Get one that uses the right skin products, duh!
Get one that uses the right skin products, duh!
The spoon method for pomegranates was a game changer for me. Beforehand I loved the taste of them but rarely ate them because they were such a pain in the ass. Now I eat them whenever they’re available.
I eat most things with chopsticks, so it’s a no-brainer to extend that to snack foods.
That works as well, but it’s harder to direct in my experience. The fork+spoon method of twirling just works best for me.
Well, when I’m in Canada. Here I eat noodles with chopsticks.
Or learn to twist the spaghetti with your fork against the spoon. It took me all of about ten minutes to learn that.
I use the spoon method for pomegranates.
For watermelon, I like to slice it in a grid with a knife before using a spoon to eat it. Then I don’t need a special spoon with serrations.
It has some applications, but far, far, far, far fewer than its advocates hype.
Worst: Using ChatGPT (In French: “chat j’ai pété”) for anything important. I spend more time checking its output and stomping on its hallucinations than it would have taken me to just write things on my own.
Best: Learning to say “no” when people ask you to do things you don’t have time to do.
Different rices are needed for different uses. Basmati is one of the best for Indian food, for example, but it would suck for making zongzi. You want some kind of glutinous rice (I like Thai glutinous best for this) for that dish. And both would suck for sushi.
Thankfully I live a five minute walk away from my favourite restaurant in the world … which makes Chongqing style hot pot. 🤣
Chongqing style hot pot is a nightmare to make. Fen zheng rou is easy and there’s a dozen or more recipes online, most of which are pretty decent.
Fen zheng rou. Unless it’s really rough in which case it’s Chongqing style hot pot.
I listened to Rebuild the Wall by Luther Wright and the Wrongs today. It’s a cover of The Wall by Pink Floyd. In bluegrass style.
(To be fair you’re pretty close.)
Ooh! Now you’re trying flattery! 😛
Right. The key is to get it assessed and treated as quickly as possible, whatever it may be.
Your wife sounds like she’s suffering from clinical depression. Take her to an analyst and find out for certain, and if she is get it treated stat.
Depression is a lethal condition. Get it looked into stat to be certain.
Is asking me how long I’ve been here a “sneaky” way to guess my age? 😉
I can cite a recent experience that in many ways sums up what it feels like to me living in China. I said goodbye to a neighbour’s son I’d grown very close with (like a crazy auntie, not romantically!) over the years; he was about to leave China (ironically for Canada) in a couple of days and he invited me as a goodbye get-together to the museum we’d both bonded most with visits over the year: 湖北省博物馆.
This museum is an incredible place with displays and artifacts that boggle the mind. One of them is 越王勾践剑 which I was appreciative of in the past, but it never really stood out to me. This summer I had been on a road trip across Canada with my SO (6700km of driving…) and decided to read the book 国语 along the way. (This very copy, in fact.) And since about a third of that book, it seems, is the story of the kingdoms of Wu and Yue, I was primed this time, when entering the display of the sword to actually comprehend the gravity of that thing.
It’s a sword made 2500 years ago that’s in shockingly good shape. (It still had a sharp edge when found!) And this time, when I looked at it, I knew its place in ancient history and the important people who’d held it over time. And that, in a nutshell, is to me what living in China is like. Perfectly ordinary life punctuated by startling revelations of just how old things can sometimes be.
Do I prefer it to Canada? That’s a more complicated question. In many ways yes. China is a far more modern country than Canada, and I blend in easier here. I stood out as a “visible minority” (a term that has come to grate over time) in Canada and was never really “one of us”. In that regard life here is more comfortable. But I’m totally a banana, so the culture is very alien and even after <redacted> years I still occasionally experience what I like to call Chinanaphylaxis. I really enjoyed my summer in Canada, seeing some of my old haunts, visiting friends and family, and there are some aspects of Canadian scenery that I will never fall out of love with (unless they burn down like Jasper did while I was on the trip). If I could afford it, I’d do the six months here, six months there thing for living between Canada and China.
I kind of stumbled into it. I studied marketing in university, did marketing for tech companies in Canada for what feels like too long a segment of my life, burned out and moved to China to a) teach English, and b) reconnect with my roots, then found an odd firm here that does marketing consultation for Chinese companies trying to market abroad and non-Chinese companies trying to market inside China.
I actually started off as a PA for the company boss, but I had a really good knack for teasing information out of obscure sources, and my general interest for cultural issues made me more suited than others to doing marketing cross-culture, so I started getting more and more little assignments in that realm until I was basically just a market researcher. (On paper I’m still a PA.)
So as with most things in my life, I just stumbled into things by meeting the right people and going to the right places at the right time. I have no special certifications, etc. but that’s more just because of how I tend to do things: “fake” it until I make it.
Yep.
I thought it was a great tool.
But I still know how to use paper maps and a compass. Because electronics fail waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more often than paper does.