William Chow's Personal Web Page

The year is 2006.

China Round 2

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

I spent most of this morning rccovering from that bad weiner I last night. By noon i am getting better. I will keep things light and bland, as well as lots of natural fibre from fruit to help clear it out of my system.

I ams also now I am taking a B12 Vitamin supplement for a canker sore. Although, after I did the research, they usually get triggered when the immune system is weak. So, it probably is a better idea to buy multi-vitamins. Oh well, in another trip to the drug store. In addition to the B12, I will probably go and buy some mouth wash today too. That should keep that sore area clean for faster healing.

The plan is to the go to the Jade store and then to the police office to pick up Ami's new id card. After that, to the market to get some ingredients for a better pasta sauce as opposed to tomato soup. I think this time, I will double the meat and cut back the number of peppers and onions used.

Well, the jade store was closed. Hmm strange. I guess she decided to take an extra day holiday this week. Not a particularly good start today. So we walk over to the police station to get her new id. Well, it seems the police is doing it's normal lazy thing, and it is not ready for pick up. Matter of fact, it won't be ready for three weeks. Well, that makes it useless. I guess we were running 0 of 2 today. We went to get food from small market. There was a whole bunch of small cart shops that opened on Wenri Lu early in the morning but they all moved. There is a large covered arena which many of the dealers have gone to. We went there to get some meats and vegatables. The vegatables are fresh enough. The meat looks fresh enough, of course who it gonna inspect this meat? Hmm..... nobody... Oh well.. better make sure it is well cooked, I guess in my case, it looks like might be making more of a tomato soup than pasta sauce.

The Experimental Chinese Food Of The Day is:
Pocari Sweat

Ok, this is actually a Japanese product, but I decided to include it here because I felt like a can of the stuff and there was an interesting Engrishism on the can.

First, this is one of those water drinks which is suppose to replace the ions (salts) that you lose when you sweat and shower and etc. This stuff has a nice nothing taste to it, unlike drinks like Gatorade or Powerade which are just loaded with artificial flavouring and extra sugar. It is not a real sweet, at the same time it is almost tasteless. I get this subtle tingle of citrus juice and it reminds me of that guava juice.

On the can is this sentence, "Pocari Sweat is quickly asborbed into the body tissues due to its fine osmolality and contains electrolytes for replenishing body fluids." hmm.... fine osmolality? What is that exactly? Well if you look it up in a dictionary, "the concentration of an osmotic solution especially when measured in osmols or milliosmols per 1000 grams of solvent." So I think the translation program is trying to say fine concentration or something like that and the wrong word came up.

Incidently, it is important that you do pronounce the name of the drink right as Pocari ("Po" rhymes with Santa Claus "Ho", "car" the thing you drive , and "E" the 5th letter of the alphabet, thus Po-car-E. Otherwise, if you say "Po-kai" that is a bad word in Cantonese and "Bo-ke" is a bad word in Japanese.