in mammary glands not pectoral muscles). Anteater became illegal for human consumption during the SARS scare because they thought it was anteaters that passed SARS on to humans. Tiny apple-like fruits of varying red and green/yellow splotchiness are good. I actually enjoyed eating barbecue octopus! Each tentacle is about 4” long, skewered lengthwise, and cooked on a griddle with a big flat press pushing it down. The second to last photo is a dish I’ve seen twice. It’s slices of taro alternating with slices of pork. It is a good example of how Chinese people eat the fat and the skin of the animals. The skin is the dark crispy part on top followed by layers of fat and meat/connective tissue. Who knows? One more food, at WalMart they sell whole roasted chickens (Cornish hen size) for 9.90 each, about $1.40. The line is always huge and everyone walks around with small plastic bags full of steam and hot chickens. We ate them after we finished shopping. It was a lesson in chicken anatomy, I started with one leg and ended with the other. I tried my first fowl neck. Fried duck necks are a common food, as well as chicken feet. I tried asking about duck feet once, but no one understood me.

Traditional Chinese medicine is interesting. My friends keep telling me things to keep me healthy. Here are a few of their tips: 1) In the winter it is best to eat a salty breakfast and a sweet dinner. 2) Drinking cold water will make you sick. (When I hear this one I like to tell them that I have been drinking cold water all my life. I also like to tell them that if this was true that everyone in Europe and America would be dead.) 3) When you're sick you should eat duck soup. 4) Did you know that foods are categorized into hot and cold? Some foods make you hot and some foods make you cold. It's best to eat the cold foods during the summer because it cools you down, save the hot foods for winter. 5) Midday naps are essential to having a productive day. The hospital system is different here. Whenever you are sick you should go to the hospital. You don't need an appointment and there's no emergency room fee. People go for just about everything. Apparently there are scads of doctors waiting around in the hospitals to treat sick people. I don't usually take a lot of medicine for colds or things that I know my body just needs time to recover from. Maybe going to the hospital to get a couple bags of IV fluid put in your vein really does help you overcome a cold?