The Great (Video) Wall of China

It's not supposed to look like this...

The seams between the cubes should flush and uniform.



The way the crowd is leaning on this thing, it is going to go bad...



This is SO not right.




I think I've made my point with this...
I'll let you know when the wall comes a' tumblin' down.


In other news....

I said I'd tell you about the Hop Pot joint...

Polly said she wanted to experience the Hot Pot method of dining, so I contacted Jocelyn, a local here in Shanghai who knows, well... Everything.
She set us up for dinner at the Hot Pot King down on Huaihai Zhonglu...
Now, I've had Hot Pot before, but it was really a disaster. It was last year with a bunch of guys from the NBA.
We had gone to this place for lunch and made a shambles of the experience. We threw everything in at one time, including the live shrimp (mistake) and basically made big stew of the whole thing. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what it was supposed to be.

This time we let Jocelyn lead...
She ordered almost everything on the menu... Lamb, beef, fish, squid, 4 kinds of mushrooms, baby bok choy, some kind of potato, scallops, bamboo shoots, all manner of Good Eats...
The pot had two sections: one side was a regular seafood stock with scallops and tiny shrimp; the other side was a spicy stock with scallops and shrimp and a decent amount of chili oil and peppers...
A bunch of stuff she threw right in... The potato things, some of the bok choy, and lots of mushrooms. When the stock was at a rolling boil she showed us how to lower pieces of the meat into the pot with ladles and wait until it was cooked, then we would fish it out along with the vegetables...
It was very good...
That's an understatement...
It was really, really good... Amazingly good, as a matter of fact.


They shamed me into eating the Century Egg...

A nasty-looking little nugget that wasn't too bad, actually.


I expected something much more noisome.
(I wouldn't order it on my own, you understand, but to save face I did eat one.)

Just as a point of reference, Polly ate one too...

Before I had mine.

(She has more guts than I do...)

TBG Out-