Travel

I love these series of three videos. Makes me want to travel again.


MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.



LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.



EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

The last one is especially compelling. :)


Discovered via Gawker. More information here.

Acquisitions, Celebrations, and a BRG weekend

Okay, no more cheating, I'm no longer going to re-post from Blue Rose Girls. I will, however, link to new posts I have over there. But I figure I'll need some motivation to post original content over here.

If you're curious, I posted today about some recent acquisition news.

In other news, we had a lovely toast for Grace Lin's Newbery Honor in the office last Friday:

And this past weekend I spent a very lovely weekend in Northampton, MA with my fellow Blue Rose Girls. It was our last weekend together before Grace's wedding at the end of the month. We spent it doing some wedding crafts (making icing flowers):

Doing Grace's hair and makeup:

And got dressed up for a lovely dinner:

Here is a sampling of some of the delicious food we had at a restaurant called Bistro Les Gras:

Yum!

Thank you to Anna for hosting and planning. It was a lovely getaway from the city.

Italy food pics

Courtesy of animoto.com, as always.

She's ba-ack

Update 12/9: added pics

crying Amanda and Aunt Marjorie"2G"--the cousins

"1G"--the parents

our crazy tour bus: home for a week

the view from the top of Taipei 101

Cousin JoAnn, me, Ben, and cousin Rich

I'm back from Taiwan! I got back late Tuesday night, but managed to stay awake during the majority of my flight, so was able to fall asleep after I got home and slept soundly till 8 am. It was a good trip. Not great, but good. I'm not sure it was quite the vacation I needed at the time, because it was overscheduled and not very relaxing. But it was still fun.

I arrived in Taiwan on Sunday morning, met some of my relatives at the airport who also arrived that morning, then was off the the hotel where the rest of my relatives were staying, got on the tour bus, and was off. It seemed that every minute of the tour was scheduled. Wake up call at 7. Breakfast at 7:30. Load the bus at 8:30. We were at a different hotel every night, so each morning we had to pack up all of our luggage and go. But it was a good way to see the whole island, and bus time was time to catch up with relatives I hadn't seen in a while, nap, play cards (Taiwanese poker, hearts, gin), video games (Bust a Move!), eat snacks, watch movies--some good (Princess Bride! Snakes on a Plane!), some bad (Snakes on a Plane!), some pirated (Snakes on a Plane!). We made plenty of restroom stops at these tourist traps where the same assortment of snacks and knicknacks were on display, and the vendors called out to us as we walked by "Ni hao! Ni cong nali lai?" (Hello! Where are you from?) Most people guessed that I was from Singapore or Malaysia. It seemed that a few aunts bought some kind of snack at each stop, and once we got back on the bus, the bags of snacks would be passed around--always something different. Mochi, sesame candy, mooncakes, crackers, oranges, etc. My cousin Andrew bought a different milk tea or coffee project at every convenience store we passed. I got a papaya milk from 7-11 and BBQ ribs-flavored Ruffles. We saw a dam, waterfalls, a gorge, swam in hot springs, played ping pong, pool, video games, worked out, watched HBO in hotel rooms, went to night markets, shopped, went to museums, Tsunah, an Aborigine village, Taoyuan, Hualian, Kenting, Tainan, Taichung, Taipei. It was a packed trip, to be sure. The food was the best part. Breakfast buffets at the hotel every morning--congee every day! We didn't have a Thanksgiving dinner, but we did pig out at a fancy buffet dinner in Tainan.

Things I learned on this trip that I never knew before:

1) The crease I've always had on my arm, about an inch above my inner elbow, is apparently a sign of aborigine blood. My mother also has the mark, and said that when she was younger her classmates would tease her about it. It wasn't desirable to have aborigine blood. My father and younger brother do not have the mark. Not sure about my older brother. My mother said that my father's nose is a sign of Dutch blood.

2) When my mother told her mother that she was engaged, my grandmother was worried, because she had not yet met my father (since they had gotten engaged so quickly). So she asked my mother where my father went to college, and then called some friends/professors she knew there to check up on him, see if he was a good guy, check his transcripts. Everything confirmed that he was not bad, so she approved of the match.

3) I remember both more and less Chinese than I thought.

4) Ben can read on buses and cars--I had thought that he got carsick like me.

5) There is a Thai instrument that was made from human femur bones, traditionally made from people who have died violent deaths.

6) The Taiwanese Atayal aborigine people used to have a tradition of head hunting and tattooing.

7) I like smelly tofu.

8) I can't eat enough wax apples and kong xin cai (water spinach).

wax apples

9) It seems that Taiwanese Americans look younger than the Taiwanese who grew up in Taiwan, at least in my family.

10) Distant cousins who live in Taiwan have read my blog, particularly my Love Story post and Marathon post.

11) One (or more) of my aunts is obsessed with marriage, and doesn't think women can be happy if they don't get married. She also thinks that whiter skin is prettier than dark skin, and thinks I'm lighter now than I was nine years ago when I lived in Taiwan. She can't understand why I'm not married.

12) Taipei has a great subway system now.

Added on 12/7:
13) KFC has the best egg custard

banana egg custard from KFC

14) My family has a temple that honors our ancestors called the Hwang family temple, and my mother's relatives who maintain it own a golf ball company

Hwang family temple

golf balls

That's all I have for now. At any rate, it's good to be back. I always love coming back to New York after vacation--a sure sign to me that I consider New York to be home.

I haven't really been jetlagged much--I've been getting a bit tired in the afternoon, but not horribly so. I hope I can fend it off. I'll try to post some pictures tomorrow--I took over 400 of them. Now it's time for bed!

To meat or not to meat...

My friend Eveline moved to Beijing a few months ago, and started a blog a while ago to write of her adventures. It's quite entertaining--have you ever heard of the Mongolian spot? Want to see the cutest commercial ever?

But her most recent post beats them all. But as a warning: do not look at the pictures if you are squeamish or a dog lover. You'll be able to tell why once you see the title of the post.

Click here at your own risk.

Of course we've all heard about or joked about this before--Asians who eat dog. (Reminds me of Grace's post about wanting a cookbook to go with her book Year of the Dog.) When I was traveling in Canton, China 9 or so years ago, I saw a barbecued dog hanging in a store window. It looked just like one of those BBQed ducks, but its anatomy looked different...and upon closer examination we also noticed that the Chinese symbol for "dog" was printed on the window. But what's the difference, really, between eating different kinds of animals? One is not more or less wrong (morally) than the other, just because one animal we may consider a pet and the other a source of food, right? Although maybe there is a difference between eating fish versus birds versus reptiles versus mammals. Anyway, I've never been squeamish about meat. I eat meat on the bone, I eat whole fish, I've tried kangaroo, crocodile, rabbit, and deer. I think people who don't like to eat meat that looks like the animal it comes from are a bit hypocritical. But part of me wonders if vegetarianism will be the norm in the future. Part of me feels guilty for eating meat, mainly because I know I don't need to eat it. As I've mentioned before, I love tofu and vegetables and fruit and beans...I can go days without eating meat and not even notice. In fact, if I think back on the last two days, today I went without eating meat, and yesterday the only meat I had was shrimp. So yes--I could survive very happily as a vegetarian. But the thing is, every now and then I love a good burger, or fried chicken, or bacon. Mmm. Bacon. But maybe someday I'll make the plunge. I could live on cupcakes.

Oh, and Rita has a similar experience with Guinea Pigs in Peru.

Countdown to the marathon, and thoughts on beauty

For some reason, I've been thinking that I have 3 weeks until the marathon, but I realized suddenly over the weekend that it's just 2 weeks away. There's a counter on the official ING Marathon website that kind of stresses me out, but really, I'm ready. Well, as ready as I'll ever be! Which if good, because it's too late to do anything about it, really. So until then, I'm just planning on eating a lot of pasta, doing a few short runs, and trying to wrap up my fundraising.

Speaking of fundraising, you can donate here for pediatric cancer research. I think I've gotten one blog-related donation so far! Thank you, thank you Kristy.

****

For those of you in the NY area, you should definitely check out the Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx--it's there until October 29th. I went there for Chihuly Nights last Thursday for Saho's Birthday, and it was breathtaking. Here are a few pics:

Or check out an exhibit somewhere near you.

It made me think about the different kind of beauty in the world. That something so artificial , and surrounded by nature, could still be so breathtaking. This past weekend I was surrounded by different kinds of beauty. I took a trip out to Princeton with two friends to visit Julie and have a girls' weekend.

Here is some of the beauty I encountered there:

The beauty of the blue sky, fluffy white clouds, and the green in an apple orchard on a brisk fall day...

the beauty of finding my first-ever four-leaf clover...

the beauty of warm homemade apple cake topped with homemade vanilla ice cream...

and, of course, the beauty of friends.

Parenting philosophy

This weekend down in DC for Amy's baby shower (lovely, lovely), the subject came up of what kind of parents we wanted to be. Antonella asked Amy if she's been reading any parenting books, if she'd gotten the Sears books from work, and Amy said no, and Antonella said that was probably for the best. She said she had gotten them because she had access to them, and then thought, "Wait, am I going to be rearing my child the Sears way, just because I happen to work at this company and get the books for free?" It's funny to think about. If she worked for S&S, would she be following Dr. Spock? My friends having babies now are thinking about what kind of parent they want to be. Are they going to let their kids watch TV? Eat junk food? Surf the internet? Date?

About a year and a half ago when I had just gotten out of a long-term relationship and found myself starting over at age 31, I had lunch with my friend Paul and he suggested I read a book called Midlife Crisis at 30--not because I was going through a midlife crisis necessarily, but because most women have similar experiences at that age. I've been reading it on and off, and at least one thing I've gotten out of it is that no matter the situation the woman is in, they usually have a feeling that maybe they should have done things differently. So, for example, the women who focused on their careers and now find themselves without a husband or children at age 30 think maybe they should have focused on family instead, and the ones that are married with children at 30 think they should have focused on their career. The women who tried to do both think that maybe they should have focused on just one or the other. The grass is always greener.

Recently I read a passage that surprised me, and fit into the theme of all my friends and cousins having babies (my cousin Melissa and her husband Albert had a second son, Micah, and Jeff and Stacy just had their second son on Thursday, Joshua).

While all parents swear they are going to raise their kids differently than they were raised, studies show that Gen-Xers are twice as likely as Boomers to say they don't have good role models for childrearing.

Besides being extremely vague (and attributed only to an article in the Chicago Daily Herald), I found this surprising. ALL parents swear they're going to raise their kids differently? I certainly think my parents were good role models, although it's true, I would do some things differently. I think the fact that I was deprived of junk food made me like junk food too much, gave me some food issues. But I think eating such healthy food growing up (brown rice, veggies, fruit) made me really enjoy that kind of food. I didn't like brown rice as a kid, and would crave the white rice I'd get in Chinese restaurants, but now I prefer brown rice. And I LOVE tofu. Love it. And spinach. Spinach...mmm. And all fruit (in fact, just tonight while having drinks with another editor and an agent I suggested getting a fruit plate, but they shot me down). But there has to be a balance. (I find that "it's all about balance" is my mantra these days.) It's finding the right balance that's the tough part. If a kid gets a taste of junk food, is that all they'll want to eat? Then again, I won't have to seriously think about this for a while.

We played an ice breaker game at Amy's shower where we each had the name of a famous mother on our backs, and had to ask others yes or no questions to figure out who our mother was. One of Amy's cousins got a Panda mother, I think Mei Xiang. When I was telling Sachin about this later, he said, "Did you hear about the mother panda who accidentally killed one of her babies?"

BEIJING - Staff at a zoo in southwest China are in mourning after a sleep-deprived panda dropped her two-day-old baby and crushed it to death, local media reported on Friday.

So sad! So we started talking about how the problem of pandas and elephants and some other wild animals rearing children in captivity is that they lack the community to teach them how to raise their kids, that it doesn't all come naturally or instinctively. And for humans, it's the same. Even though everyone tells you how to raise your kids, or what you should do, there are so many books out there and it gets confusing, the truth is that you take the information you want to, and form your own parenting style. But the knowlege of your parents or other people with kids is invaluable.

Not to keep talking about running, but, well, yeah, I'm gonna keep talking about running. I haven't really been doing any of my own research on how to run a marathon, but I've found people's advice to be great. I don't follow all of it, but I'm able to cull the advice I think is best for me, and it makes me feel like I'm not running blind, despite my laziness.

Anyway, back to parenting, I'm curious to hear from you parents out there. How did you go about deciding your parenting philosophy? Are you finding yourself raising your kids the same way you were raised? (I'm wondering how many parents read my blog...I guess I'll find out!)

Vegas, baby, Vegas

I had used the title (Vegas, baby, Vegas) in the subject line in an email I sent Sachin when we were planning the trip, and weeks later he asked me if it was a line from a movie. Uhh, helloooo? Swingers! But he had never seen it, and thought it a weird coincidence that I used the same exact line as his friend who had sent out an email about his bachelor party a few months earlier. Anyway, Swingers was actually on tv while we were there, but we only caught the end of it. I love that movie.
Just wanted to share some pics from our Vegas trip for, as I mentioned earlier, my brother Felix and his wife Erika's renewal of their wedding vows. The ceremony was sweet and silly and appropriate, and we had a fun dinner afterwards at Quarks, the Star Trek-themed restaurant where we had a little too much to drink and got a bit nauseated afterwards on the ride.




Sachin and I hiked to In-n-Out on our first day there--had to do it (his first trip--to both Vegas and In-n-Out). I didn't think we could walk there, as I had always driven there before, and other people expressed doubt that we could walk there as well, but as we were carless, we took on the challenge. It's hard to walk in a non-pedestrian-designed city, and it proved to be an adventure, but we made it there and back (had to climb up the sides of a freeway overpast to do it), and it was worth it.

Also ventured out with my parents to Old Town/downtown Las Vegas, where I had never been. Pretty cool. Overall, I ate too much, drank too much, sat in the sun too much--in other words, the perfect vacation.

Now on to my birthday festivities!

Food adventures

I can tell that I've been devouring too much television/blogs/media when I start feeling like my real-life experiences are mimicking them. This weekend roadtrip to Western Mass for Julie and Jim's wedding felt very much like a Food Network show like Rachel Ray's $40 a Day, or even The Hungry Cabbie blog.

On our trip up, we decided to stop for lunch around 1 pm, and decided to exit the next time "food" was designated by the freeway sign. I thought it would be nice to try something local, non-chain fast food, and after passing this place:


we did a U-turn and went back to it. It was called Carville's Ranch House, and it looked great. Sachin and Dennis both got cheeseburgers, and I got a veggie grinder (we were in grinder country!) and fried clams. I can't say any of the food was the best I've ever had, but it was solid, and the place had a good vibe. As I was taking the picture, and older patron told me mid-chew that the place had been around for 60 years, and he used to come there as a kid over 40 years ago. He now lived in Florida, but decided to stop by while passing through. "But don't come here at night" he said, "this is a horrible neighborhood." Heh. Seemed okay to me.

Once in Deerfield, MA we passed a sign for "Bub's BBQ" off the 5/10, and so on Saturday we had some free time for lunch before the wedding and decided to check it out. It was 5 miles away in Sunderland, MA.














Yum! We decided to share a combo of spare ribs and pulled pork, which came with all-you-can eat cold and hot bars, so we were stuffed. The ribs and pork were delicious--great seasoning--but I think we were both taken by the sides of hickory smoked potatoes, orange glazed sweet mashed potatoes, dirty rice, collard greens, etc. etc. Sachin got a local beer: Berkeshire Brewing Company's Steel Rail, that was very flavorful and good. And only $3. The total bill came out to be about $25--maybe a bit pricey for lunch, but a ton of food and totally worth it.

After the wedding we dropped Dennis off in Flushing, and then since we had the car we took the opportunity to go to Sachin's favorite Falafel place, Naomi's Kosher Pizza, which is nowhere near a subway stop. Yeah, sounds weird (Kosher...pizza...Falafel?), but it was awesome. Sachin was disappointed I wasn't raving about the Falafel more at the time, but I was a bit nauseated from the car, and really, although I like Falafel, I generally don't find that one place is so different from another. But truly, they were great, and certainly worth trying--and actually different from other Falafel I've had. Not as crispy or hard as usual, a bit softer and with a nice smooth texture. The tahini and hot sauces there were excellent. The place was a total trip--pizza and Middle Eastern food on the menu, a very diverse clientele, and buzzing at 4 pm on a Sunday. Anyway, afterwards we went to Chinatown Flushing and walked around a bit, and then found a random teashop called Tong's or Tang's on Main Street where we got drinks (Watermelon Milk Shake for Sachin, Plum Red Tea for me) and a bowl of wonton noodle soup. Perfect.

I also bought a bundle of my favorite vegetable kong xin cai (water spinach--or literally translated as empty heart vegetable, as the stems are hollow) to cook when I got home, stir-fried it up with garlic and olive oil and ate it for both dinner that night and lunch the next day. The perfect finish to the perfect food weekend. And I didn't even mention the wedding food which was also excellent. Tuna shish-kebabs, noodles with peanut sauce, mahi mahi, and the desserts! Oh, the desserts. This was one of the cakes from that awesome dessert party:

When I was a kid, I remember reading about how in the future people will be nourished via pills, and I was horrified. I get so much enjoyment from eating. I look forward to each meal, each food adventure, and since I don't have picky taste buds, I tend to like almost everything I try.

I'm hungry now. What's for breakfast?