I Forgot Where I live

Resistance is futile!


  Lately I've definitely become more acclimated to living here in Shanghai. I feel like at this point, I really fit in and I have friends that I can always call and rely on and my financial situation is steady. I finally feel like I belong here and that I am accepted as a local to most and a friend to some. I'm excited to see what lies ahead in the near future as I live out the rest of the time that I believe I will be staying here.





  The last two weeks have been pretty eventful and I've been keeping myself busy although lately it's been busy with lots of time with friends instead of busy working very irregular hours and not having time to enjoy life out here in the big city. Since we last spoke, I had the chance to relax a bit at home and catch up on some much needed sleep. My teaching hours have become a bit more sporadic but I am feeling myself getting into a routine.


  This weekend was the Chinese mid-autumn festival so I ate plenty of moon cakes which are little cakes that are filled with various assortments of fillings such as sweet beans, coconut or meat... the meat ones are pretty gross! I also watched the full moon considering it was a harvest moon. I also took a girl out on a date and had a bit of a peculiar night to say the least. I took out my good friend Jie and his girlfriend for a nice teppenyaki dinner and I also had a run in with some less-than-sober seafood. Let's jump into the thick of it!





  My roommates and I have really been getting along well and it's been really great. My new roommate Giuliano is half Italian and half British and he's a blast to be around. We went out to a jazz club not too long ago and had a glass of wine while enjoying some great music. It was really a lot of fun and I definitely plan on doing it again. We then proceeded to go to a club but we didn't go inside. Instead of partaking in the party, we waited out front for about 2 hours and just watched all the people going in and out. It may sound a bit creepy or boring but the people that attend these clubs are quite hilarious after a few hours of drinking. We ran into a couple of buddies as well so it was good to catch up with them as we watched the drunkards enjoying themselves.


  I also attended a house warming party with my roommate Giuliano not too long ago and it was quite a treat! All of the patrons attending were Europeans for the most part and so Italian, Spanish and French were all being thrown around. It was actually really great because the most common language spoken was Spanish so I got a chance to get back into the swing of the language. I was quite rusty but I understood everything that was being said but when it came to be my turn to speak, I found myself thinking too much in Chinese! Well, that's both good and bad I suppose but I'm looking forward to spending more time with them and getting my Spanish fluency back.


  So last time I mentioned a girl that I met at a club and managed to get my phone number to her before she left. Well, she got in touch with me and I ended up taking her out on a date this past Monday on the night of the mid-autumn festival. This festival is much like our Thanksgiving where families get together and enjoy a nice meal together while giving thanks for all they have in their lives as well as talking about their loved ones who have passed on. It's also the day of the harvest moon so it's nice to see such a full moon of splendor.
  We started out with a nice dinner at a restaurant that I pass all the time during tours that I had never been before. The food was great and the atmosphere was pretty awesome too and we made small talk in a nice mixture of Chinese and English. It was nice to be able to communicate in mostly Chinese and she was quite impressed at my level of the language. We decided to go for a walk after the meal and we walked and walked and walked for quite some time. We stopped in a park and looked at the moon and were headed back to her place so that I could drop her off when she stepped right onto a broken piece of glass from a beer bottle and gashed her foot open pretty bad.
  I haven't seen that much blood in a long time and I knew pretty much straight away that we needed to go to a hospital. I asked the closest person I could find where the nearest hospital was, stopped a cab, threw my date in and off we zoomed to the emergency room. We went into the emergency room but it was anything but fast unfortunately. It took about 1.5 hours total at the hospital and it took the doctor about 15 minutes to see her and when he finally did, he wasn't quick to act... Overall, it seems that she will heal just fine but it was quite a memorable first date to say the least.


  So the next day I had made plans to have lunch with my Chinese mama and I told her about the whole ordeal. She asked me about the age of my date and I told her that she is one year older than me and instead of inquiring about the hospital ordeal or even asking me other questions about her, she started scolding me for not wanting to be with Gao Yue, the daughter of my Chinese mama who just so happens to be one year older than me! Oh no... here we go again.
  She sat on the couch and told me about how the Shanghainese do things and boy was she laying it on thick.  Quick cultural lesson: In Shanghai if you want to get married, you must have enough money to buy an apartment to share with your new husband/wife. If you don't have enough money, then you don't get married. My Chinese mama told me that she would give me and her daughter HER apartment if we got married so we wouldn't even have to worry about that. Oh man is she set on me becoming her son-in-law! I think I'll eventually have to just stop deflecting her insinuations and tell her I'm not interested. I think I haven't done it yet because I'm scared of her hahaha.


  Hokay, so, I've been teaching a new student quite regularly and although he is quite a naughty little fella, he's actually quite smart. He gave himself the name Jacky as in Jacky Chan so that's pretty neat although he's quite a little scaredy cat. I did my best to take a picture of him but he told me he's not super photogenic so I had to snap off about 5 or 6 random shots before I actually could get a decent picture of him. Here he is hiding under the table where I finally managed to snap a pretty good one.





  I also have been teaching a business English class every Friday night to a group of 5 students. Friday night! Oh man, that sucks right? Well not too much, here are my students... (Oh and by the way, Kerry, the one on the right made sure to make me tell all of you that her eyes are mostly closed, don't be racists! =P)





  Oh Tony you dog you! Well it's quite a fun time teaching these young ladies because for one, their English is actually quite good and we also trade off cultural differences and tell stories about our pasts and I learn about what it's like to grow up in small towns in China and such. It's really, really cool to hear their stories. Oh ya and did you see the picture of them? =P


  My friend Jie and his girlfriend Cici have been treating me very well since I've been out here to Shanghai and especially when my financial situation wasn't as reliable as now. They treated me to eat so many times, it's hard to count them all. I knew that I owed them big time for all of the hospitality they had shown me so I decided to take them out for a night of good eats and drink.
  I mentioned an all-you-can-eat teppenyaki place a few posts ago and that's where I took them. They had never been but oh were they so delighted! They ordered just about everything off the menu and we dug in. Jie was especially happy about the all-you-can-drink part and we ordered Sake after Sake after Sake. He is a big fan of it and he told me that in his home province of Si Chuan, they have something very close to the Japanese rice wine. We ate and ate and then took a break, then ate some more and more and then finally when they were ready to go, I ordered some dessert, paid the bill and then we all took off. They were so happy to have had me treat them to a great meal and I have to say that it felt nice to be the one treating this time.





  I also had a couple of other people to treat to dinner that I had been promising for quite some time, so that was nice to finally be able to follow through with my plans. I've been meeting a bunch of people out here lately and it's been really cool to finally have a comfortable friend zone back so that I'm never lonely and usually have someone to hang out with. We're throwing a big party this Saturday for the return of my roommate from Holland (or at least he thinks so) but also for my roomie Giuliano's friends to see the new place and for all of my new friends to see the place. It should be quite a blast and I'm really excited to have another large gathering with what seems like guests representing the whole world.


  To wrap things up, I would LOVE to tell you about a dish called drunk shrimp. Well I'll back up a little bit and describe the setting first. I was invited out with my good friend Jie and his girlfriend Cici to eat dinner and have a night on the town with 20 of their coworkers. It was a bit overwhelming to be at a huge table with 20+ Chinese people but they were all so warm and friendly that I quickly became involved in bits of conversation and especially involved with their toasts. It was a lot of fun and these guys/gals know how to have a good time and they also know how to have a good meal... sort of.
  We went to a seafood place and out front of the restaurant are tubs filled with water. In that water are any and all animals that you will be eating during your meal. It's really quite weird but it's like going to Red Lobster and picking your personal lobster that you want to eat except they have about 30 different tubs with bunches of different types of sea critters. Some of the dishes we ate include raw oysters (I'd be lying if I told you that I tried one....yuck), steamed snail-like creatures (pretty tasty but hard to eat a good amount because you only eat about 1cm2 of meat with each one that you pluck out of it's shell), crab, small lobsters and of course, drunk shrimp. The other dishes are pretty self explanatory but the drunk shrimp were something else for sure.





  So as dishes were being served one after the other, I saw a dish being placed on the table in a plastic Tupperware container with a plate over the top of it. Inside the tub was a nice red sauce which is a really, really tasty sauce that is a very popular style Shanghainese dish. In the sauce were live shrimp and they were jumping up and down hence the plate on top of the tub to prevent escape! This immediately scared me away from the dish since they were still alive. Everyone told me to give it a try but we had to wait a few more minutes until they were ready. So after a few minutes they stopped jumping and the plate came off and the party proceeded to consume them. Mind you, the shell is still on, the head is still there and they literally just stopped moving. They told me that the shrimp had died, presumably from the lack of oxygen. I reluctantly threw one into my mouth whole, bit off the head, spit it out, crunched through the shell, spit it out and then consumed the meat. It was actually pretty tasty in the nice sauce!
  Wellllll, turns out the shrimp weren't dead at all. It turns out that they were just drunk from a little bit of alcohol in the sauce... So wait... that means that... yup... I ate raw shrimp that were intoxicated.......................................................... I don't know what to feel. Poor little guys were just having a good time with their shrimp buddies and then I chomped their heads right off. It was crazy to say the least but to be fair, I'd probably eat the dish again because it was quite tasty.


  I realize that this post is a bit shorter than usual especially after not having posted for about three weeks. I apologize for this but I guess life is just cruising normally and besides the random story here or there I guess I'm just assimilating. AHHHH! Sounds like I'm on Star Trek and the Borg just took over my ship. Although I guess I wouldn't mind being assimilated by Jeri Ryan.... Aaaaaaaanyway, I'll do my best to not be such a slacker and get these posts up every week again. I'll also try to get some good stories for all of you since from your feedback so far, you seem to actually like what I've been experiencing so hey, that's a bonus. Huge shout out to My buddy Seth Yoder who's birthday it is today (or at least it is as I write this) as well as to all of my friends I've been chatting with recently. It seems like we're growing a bit apart but I assure you, even though I'm making new friends out here, there is no way that you will ever grow further away from my heart. I miss all of you and I can't wait to be reunited one day.


It's not saying goodbye forever, I'm just saying see you later.


Tony G.


Pics right HERE