Dingle Speaks

Before I get started, don’t get yourselves excited, I didn’t eat chopped up robotic fish (although I’m sure the Chinese would give it a go).

We went for sushi yesterday at the Yakashimiya (something like that anyway) department store at Nagoya Station, in Nagoya, in Japan. It was your typical Japanese restaurant, spotlessly clean with shouted welcomes from all the staff. We were lead along a long alleyway past tables of diners to our table right at the end, fully enclosed by wood panelling, and that was the last time we saw a member of staff until we left the restaurant.

This is the setup, note the touchscreen LCD, you can just make out the yellow and black conveyor belt and a weird thing (the grey rectangle) which I didn’t immediately figure out. Note the two dispensers on the left hand side, one has powdered green tea, the other has red tea (I think), you pour some into one of the cups on the back and take hot water from the dispenser (the silver thing behind the tea dispensers).

All ordering is done via the LCD touchscreen, which thankfully for me, had a full English translation. I went for a couple of portions of small tuna rolls and cucumber rolls (maki?), which had everyone else doubting my sanity (like ordering cheese on toast at Seniors in Blackpool (the poshest restaurant I could think of)) oh and a portion of tuna sushi and some other fish that was white with pink bits, the others all ordered lunch sets.

After a few minutes there’s a beeping and a small light flashes on the table, then a couple of seconds later a plate appears on the conveyor, stops in front of our table, a black bar comes out of the panel at the back and pushes the plate onto the small conveyor on our table (that’s what the grey rectangle is for) and is brought to the centre of our table.

The sets arriving, ooooh you can see the flashy light!!!!!

Only in Japan…

Ok, I exaggerated a little bit, we did see a waitress briefly when I ordered a bottle of ginger ale, it was delivered by hand.

I’m in Japan right now, last night a colleague took us to a local restaurant, he told us it was okinawa food, or oklahoma food, I can’t remember exactly.

ANYWAY, what I do remember is that it was an damned odd affair, there was no soup to start, the main course was eaten from a bowl rather than a plate and no custard with pudding to top it off, what’s more we paid 5 pounds for a cube of tofu which was exactly the same size as an oxo cube, yet even more pungent, it was like the pressed and aged toe cheese of the filthiest of soap dodgers, I enjoyed it immensely!

Here are couple of other things that were on the menu, any ideas? A cube of my own toe cheese to the first person who guesses correctly!

My first guess of “millipede testes” was incorrect

It’s an easy one this one, a gift!!!

There’s a new shopping centre close to my apartment, actually it’s been open a few months now, since Expo opened, but it’s taken time to get the booths filled up.

Anyway, apparently there’s some kind of rule in there that if they serve drinks they have to be absolutely minging.

Exhibit 1 -

At first I figured this was just Chinglish, which was humorous enough anyway, but now I’m not so sure, I read on the interwebs that 70% of Japanese have drunk vinegar with 1 in 8 having a regular habit, and this is a Japanese cafe… Anyway, it sounds minging to me, although you might want to try mixing with honey and diluting with water to add a mellow bottom note to the sour top notes.

Exhibit 2 -

Well they’ve really pushed the boat out here, presumably this was invented by a 5 year old who made a special drink for his mummy (although the lack of worcestershire sauce and pickled onion vinegar is a disappointment). Seriously though I just can’t imagine the taste, I mean the vinegar stuff I can imagine how it could taste, and ok, it sounds a bit minging but at a push I could probably manage it, but coffee with salt and cheese????? Mind you it’s not ordinary salt you know, it’s rock salt, yeah… oh no hold on, that’s just table salt that hasn’t been fully ground down, cheapskates…

I rest my case…

I’m sure I’ve probably seen one of these before somewhere but I was still surprised to see this bang in the middle of the sourcing centre at YiWu (with not a single drinks or snacks vending machine in sight…)

How urgently could you possibly need a shirt that they need a vending machine for them?

What happens if it’s the wrong size?

Damned expensive business too at 79 kuai a shirt, “reduced from 159″ though!

Before my trip to the Philippines I knew nothing about Philippino / Filipino (which is correct, I’m damned if I know??) food, but after my trip I can look back and say that all in all it was excellent (if it didn’t consistently take so damn long to arrive), although curiously the holiday was a week of the greyest, most plasticiney turds of my entire 28 years. The first time I looked into the pan it looked as though a careless bricklayer had dropped great daubs of cement into the pan or a nearby potters wheel had flung off nuggets of clay. I’m digressing, but let me tell you that after 2 days back in China I’m on the mend but the colour has returned to normality quicker than the consistency.

Some Philippino food we ate. Sisig at the back right, something porky at the front (or maybe beefy) and something prawny at the top left.

ANYWAAAY.. Philipino food! Right, yeah it was delicious, distinctly Asian but with clear western influences (blah blah blah, I read that on the internet you know, it’s all the same to me), Bulalo (beef joint stew) could have easily been something I’d eat in Europe without suspecting it was “foreign muck”. My favourites were Chicken/Pork Adobo (chicken stewed in vinegar/soy sauce), I’m going to have a go on this one at home I reckon (I’ll let you know if the cement comes back)!; Bulalo (as above); Pork Tocino – pretty much tastes like pork fried in syrup; Sisig – taste it before you find out what it is (SPOILER ALERT – it’s pig’s ears), when it’s cooked right it’s amazing, like pork crackling in a delicious spicy sauce; and finally Halo Halo (dessert). I can’t remember what else we ate now but pretty much everything we had was delicious, oooh I just remembered this roast pork dish with proper crackling on the outside, hmmmmmmmmmm..

Some kind of character from popular Philipinno culture, while eating, probably McSisig

“Halo Halo??” you say, yes, Halo Halo! This has got to be the weirdest dessert I’ve ever seen but strangely addictive. Basically you order Halo Halo and the chef gets a big bowl and chucks in a spoonful of absolutely everything from his store cupboard (fruit/sweets/crème caramel/beans/jelly/ice cream/custard etc). He then covers the lot in shaved ice and pours evaporated milk over the top. The thing is a feast for two people at minimum, even without a meal beforehand and I’ve got to say, it were proper good despite my initial reluctance to try!

How Halo Halo looks according to the internets – a photographers dream

Halo Halo in real life – a bowl of Augustus Gloop’s vomit

Hmm, does anyone know any good Filipino restaurants in Shanghai?

One of the first thing you notice about the Philippines is the amount of guns everywhere (and we didn’t even venture into Manila where I’m told even 7-11′s have armed guards). It seems odd for a place that seems at face value to be so friendly and which we were reassured was very safe by our Philipino friend (Anna, Wiggy’s girlfriend, she organised the holiday), yet outside every bank you’ll see guards armed to the teeth with machine guns, pump action shotguns and ammo belts.

Not only that but two days ago we were swimming in the pool at our hotel (Canyon Cove, Nasugbu – more on this later) when a security guard with a large machine gun came sauntering round the pool within a few paces of us. It didn’t bother me really, just odd to see them patrolling the pool like that.

Another night Anna took us to a local nightclub in downtown Nasugbu for a cracking night out, the thing was basically a roof on stilts with no walls, with a few hundred people inside listening to local bands (of course), the place was really friendly, whole families were there from grandparents down to infants. The music, as you’d expect from Filipino bands, was excellent, and up to date compared to the Filipino bands you see in Paulaner and other Shanghai bars (think Lady Gaga (Poker Face) and Black Eyed Peas (I Gotta Feeling) rather than the staple Hotel California, U2 etc you normally see). I was having a great time dancing away and proper hit the booze, at one point I ordered 4 bottles of san miguel pilsen because they weren’t delivering fast enough and I’d drank 3 of them by the time Wiggy had finished his first (unsurprisingly enough I finished the night asleep on my chair). Anyway, let me get back to the point, we were sat quite close to the entrance of the club and at one point I turned round to look at the entrance gate to note that it was being policed by no less than six armed guards sporting a variety of machine guns and shotguns. When we left there were only 3 (only…) so maybe I witnessed a change of shift or something, but anyway, how much trouble can you possibly get at a family nightclub in a small town that you need so many guns for protection? I don’t know about you but one machine gun is probably enough to convince me not to cause any trouble…

Anyway, here’s a special promotion I saw at a sports shop in a Tagaytay shopping mall:

If I was him I’d ditch that first aid pack and get an Equalizer strapped across my back, just in case my baton snapped and I ran out of bullets

No honestly, it REALLY is for baseball!!

Dingle here, your one and only guide into the scandalous lives of the  Shanghai elite!

Well, lordy lordy that was a long break from blogging!

Apologies to you no-doubt frantic readers but the last few weeks have been a major ball-ache, I’ve been very busy at work, plus a couple of H’s nephews came on an extended visit (six weeks and counting), plus I’m in the process of moving apartments , oh and I’m about to go on holiday to the Philippines!

So, I’m just about to close down the computer (which I’ve barely touched in the last six weeks, it’s become a gaming station for the brats kids) to move it to the new place and they’re out to dinner, I’m home alone for the first time in like, ever.. and thought it was time for an update.

This is probably all before my holiday, but I promise not to leave it so long next time!

You know you love me X.O.X.O.

After watching the world cup in Big Bamboo in Shanghai and then the Brass Monkey in Taipei I was pretty much blown away by the difference in quality.

Most of it was the picture, in Taipei they were showing in amazing high definition on a high contrast 3m projector screen while in Shanghai we have to make do with a fuzzy, poorly low-contrast picture.

It wasn’t just that though, the Brass Monkey had made a real effort, they’d totally cleared the bar area and put in rows and rows of seats like a cinema, their restaurant was serving food in cardboard take-away boxes so you didn’t need a table to eat, there were extra bottle bars dotted around the place (Big Bamboo by contrast was waitress service and your selection of drinks was limited to what she could be bothered to fetch for you. In my case I wanted a pint of Carlsberg, ““Oh, our draft beer is broken tonight, we only have bottles” the waitress told me, I pointed out that everyone else was drinking pints, “oh, yes, it broke just now” she said, so off I went to the bar to find everything as normal and they were still serving pints…), oh and a big thing for me, The Brass Monkey was no-smoking inside (proper no-smoking, not Shanghai style no-smoking)!!

So, when I got back to Shanghai I somewhat missed watching the World Cup in Taipei, we ended up watching the england match in the Park Tavern at the weekend, that was somewhat better than Bamboo, but still not as good. Then at the weekend I popped into my local game/dvd shop to buy a couple of movies and noticed a box in front of their tv and the empty box at the side, the empty box had 1080i written on it (the resolution of HD tv) so I asked what it was. “Oh, this is so you can watch the world cup in high definition” they said. Well, within about 10 minutes I was back at home wiring it up, and it was well worth the 480 kuai we paid for it.

Basically it turns out there are two domestic HD channels which I’d never heard of, CCTV-HD and Dong-Fang, they broadcast terrestially. So you basically buy a digital set-top box and an aerial (which you just seem to have to place near a window, there’s no aiming and it seems like it doesn’t even have to be outside) and away you go.

So far it looks amazing, the picture is a bit up and down, it almost seems like they compress the signal a little more during the daytime repeats, it looks amazing for the live games though (with english commentary from radio 5 live!). Here are some pictures of the image (click for full size images):

HDTV – watching England get humiliated by countries I’ve barely heard of will be even more painful in jaw-droppingly sharp HD, in fact I’m going to watch the England match in the pub…

Naturally the first thing H wanted to do when we set this up was watch the news to take a look at how dreadful the presenters looked in “real life”. Sure enough the news came on and I heard H screaming with laughter from the lounge, sure enough the presenter had a face like the surface of the moon and was absolutely caked in powder and make-up…

At the moment it seems like CCTV-HD is showing pretty much 24 hour coverage of the world cup, not sure what their normal footage is going to be like..

Edit:

here’s how the setup looks:

I’ve just read something that says you should point the aerial towards the pearl tower, well I’m pointing nowhere near it but still getting a great picture.

Oh, you’ll need to buy a HDMI cable to connect to the tv, other than that everything’s in the box

If you’re collecting money on the street, i.e. begging or collecting for charity (and they’re pretty much the same thing right?) there are a couple of things you can do to maximise your gains:

1. be disabled
2. have a dog (puppies = double score!)

Here’s a guy I saw in Taipei pretty much taking it to the limit:

I upgraded wordpress today and somehow managed to lose my theme settings! This is going to have to do for now I’m afraid!!