Yang
To say that Asians have a sweet tooth would be a huge understatement. They have a sweet mouth, or even skeleton. Our local mall here has more bakeries than the whole city of Calgary (I mean proper bakeries, with pastries and something other than a a handful of brown goods - yes, French bakeries if you must know).
In Shanghai, I got partial to a flaky almond pastry. I started with a couple a week. By the end of our stay, I was eating three a night. I was already overweight, so it didn't make a damn bit of difference (I think we're all scheduled to have a certain weight at a certain age and any efforts to fight this are doomed).
Our local supermarket here in KL has a half dozen displays near the check-out dedicated to chocolate. So what? Who cares?
I'll tell you who cares: someone trying to find salted peanuts. Or salted anything. (Lo and I are both salt fiends, and we constantly have to ask for it here).
Back to the peanuts: in Shanghai, we bought what we thought were just salted peanuts: no dice, they were sweet. Peanuts in the shell? Some were sweet as well. I finally learned to read the labels in Chinese so we'd get just salted peanuts. That worked exactly once, as the supermarket discontinued them instantly (more on the strange supermarket practices later).
We finally found some peanuts in Vietnam, but they were not nearly salty enough (although not sweet). Bottom line is we've been peanut-less for most of the year, until we found our local KL supermarket's import section: honest-to-god French peanuts from Casino (a French supermarket chain). Why must we come here to get that?
Enough about peanuts you say. Fair enough. What about popcorn? The microwave stuff is straightforward enough, but the movie popcorn is tricky. They have three kinds, which are sweet, sweeter and salty. So far so good, except that the salty kind is like a wavering politician: it was sweet before it was salty. You can taste it: salt is like an afterthought. But really, when you're lying back in your recliner, ordering another beer to take you to the end of the movie, who cares?
Because of Winn-Dixie
Supermarkets can be very confusing. Especially here in Malaysia, or of course in China.
I do not know where anything is. There are some recognizable sections, mostly for non-food items, but otherwise, it's pretty dicey. Microwave popcorn is with the spices, right next to the pasta. Really? You can find instant noodles in four different areas (I since figured out that two of them are for Korean and Japanese noodles - no idea about the other two). So we just wander around, keeping our eyes peeled, like ferret hunters. We usually have to go around twice.
Produce has to be weighed where it is bought, so you have to wait for the weight, so to speak. The wine lady in our main supermarket is very keen. Whatever I pick up, she has something better to offer (usually something similar, for the same price, and a different label, but a few times she pointed out some good sales). I know that, when she's lurking, she'll try to talk me out of whatever I have, so I grab a random bottle and let her do her stuff. I know this sounds strange to any wine-loving people out there, but she is very persistent, and although obviously has never had a glass of wine in her life, you just want to listen to her. It's easier and you make one person happy: what can ever be wrong with that?
Speaking of happy, Malaysia has to be home to some of the happiest people I have ever met. Everyone has been superbly nice to us, and in an obviously genuine way. Of course there is some dire poverty here, and we have not been in contact with the poorest of the poorest, but that holds for anywhere.
Bad Teacher
Despite decades of preferential treatment (like 90% of university places and government jobs reserved for them), the majority of Malays have yet to make up any economic ground on the Chinese and Indian minorities, and remain the least prosperous race in Malaysia. Everyone pretends to be mystified by this, because they don't like the answer.
The answers can be found in the Malaysia National Museum. (We know we can believe anything they say in a museum: in a Malacca museum featuring a full-scale replica of the Flora del Mar, a 16th century Portuguese ship, we are reliably informed that it sank "by the grace of god". A mere 400 years later, god woke up and granted independence to Malaysia).
The museum tells us that, in the 14th to 16th centuries, Malacca, then the most important city in Malaysia, became a widely-renowned centre of scholarship. That really piqued my interest, as I was not aware of any piece of scientific or artistic contribution from that part of the world. No wonder. The so-called scholarship was in islamic studies. Big fat lot of good that did for anybody. But surely, things evolve? In the 19th century, in a typical imperial divide-and-conquer move, the British gave each race control over its education. Predictably, the Chinese and Indian set up a normal curriculum with high standards. The Malays opted for a schooling system that would "reinforce Malay nationalism and muslim consciousness". It was specifically not designed to instill marketable skills. Smart move.
Each race still has an independent education system, and things haven't really changed in the last 150 years. The Malays are educated in madrassas, the main purpose of which is to produce good muslims. The results are predictable. Then there is the idiotic fasting month of ramadan, when their productivity drops to near nothing. Throughout the month, they remain, however, always nice and cheerful, which is really surprising given the importance of food in their culture (Malays greet one another not with "how are you?", but with "have you eaten yet?"
In Malacca, we came across a first- or second-grade girls class outing. In 40 degree weather, the poor things were clad from head to toe. Unspeakable! Seven years old! Keep in mind that every fat bastard dragging a black-burkah-swaddled woman two paces behind him is wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Unbearable cruelty. I'm going to stop and open a bolla wine now, before I get more worked up.
The producers (cont'd)
Something else you never see in movies: a light drizzle. Hollywood rain machines have two settings: "monsoon" and "heavy monsoon". (Although I seem to recall a seemingly interminable scene in a Claude Lelouch movie where a couple stares wordlessly through a car windshield during a normal rainstorm - but that ain't Hollywood).
Night at the Museum
We have been looking at oriental art for the last 7 months. The contrast with western art, at least in the earlier years is stunning. It was, however, difficult to appreciate everything I saw because I am not familiar with the iconographic conventions of the various countries and traditions being depicted. As a result, only a purely aesthetic enjoyment was possible. The western and oriental artistic traditions are, however, so far apart that even that was enough to enable me to enjoy things, if only because it was different. You can, obviously, enjoy western art on a purely aesthetic level as well, but you get much more out of it if you know the symbolisms associated with Greek, Roman and christian mythologies.
Eastern and western arts are, of course, converging nowadays into the big con game that is modern art. In no other field could a pretentious twit like Damian Hirst become a multi-millionaire by selling his "art". In Asia, there were no "experts" on hand to tell us what's good, so we couldn't find anything good.
Lagniappe
The U in USB stands for Universal and is a very useful standard. Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers think it only applies to one end of the cable. Every reader, phone, tablet, camera, printer or thingummy has a different connector. None are compatible with anything else, except, in certain cases, with other products from the same manufacturer. I have three different hard drives from Western Digital that use three different connectors. Why is this? There is absolutely no technical reasons for it. The mini and micro USB standards cater to thinner devices. I can understand, and even expect, Apple to do this: their fan-boys and cult members will happily fork out $35 for a $5 cable, as long as it's white. Why the others?
To say that Asians have a sweet tooth would be a huge understatement. They have a sweet mouth, or even skeleton. Our local mall here has more bakeries than the whole city of Calgary (I mean proper bakeries, with pastries and something other than a a handful of brown goods - yes, French bakeries if you must know).
In Shanghai, I got partial to a flaky almond pastry. I started with a couple a week. By the end of our stay, I was eating three a night. I was already overweight, so it didn't make a damn bit of difference (I think we're all scheduled to have a certain weight at a certain age and any efforts to fight this are doomed).
Our local supermarket here in KL has a half dozen displays near the check-out dedicated to chocolate. So what? Who cares?
I'll tell you who cares: someone trying to find salted peanuts. Or salted anything. (Lo and I are both salt fiends, and we constantly have to ask for it here).
Back to the peanuts: in Shanghai, we bought what we thought were just salted peanuts: no dice, they were sweet. Peanuts in the shell? Some were sweet as well. I finally learned to read the labels in Chinese so we'd get just salted peanuts. That worked exactly once, as the supermarket discontinued them instantly (more on the strange supermarket practices later).
We finally found some peanuts in Vietnam, but they were not nearly salty enough (although not sweet). Bottom line is we've been peanut-less for most of the year, until we found our local KL supermarket's import section: honest-to-god French peanuts from Casino (a French supermarket chain). Why must we come here to get that?
Enough about peanuts you say. Fair enough. What about popcorn? The microwave stuff is straightforward enough, but the movie popcorn is tricky. They have three kinds, which are sweet, sweeter and salty. So far so good, except that the salty kind is like a wavering politician: it was sweet before it was salty. You can taste it: salt is like an afterthought. But really, when you're lying back in your recliner, ordering another beer to take you to the end of the movie, who cares?
Because of Winn-Dixie
Supermarkets can be very confusing. Especially here in Malaysia, or of course in China.
I do not know where anything is. There are some recognizable sections, mostly for non-food items, but otherwise, it's pretty dicey. Microwave popcorn is with the spices, right next to the pasta. Really? You can find instant noodles in four different areas (I since figured out that two of them are for Korean and Japanese noodles - no idea about the other two). So we just wander around, keeping our eyes peeled, like ferret hunters. We usually have to go around twice.
Produce has to be weighed where it is bought, so you have to wait for the weight, so to speak. The wine lady in our main supermarket is very keen. Whatever I pick up, she has something better to offer (usually something similar, for the same price, and a different label, but a few times she pointed out some good sales). I know that, when she's lurking, she'll try to talk me out of whatever I have, so I grab a random bottle and let her do her stuff. I know this sounds strange to any wine-loving people out there, but she is very persistent, and although obviously has never had a glass of wine in her life, you just want to listen to her. It's easier and you make one person happy: what can ever be wrong with that?
Speaking of happy, Malaysia has to be home to some of the happiest people I have ever met. Everyone has been superbly nice to us, and in an obviously genuine way. Of course there is some dire poverty here, and we have not been in contact with the poorest of the poorest, but that holds for anywhere.
Bad Teacher
Despite decades of preferential treatment (like 90% of university places and government jobs reserved for them), the majority of Malays have yet to make up any economic ground on the Chinese and Indian minorities, and remain the least prosperous race in Malaysia. Everyone pretends to be mystified by this, because they don't like the answer.
The answers can be found in the Malaysia National Museum. (We know we can believe anything they say in a museum: in a Malacca museum featuring a full-scale replica of the Flora del Mar, a 16th century Portuguese ship, we are reliably informed that it sank "by the grace of god". A mere 400 years later, god woke up and granted independence to Malaysia).
The museum tells us that, in the 14th to 16th centuries, Malacca, then the most important city in Malaysia, became a widely-renowned centre of scholarship. That really piqued my interest, as I was not aware of any piece of scientific or artistic contribution from that part of the world. No wonder. The so-called scholarship was in islamic studies. Big fat lot of good that did for anybody. But surely, things evolve? In the 19th century, in a typical imperial divide-and-conquer move, the British gave each race control over its education. Predictably, the Chinese and Indian set up a normal curriculum with high standards. The Malays opted for a schooling system that would "reinforce Malay nationalism and muslim consciousness". It was specifically not designed to instill marketable skills. Smart move.
Each race still has an independent education system, and things haven't really changed in the last 150 years. The Malays are educated in madrassas, the main purpose of which is to produce good muslims. The results are predictable. Then there is the idiotic fasting month of ramadan, when their productivity drops to near nothing. Throughout the month, they remain, however, always nice and cheerful, which is really surprising given the importance of food in their culture (Malays greet one another not with "how are you?", but with "have you eaten yet?"
In Malacca, we came across a first- or second-grade girls class outing. In 40 degree weather, the poor things were clad from head to toe. Unspeakable! Seven years old! Keep in mind that every fat bastard dragging a black-burkah-swaddled woman two paces behind him is wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Unbearable cruelty. I'm going to stop and open a bolla wine now, before I get more worked up.
The producers (cont'd)
Something else you never see in movies: a light drizzle. Hollywood rain machines have two settings: "monsoon" and "heavy monsoon". (Although I seem to recall a seemingly interminable scene in a Claude Lelouch movie where a couple stares wordlessly through a car windshield during a normal rainstorm - but that ain't Hollywood).
Night at the Museum
We have been looking at oriental art for the last 7 months. The contrast with western art, at least in the earlier years is stunning. It was, however, difficult to appreciate everything I saw because I am not familiar with the iconographic conventions of the various countries and traditions being depicted. As a result, only a purely aesthetic enjoyment was possible. The western and oriental artistic traditions are, however, so far apart that even that was enough to enable me to enjoy things, if only because it was different. You can, obviously, enjoy western art on a purely aesthetic level as well, but you get much more out of it if you know the symbolisms associated with Greek, Roman and christian mythologies.
Eastern and western arts are, of course, converging nowadays into the big con game that is modern art. In no other field could a pretentious twit like Damian Hirst become a multi-millionaire by selling his "art". In Asia, there were no "experts" on hand to tell us what's good, so we couldn't find anything good.
Lagniappe
The U in USB stands for Universal and is a very useful standard. Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers think it only applies to one end of the cable. Every reader, phone, tablet, camera, printer or thingummy has a different connector. None are compatible with anything else, except, in certain cases, with other products from the same manufacturer. I have three different hard drives from Western Digital that use three different connectors. Why is this? There is absolutely no technical reasons for it. The mini and micro USB standards cater to thinner devices. I can understand, and even expect, Apple to do this: their fan-boys and cult members will happily fork out $35 for a $5 cable, as long as it's white. Why the others?