Speak of the Devil

The kids have been sort of into the devil lately. What does he look like? Where does he live? Why is he so mean? I turns out that Ben has a friend named Sadan or something like that. The kids in their classes are from such a wide variety of countries that a kid with a typical American sounding name is the exception rather than the rule. For a while he kept talking about his friend Satan, which was a bit worrisome. No parent, no matter how religiously disinclined, is happy to hear that their kid has befriended the Prince of Darkness. When I figured out that Satan was actually in Ben’s preschool class, it became clear that we had a pronunciation issue rather than a need for an exorcism. It got me thinking that from an employment perspective being named Satan may not be that bad, since it would definitely get you noticed in a pile of resumes. Plus people would think of the tiniest nice thing you happened to do as a huge upside.

La Vie en Rose

I went into my 2 dollar haircut place the other day and they were playing an Edith Piaf album. This is in boondocks Shanghai, not central urban sophisticate Shanghai. Where did they find this stuff? Given my linguistic limitations, I was only able to ask them if they liked French music. I was happy to have even been able to communicate this. They said they did and that they liked Edith Piaf. I asked them if they also liked Charles Trenet, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. They all had spiked up or dyed hair, one dyed bright red. None of them was older than 25.

King of Citrus

In the fall and winter in China it's common to see big piles of what appear to be steroid enhanced grapefruits being sold by vendors on the street and in supermarkets. They are gigantic. They are actually pomelos, which I had never seen in the U.S. The taste is in between an orange and a grapefruit in terms of sweetness, probably siding more towards a grapefruit. The white-ish semi-see through skin in between the sections is pretty tough, so you have to peel the whole thing and then peel off the white section-y stuff. Pretty labor intensive, but very good.