Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 15

Well, back to normal life! Sorry that this week will have no magnificent views, none of the Seven Wonders of the World, no 600 year old imperial city.

Mid-Autumn Festival

We got to celebrate our first Mid-Autumn Festival this year. It is a lunar harvest festival celebrated in China and Vietnam and is sometimes called the Moon Festival or the Mooncake festival and is one of the most important Chinese festivals. It is a public holiday here in China and so I got the day off! For this festival, you have Mooncakes, which we had starting seeing everywhere in stores about a month or so ago. Mooncakes are offered to friends and family during the festival. It is interesting talking to people here, because most don't really like mooncakes (to eat them) but it is more the act of giving them. And some of these mooncakes are quite high-end and come in very fancy boxes.

We received 2 boxes of mooncakes this year, one from work and one from the company that manages our apartment. They seem to do this for each festival, since we also received something for the Dragonboat Festival also. The boxes have very nice designs on them, and the second one, each mooncake was in it's own little box and the boxes was lined with silk.

Traditional mooncakes have an imprint on top consisting of the Chinese characters for "longevity" or "harmony", as well as the name of the bakery and the filling inside. Imprints of the moon, the Chang'e woman on the moon, flowers, vines, or a rabbit (symbol of the moon) may surround the characters for additional decoration. There are some traditional fillings, which include Lotus seed paste (supposedly the most luxurious filling), Sweet bean paste (red or black), Jujube paste (a sweet paste made of the date plant), or Five kernel (5 different types of nuts and seeds, chopped up). I think some of ours were a little less traditional because I thought some tasted like peanut butter and coconut.

Cooking Class

I decided to spend my day off at a Cooking Class. I had taken one before in the Pudong kitchen but this one I decided to do over in the Puxi kitchen. It was alot smaller than the Pudong kitchen but there were others in the class this time so that was good. The class had 2 different items: snowballs and a noodle dish. The snowballs were somewhat of a dessert dish. It starts by mixing a few of the ingredients together and putting them into a shallow bowl and steaming them in a bamboo steamer

When it comes out, it is resembles a jello kind of thing ... it is hard to describe.

We then peeled it out of the pan and needed and rolled it then like dumpling skins. This is the "skin" of the snowball. In the middle, we placed finely diced fruit (in this case, melon) and whipped cream and we close them up like dumplings. They were then placed top-down in little cups. They were okay, but the melon didn't have a strong flavor so they didn't have a whole lot of taste. Perhaps with strawberries or something like that, it would have been much better.

Then the noodle dish ... we made the noodle dough from scratch, kneaded it, and rolled them out, then cut them into strips. After a quick cook in hot water, they were ready to go. Then we took soybean oil and put it into a hot wok and added cut green onions and cooked until the green onions started to brown. Then they took the onions OUT .. they only wanted to infuse the oil with the flavor of the green onions. Although I actually added some of the green onions as well. Then they also heated up soy sauce and added a bit of water to mellow out the flavor, and then poured a bit of soy sauce and a bit of the onion-infused oil on top of the noodles. There were actually pretty good, if I can say so myself!

Shanghai Expat show

No pictures on this one, but we had gotten information about an Expat show that was taking place over 3 days, so we decided to head over one day and just take a peek. Some of the information was useful and some ... not so much, at least for us. They had a section devoted to communication and information, and there were lots of different English-language newspapers and magazines that gave out an edition and you could subscribe to get them in your mail daily, weekly, or monthly. Some of them were nice, as they provided information on day-trip locations like Hongzhou. There was also a guy who was from a hotel in Hongzhou that was giving out 20% off cards for the hotel. We may stay there, since Hongzhou is one of the weekend trips that we want to take as it is supposedly very picturesque.

There was also a large section with medical, dental, and insurance. This section we somewhat breezed through since for the most part, we don't need to look for medical insurance since IBM provides international medical coverage, and the medical and dental offices that we will use are specifically those that work with our insurance carrier. We did find one medical office that is the one we were thinking of using that provided us information, including all of their doctors and locations, so that was helpful. Next were the schools .. again, not so helpful for us. There were lots of International schools for kids of all ages that had representation there as well as several universities that had English-language programs.

There was a "French Village" which had a couple different booths from French expat organizations and some french restaurants where you could get crepes or sandwiches. There was one booth for a French charity organization and they had a couple books they were selling. One was something we were just talking about, and that is 1-day side-trips from Shanghai. Tom and I were talking that there are lots of interesting little towns that are only an hour or 2 outside of Shanghai, but it would be difficult to just "pop" in there because we wouldn't have any information on what is there, how to get there, etc. This little book has 40 1-day trips and explains how to get there and then a walking tour through the town with what is good/important to see. So we picked that up, and had a sandwich in that area.

All in all, it was a nice show ... quite a few booths and for families that are here, or people moving here without the benefit of company health insurance, there definitely were lots of good booths with information.

Dinner at South Beauty

We did dinner one night at South Beauty, which is a chain of restaurants based in Beijing but they have several different locations in Shanghai. We had walked by this location multiple times that had this interesting face-mask looking logo, and with a name like "South Beauty", we assumed it was a spa. Go figure, no, it is a restaurant! The restaurant is listed as Sichuan but we were able to find some dishes that were not very spicy. The restaurant itself inside was quite nice, although we hear that the one on Yan'An Road has great architectural features in the restaurant. What we did do here was try the "Chinese Yellow Wine" which seems to be a rice wine instead of made from grapes. We did a bottle of the "blue label".

They poured it into these little glasses at room temperature. The people I spoke to at work said that it should have been served warm .. but perhaps they saw us and said "hey, they won't know the difference!".

Charity Run

And last thing for this week's blog is a charity run that I did. At work, I kept getting these emails (all in Chinese) about some "Sports Week" where people would participate in different sporting events or activities and they got a "point" for participating. So on Thursday, as we were going to lunch they asked "are you doing the run tomorrow"? I'm like ... umm .... I don't know about it. So they sent me the information in English and it was a 4K charity run that happens each year for the companies that are in the High Tech Park. This is me as I started out the morning, heading over to the metro to catch the train over to the start of the run.

The 2011 Charity Fun Run had participation and sponsorship from a pretty good set of companies, that were listed on the bottom of the banner. They had a little band there (well, a keyboard guy and a singer). Each company gave a certain sum of money to the Charity run, which benefited a community center.

I checked in at the registration deck for IBM and got my official Charity Run t-shirt.

I took a few pictures of the participants, who were all grouped in their respective companies.

They did this contest where we all got in a group and screamed into a microphone that gave us our decibel level to see which team could shout the loudest. I think IBM won ... but I couldn't understand the Chinese guy who was saying things :-)

Then there was the end of the run ...