No Dogs were Harmed During the Making of this Meal

We had Thanksgiving this year again at Ken's place, though this time we moved all the tables into the room with the heater so we wouldn't be so cold. We did it pot luck style again with everyone bringing something. We asked Spring, Steve's wife, not to bring anything again, last year she completely ignored us on that one. We thought she'd probably just bring stuff anyways this time too but she actually stuck to it and only brought over one dish. There was of course way too much food anyways, can it really be Thanksgiving without it. This great picture was taken by Sarah, and reported here without permission. Pretty much everyone who was there is in the picture besides Sarah who was taking the picture, and Mike, Steve's son, who was in a bit of a mood and didn't feel like leaning forward. I made mashed potatoes again, they came out much better this year thanks to the masher I got from the US and the fact that instead of much milk I added a really ridiculous amount of butter and some garlic to them. Ken made stuffing again which was definitly better than last year thanks to drying out the bread first. The real stars of the show were Sean and Sarah though who do an absolutely amazing job with their little toaster oven. They made green bean casserole and stuffed mushrooms that were out of this world. They also deviled about 3 dozen eggs. The best part was the desert though which consisted of cup cakes and an amazingly good apple crisp. Ken joked that we should have just given money to Sean and Sarah and had them cook all the Thanksgiving food. We had KFC as the turkey again despite some jokes about going for the dog meat.

Having Thanksgiving this year was both similar and different to last year. The actual meal was pretty similar, though with better cooking thanks to Sean and Sarah, but the people were different. Dave is back in the US and Clark is over in Shanghai, and even Amy who was hear in the second semester is gone. Looking back on my old posts from last Thanksgiving http://pleasedontrunoverme.blogspot.com/2008/11/to-give-thanks.html I'm reminded of feeling homesick around that time. It's not really in the post but I can just remember feeling it as I was writing. What's interesting this year is that I don't feel as homesick. It feels like I just got back to China even though the semester is almost done. Maybe I'm just getting used to missing holidays I don't know. When I used to live in Belgium I made up a word, distance Americans, it refereed to people who were technically Americans, but had lived so little of their life in the US that they came across as more European than anything. I wonder if I'm going to be like that some day. I wonder if I spend enough time away from the US will I lose my connection to it. I'm not sure if this is good or bad I just don't know. Already I know less about US pop culture than I would if I lived in the US. How long will it be before people will ask me questions about what's big in the US and I'll have no idea. I've always prided myself on my ability to predict political trends but I wonder if that too is eroded by losing some of my connection to the US. Part of me wants to visit every country, see every sight like I was collecting them, but it seems that the old ones slip away though my fingers the longer I am gone from them. By the time I've seen everything will I need to start again to see how everything's changed? I just wonder if I'm losing my country, and if that's a good or bad thing.

I'm going to end this post the way I ended my post last year and the way my dad begins every Thanksgiving meal, because traditions can be important when they bring us closer together, by saying what I'm thankful for this year. I'm thankful to have friends in China with whom I can spend a nice Thanksgiving. I'm thankful to have friends with whom I can travel to strange and interesting places with. I'm thankful for having this blog as, at very least, a record of what I've been doing that even I already need to look back on. I'm thankful for all the support I've gotten from friends and family in the US, I know not all families are as supportive of such wanderings as mine is. I'm thankful for having this opportunity to gallivant around the world. I'm thankful that my mother and my grandfather are feeling better, and I hope for continued good health in the coming year. Happy Thanksgiving.

More Mao

Besides seeing the Great Wall we also took some time to see the stuff around Tienanmen Square including the Forbidden City and my favorite, preserved Mao. Much like Ho Chi Minh Mao despite leaving explicit orders that he be cremated was preserved in the creepy Soviet style immediately following his death. Much of the technique came from the Soviets through Vietnam as the Chinese and Russians weren't on great terms at the time. Mao's mausoleum is a lot like Ho Chi Minh's except bigger. The line wraps around three sides of the gigantic structure in the middle of Tienanmen Square, and even with all that requires that the line fold in on itself several times. Being in China this of course means that there are constantly people trying to cut in line. Chinese line cutters aren't really like the ones you might find in America either. In America once a security guard caught you trying to cut in line you would probably be ashamed and go back to the end, but not in China. In China people had to be basically forcibly ejected from line and there were endless arguments with the various guards. If people were forcibly stopped they would often just try to find another spot to cut in. This constant back and forth combined with the already huge size of the line made the wait about two hours.

This contrast pretty sharply with what I saw in Vietnam where the whole atmosphere around the tomb was pretty somber and there were probably as many guards as people. Once you finally got near the entrance there was a place selling flowers, which were then deposited about five feet away near a big portrait of Mao, and I'm sure collected and resold. People always wonder how China's economy can grow so fast, honestly I think a big part of it is that the Chinese just naturally take to capitalism in a way you don't see in many countries. I've been to the tomb of Mao and Sun Yat-sen probably the two most venerated figures in China, and they were selling junk at each place. Inside the huge mausoleum the first room has flowers and some big pictures but is pretty uninteresting. When I finally go into the room with Mao it was again a lot like in Vietnam. Mao was behind several layers of glass and his lower body was covered with a big flag. Again I don't really know what a person whose been dead that long should look like, but he didn't look great. Maybe it's that he was never as good looking in life as Ho Chi Minh but he just looked old and sick behind all that glass. Having waited so long to finally get to the room with the body I walked really slowly through the room. One of the guards made a hurry up motion to me, but in good Chinese fashion I just ignored him and took my time.

The Great Wall of China

A Million Maos

Most of the stuff I saw with my parents in Shanghai was stuff that I'd already seen before at some point. The one exception was the Propaganda Art Museum which was recommended to me by Dave before he left. The Propaganda Art Museum was really hard to find despite some good directions. Basically we had to take a taxi to this one really random building in the city not particularly near anything. Then we just wandered around confused for a while before a guard at the entrance to a little housing complex came out a gave us a card that had directions on exactly where to go on it, I think he knew who we were by the fact that we were the confused looking foreigners. Even with the little card we walked by the building we were supposed to go into a couple of times before finally finding it after about 15 minutes. In the building we went down to what was basically the sub basement where we finally came to the Propaganda Art Museum. The museum was basically in a couple of small rooms. Each room was filled to the brink with old propaganda posters from the 40's-70's. The posters were really amazing both as historical relics of an amazingly crazy time and also for there interesting artistic quality. The signs around the museum explained how the different styles of the time and the different people in charge effected the look and composition of the posters.

The small museum was divided by the dates the different posters came out and didn't really have much to it besides wall after wall packed full of posters. It was still an amazing find. In a country that usually so quick to brush over it past flings with radicalism I suppose it's the fact that the communist part can't really write off Mao who they depend on for so much of there legitimacy that allows a place like this to exist even if it's in the basement of a housing building. As we were walking over to the gift shop we met the owner and collector of the place. He said that they didn't really have a specific problem with the government but that it was just his personal side project and they didn't have much money so they were in the little building. That being said I've seen the big and famous museums of Shanghai and there was nothing 1/10th as memorable in them as what was in the little Propaganda Art Museum. The gift shop alone was worth going to check out as they sold tons of original propaganda pieces. They're somewhat rare since not many were kept but because of the huge quantities made at the time they have enough extra to frame and sell some to pay for the rest of the museum. I went a little wild as there were a lot of things in there I had been looking for. I got a great English version of Mao's little red book. I got a Red Army jacket and a Red Guard arm band. I got a hilarious teaching English book from the Cultural Revolution where every practice sentence just praised Mao.

I also got two small old propaganda posters one extolling the people to harvest wheat and the other wishing Mao a long life. I love them and they are incredibly interesting to me. I'm a little conflicted on the Mao one since I consider Mao a really evil figure and I wouldn't exactly display an old picture of Hitler on my wall. But I suppose his picture is still so prevalent here it's not like I'm exactly reopening old wounds. My dad talked to the owner for a while and when he heard that my dad was a reporter he got excited and offered to show us some more stuff. He had another sort of storage room with a huge pile of plastic Mao busts and other posters. The most interesting stuff though was old sheets of really big paper from the Cultural Revolution where people had written messages criticizing various people. What was really interesting is that messages would be crossed out and new things written over them. It sort of made a back and forth discussion in big angry words. The owner noted that he had seen the posters years ago and hated them. But after seeing them more recently he realized that they had a odd artistic value as sort of a mass generated art. I suppose I've never thought of the Cultural Revolution for it's artistic value before. I'd recommend going to the Propaganda Art Museum as the best stop in Shanghai for anyone traveling there.

Back to China

The very next day after I got back from my trip down to New Orleans, we did the driving in two day though most of it was done on the first day, I was off again to China with my parents. They had wanted to visit China and since I didn't have classes starting until early September it was a good time. In the end they almost weren't able to come though and the Visa took a really long time since China is not exactly super friendly to journalists. In the end all they were able to get was a Visa that was only half as long as the normal Visa and China even likes the Wall Street Journal. Also speaking of great moments in censorship Obama is in China and during one of his speeches called on the Chinese government to uncensored the internet, a comment that was promptly censored in all the Chinese sources. In China we went to Shanghai, Changzhou, Beijing, and then to Chengdu to see the Pandas, I'm again not going to do every day from the trip. I think I'm going to do one post of Shanghai, one on the Great Wall, one on the Forbidden City, and one on the Panda preserves until I'm finally up to the point where I was back in Changzhou.

The Big Easy (New Orleans Part 2)

I can't remember exactly what we had for breakfast the next day but we certainly had a number of beignets while we were there. Beignets are a popular New Orleans snack food that are basically just fried dough with a bunch of powdered sugar on top. The only thing that makes them a little different from normal fried dough is that they are sort of puffed up with air in the middle giving them a vaguely round shape. They seemed to sell them pretty much everywhere in the French Quarter and at all the coffee shops in the city. There was a big placed just called Cafe Beignet down near the river which seemed to really only sell beignets. I think the place was pretty famous as it was always pretty full even with a large number of outdoor tables under a big awning. All the food we had in New Orleans was really good. We ate one night at the nice restaurant in a different Hilton in the city, there were about four within walking distance. Mike was even able to get us a discount in the restaurant since he worked at a Hilton. The food there was really good including a soft shelled crab that was so big I almost made myself sick trying to finish it. That was actually one of the few meals where we didn't just order a few things and share everything. Harry and Mike loved doing that but it's just never been what I'm used to so I wasn't quite so gung ho about it.

We had gotten a flier the previous day for a brewery tour of a local Rum company. It seemed as good a thing as any to do so we got a taxi out to where the warehouse/brewery was. The thing was that we didn't exactly read the brochure very carefully since what we thought it said was that there were tours from 11am - 3pm what it actually said was that there were tours at 11am 1pm and 3pm. So we ended up arriving about 30 minutes too late for one tour and 2 hours too early for another. The place wasn't close to anything either it was basically in an industrial area of the town with nothing much around but warehouses and construction yards. The people at the rum place though were really nice to us once we all realized our mistake. We didn't have much to do so we basically just say down and waited for whenever the next tour would be. They had some rum cake out from the last tour also which was really good, and seemed to include more rum than cake. They also had a big dispenser full of one of there rums and iced tea which went really well together in the heat. I'm not usually much of a fan of iced tea but with rum it was really good. We talked some with the people there and read through some of their literature. The rum company seemed to be pretty recent but they already had a number of different types of rum.

After not too long the guy who does the tours came by and just figured since we were there he might as well do a tour then. The tour was pretty short, the whole brewery basically fit into one small warehouse and you could see the whole thing practically from the door. He showed us a little about how rum is made, which since it involves brewing is pretty much the same as how any alcohol is made. What was interesting is that when the brewing process is over the rum it makes is like 80-90% pure alcohol so they have to delude it with water to get it down to a drinkable level. The other really interesting thing is the guy showed us the water line from where the water got to during the hurricane Katrina flood. The mark was really high up but the guy said that the water was actually higher than that and the stain on the wood was from the level it settee at for a while. They said that they actually hadn't lost that much in the flood because of where a lot of the barrels were placed but had lost some stuff. After that we got to do a rum tasting which was a lot fun. They had about five different types of rum including some that were made to be especially good with tea. Harry and Mike bought more than I did but I wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to get it back to China.

Later that evening we went out to dinner in the city again and this time I was sure to get some gumbo and some jambalaya since they are such famous local foods. Gumbo is good it's basically a thick seafood stew but I really liked jambalaya since it's basically just paella with slightly different spices. After dinner me and Harry got in line for a famous Preservation Hall jazz club. I think you can tell a lot by a place by what sort of atmosphere it has. Some places charge a big cover and have fancy tables and food and what not. Preservation Hall has no food, no drinks, about enough benches for 1/5th the number of people packed into the little room, no air conditioning, and a line out the door that stretches down the block. Preservation Hall actually became famous partially because of all this. At a time when other jazz clubs were adding lots of dancing room and what not Preservation Hall just focused on jazz and little else. The place was packed way before the musicians showed up. The set up was simple with a trumpet and trombone a bass and a piano. They played a few songs then then brought in an older guy who did some singing. He was good but being what looked like 90 he didn't exactly have a loud voice and simply the whirred of the fans almost drowned him out.

They divided the time up with several sets and the low admission price allowed you to stay for as long as you wanted. The last set was the most fun as the final song they did involved the trombone played marching around the room and doing what must be the longest trombone solo on record. At one point he was even able to get down on the floor while playing it and get back up. After the music was done we went out to the bars for a while. Harry and Mike were still really excited about the lack of open container laws but coming from China where the laws about alcohol are simply nonexistent it wasn't as much fun for me. There is a certain fun in breaking the rules and carrying beer outside sort of has that feeling but it's a lot less when you get used to it. The most interesting thing about the bars was that they would often have two bars in them, a nicer one upfront and a cheaper one in the back for people like us. This almost made the bars into two places at once a dive bar and a more respectable place. The bar tender at one of the back bars we visited had just been in a car accident of some kind and seemed so spacey we wondered if he had a concussion, I think he eventually went to the hospital to check it out. As we were leaving one place we noticed a University of Wisconsin flag. We asked around and found out that it was simply that one of the residence had been a badger. You never know where you're going to find people.

Voodoo Doctors for Ron Paul (New Orleans Part 1)

We spent about two or three days in New Orleans and while there are too many stories for one post I'm not going to break them up exactly according to day, that being said it is going to follow the general outline of my time there with just a few events moved around for the sake of brevity and clarity. The first morning there we left our hotel which was nicely located just about three blocks from the French Quarter and walked down into the city to get some breakfast. After looking around for a while we just picked on place essentially at random and went to get something to eat. Despite how hot it was out it wasn't so bad in the shade, and I was outvoted, so we sat outside in a courtyard area that had the look of being unchanged for the past hundred years. The food was good, and we ordered entirely too much of it, Harry and Mike each got a sandwich so big that finishing half of it was difficult, but the most remarkable thing was our waiter who had such the accent and mannerisms of the old South that it felt like we had become unstuck in time. Breakfast being at about noon we also stopped and tried some of the local beers which were pretty good. After breakfast we just sort of wandered around the historic streets of the French Quarter.

The buildings in all of the French Quarter were beautiful old stone and brick buildings with balconies on every level and with plants and people leisurely sitting taking in the day. I've heard the criticism that New Orleans has become so focused on tourists that what you see there today is more an image of what used to be there than the actual culture, but it did just seem like everyone was quietly going about there lives and while there was definitly a lot of stuff catering to tourists the city wasn't exactly overrun. I think some of that had to do with the fact that we were there during a lower season, as the heat and hurricanes that come in the summer tend to make spring and winter bigger tourist seasons. We walked around a lot, which is always a good way to see any city. We passed a number of parks and came down near the river to what was essentially the heart of the city. Harry wanted to look up some local artist that his parents and some of his Aunts and Uncles knew. He gave him a call and we went looking for him finding him sitting outside near one of the parks with a bunch of his art put up for display and sale. The art itself was really colorful stuff mostly being impressionist type works about jazz. In a number of the paintings that frames themselves were painted as well as if the color had just spilled out off the canvas.

One of Harry's relatives had offered to put some money toward a painting as a housewarming gift for his new condo so Harry talked to the guy for a while and eventually picked out some paintings that he really liked. He had been looking at one of the larger ones but Harry eventually decided to go with a series of three smaller ones that made there own little jazz band, with a pianist in one, a saxophone player in another, and a drummer and singer in the third. The artist was an interesting guy to he had lived in New Orleans forever and some of his work was in local galleries. He was older now so I think he mostly just took it easy sitting out by a park with some of his stuff. After Harry paid him we took the paintings over to a post office to get a bunch of bubble wrap and boxes to put them in. After using what seemed like ten pounds of bubble wrap we put them in a box. Harry decided not to mail them though since we had driven and they would be safe wrapped up in the trunk of the car. While we were doing all this though it had started to pour outside so we were sort of stuck looking for a taxi. After not being able to find one for a while we just eventually put some plastic bags over the top of the box and carried it back to the hotel in the rain.

After spending a little time in the hotel the rain let up. Mike was taking a nap so me and Harry just went out to walk around New Orleans a little more. We walked over toward something one of the guide maps just described as a Voodoo Museum. On our way there we walked down the famous Bourbon street which had literally nothing besides strip clubs and bars. Harry's dad had once called Bourbon street the "Disneyland of Sex," and I think that's pretty accurate. Whatever once had been there the whole place now was just a monument to tourism, overpriced beer, and strippers. What's more it lacked the honest sleaziness of some of the more unseemly parts of cities like Bangkok as it had all been done up in neon to give it a more friendly atmosphere for tourists. I did stop and take a picture holding a sign which simply read "Huge Ass Beers to Go" as New Orleans doesn't have any open container laws so people can get there alcoholic beverage of choice and carry it around with them as long as they don't have glass. There were a lot of places actually that sold what looked like basically alcoholic Slurpees.

When I had head about a Voodoo Museum I imagined something formal with a more anthropological take on Voodoo, what I got was a shrine for the true believers. The guy at the front desk, who I believe was the only one working that day at the little place, looked about as little like a Voodoo Doctor as you could imagine. He was a middle age, maybe late 40's early 50's, overweight white guy sitting behind this desk wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. We had some time to wait there as we called Mike and told him we had found the place and it took him a while to make his way down to where we were. As we were waiting we started to talk to the guy as we were the only people in the whole place. This guy may have looked like a joke but he took his Voodoo about as seriously as anyone I've ever meet took anything. He talked at first in a bit of a whisper so we had to lean in a bit to hear what he was actually saying. I asked him some questions about Voodoo and he told us a bit of his life story, how his family had been at one point in the past big plantation owners in Louisiana and Virginia and that people in his family had started to learn Voodoo from there black servants. He told us that he had been to Africa at one point to do some Voodoo initiation ritual.

If this just sounds like the guy was having us on, or essentially conning us, I can't prove that anything he was saying was true but it was just something about the earnestness with which he talked about it or the way he despised people who made light of Voodoo that made him sound extremely credible. And while he was pretty dressed down at the time there was a quite creepy picture of him wearing a robe and holding a snake. Besides telling us about Voodoo he loved to name drop and talk about the museum. I think we heard about every celebrity who ever came in there and exactly how respectful, or not, they were to Voodoo. He described Brad Pitt as something of an air head, and Angelina Jolie as like a dominatrix. I don't remember exactly how we started talking about politics, I think he asked us what we did and Harry mentioned he worked for a Senator, but the political conversation was certainly interesting. I was going on with something about single payer health care, which he didn't seem to be very interested in, when out of no where he just turns to me and goes, "Are you gay?" For a second I was just confused wondering if he was joking or what exactly brought on this question. I just turned back to him and said no and he sort of continued on. Harry joked later that I must have been promoting the homosexual agenda and Mike wondered if it was a pick up line.

After talking about politics for a while he said that the only candidate he really liked was Ron Paul. For those of you who don't know who Dr. Congressmen Ron Paul is he's a former OB/GYN from Texas and long serving member of congress who ran for the Republic nomination on a campaign that basically defines the term grass-roots. Paul basically didn't do any of his fund raising or spending, instead having people basically raise there own money and decide how to spend it. I don't think anyone was more suppressed than Paul when his little campaign took off finishing third and even once I believe second in a large number of primaries. Paul who is sometimes known as Doctor No for basically voting against everything in Congress ran on a platform of basically shrinking the federal government as much as possible and attracted support from everyone from hippies to CEOs. At one point his supporters even raised enough money to have a blimp advertise his candidacy. Hearing that the white New Orleans Voodoo Doctor is a big Ron Paul booster is just about a perfect as you can get. The Voodoo Museum itself wasn't that big or interesting but I considered coming back for a Voodoo reading but could just never really get my head into it enough.