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It just struck me that the order of my recent blog posts have been a beer & cookie post, a beer & tacos post, a bar post, a rice wine post, and a sex post. I am slightly glad I am going back to class, if only to pull my mind and my blog out of the gutter I made for myself. I promise I will post something vaguely academic or a pretty picture of Shanghai soon.
I am a man who has a frequent problem with sunburn. Usually I prevent this by wearing a silly hat with a wide brim. My previous sun hat (a Panama hat I got in Puerto Rico) has been falling apart for some time now so I decided to switch to a new hat. Fortunately, hard plastic wide brimmed sun hats are a common in Vietnam and sign of your support for the global communist revolution in Laos. The Chinese though saw my new hat a bit differently. Instead of being a sign for my love of the united workers of the world losing their chains, my hat is a sign that my hypothetical wife is having hypothetical sex with other hypothetical men and was apparently quite funny to everyone in Changsha's airport. In Chinese 戴绿帽子, wearing a green hat, is a euphemism for a man's wife cheating on him. While this often doesn't come up it is this stigma around green hats is occasionally a problem for foreigners. Sometimes Boston Celtics, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, or weirdos who buy a hat because they saw a picture of Ho Chi Minh in the same hat will end up accidentally wearing a green hat in China, wondering why everyone thinks they are funny. I have also read stories online of foreign businessmen, and women, throwing Christmas parties in China or with Chinese getting in trouble because they tried to get everyone to wear green elf hats. I guess take my mistake as a lesson in what not to do in China or when throwing Christmas parties for Chinese.
Last Friday, some friends of mine and I went to La Bomba in Shanghai (you might remember the taco post). While I have talked a bit about foreigner bars in Shanghai I have never done a full post on them. While the actual ex-patriot population of Shanghai is very diverse the bars they frequently attend aren't. Once you read my list, you can handle any ex-pat bar in Shanghai.
Tacos from La Bomba in Shanghai, aka the first Mexican food I had in a long while. The tacos weren't bad, they did have both a hard and a soft shell so that was a bit odd. I defiantly had low expectations from Mexican food made by Chinese people. The beer was free, on draft, and cold so that was nice. While it is not like sitting on my patio in Chiang Mai, enjoying the sunset in Luang Prabang, or drinking the unidentified fresh draft of Hanoi, it is nice to do beer and cookies back in my own room in Shanghai. The Thai had better cookies and the Lao had better bottled beer though (the Vietnamese beer was better on tap). My classes started back up again for the semester with my Chinese studies classes having started on Monday and my Chinese language classes having started today. This semester I have four classes: Chinese Language, Chinese cinema, Chinese civilization, and neo-Confucianist philosophy. I have been to every class except cinema, which begins on Friday, and everything seems to be shapeing up well. It is a bit hard to tell how class will this early in the semester without really knowing the professors, but if last semester is any indicater it should be fine.
I also got an email from Juniata confirming they got my last semester grades (all good), accepted all my credits, and have given me 12 generic study abroad credits. That went easier than I thought actually, I was prepairing for a month of paper work when I returned to JC. I guess butter cookies are now my blogs thing, considering this is my second butter cookies review and two people independently made butter cookies references to me. Since I was still a bit hungry after dinner, I went to ECNU's on campus convenience store to get something snacky. I stumbled across these Floury Premium Quality Danish Butter Cookies and knew they needed a review. I am not sure what the Malaysians thing for butter cookies is ample about, these are the second Malay butter cookies I have tried. I guess Malaysia has a low enough income to make cookies that the Chinese could buy while still being "imported 100%." Unlike the ZEK cookies that reeked of artificial butter, the Floury cookies smelled distinctly of lemon juice. They did have a stronger than average lemon taste to them. Furthermore, while the ZEK cookies looked like what the package showed them to look like, the Floury cookies look very little like the package and several actually came broken. In the words of our new president Donald J. Trump, "sad." While pretty cookies are nice the real test of any food item is taste. These butter cookies actually taste alright and for 6RMB there is not much to complain about. I wish they had a bit more substance though, they just kind of fell apart. Also, all the different shapes had roughly the same texture. Makeing textural differences using the same base butter cookie batter was the reason why I thought butter cookies all had different shapes, according to Floury I am wrong. In conclusion, I guess Floury Butter cookies are alright, I won't be buying them in the US though
Today my friend and her friend wanted to go to Yu Garden to buy stuff and I decided to come along to buy myself a proper name seal. Originally I didn't want a name seal, I thought they were a bit touristy, but after my Mom and I saw the seal exhibit at the Shanghai Museum I knew I needed one. Seals in a large part of Asia are serious business. In mainland China and Taiwan, seals are legally and functionally the same as a written signature. Some Chinese prefer them since seals are harder to copy than signatures. I have also noticed that organizations, like the International Education Office of East China Normal University or the Huawei Store, use seals to represent the organization instead of the signature of a representative. From what I read Japan and South Korea take seals even more seriously, placing legal requirements on seals (regulating the size and content of seals) and demanding people register their seals with the government. Prices for seals in China can vary from 20RMB to 2000RMB depending on size, stone, and quality of the craftsmanship. I went for a 200RMB seal that included a decorative seal made of a harder stone, a nice box, and some ink. The guy carved my Chinese name (马杰瑞) into my pig seal (I Chinese zodiac animal is the golden pig) right in front of me. Interestingly enough, after carving he actually damaged the sides of the seal a bit as a form of primitive anticounterfitting. While a skilled and scummy artesian could copy the carving on a seal, they would find it difficult to copy damage pattern on the sides of the seal. I got to play with my new seal a bit when I got back to my room and it feels way more satisfying to stamp something than to sign my name. My seal has some weight so it makes a lovely "thud" sound whenever you press it down on the paper. The major question is what can I do with my seal? As I mentioned, in China I can use it instead of my signature. I also read that in some common law jurisdictions, I believe including my home state of New Jersey, sealed contracts are more binding than unsealed contracts. Wikipedia (source of all truth) says that seals can serve as a form of alternative consideration, making deals that aren't contracts contracts, because sealing something requires extra effort on the part of the parties. From wihat I read, normally in these jurisdictions people who want to take advantage of this just write "seal" or "l.p." since most people in modern America don't have formal seals. I believe that, in theory, I should be able to use my formal seal in place of writing "seal" if I so choose. More research is needed before I accidentally invalidate the contract to by my first house by being a weirdo who insists on using a stone seal for some reason. Regardless of legal standing, my seal is still cool and I am very glad I now own one.
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
November 2021
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