China

Six weeks and sixteen flights later, we are finally back from our trip to Asia, with a brief stopover both ways in San Diego.

We spent a couple weeks in China, most of it on a group tour, but with a couple days on our own in both Beijing and Shanghai. I'm not a big fan of packaged tours, but it certainly helped pack as much as possible into the short time we had. I had already been to all the cities before, but it's pretty amazing how much more modern and crowded it gets each time.

With our extra day in Beijing, we stopped by the 798 Art District, an artist community that occupies old military factory buildings. It was an eclectic mix of various art, but we enjoyed the sculpture more than other media:

The tour covered most of the touristy stuff in Beijing, of course. First up was Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, all of which were flooded with hordes of domestic tourists. The tour scheduled the visit to be on the weekend, which probably didn't help any. The Forbidden City is pretty amazing, but there's way too much to see, especially when walking through on a group tour.

I enjoyed the Bird's Nest since it was the main site I had never seen before. It was an impressive stadium, but unfortunately pretty much unused right now except shuttling through tourists. The Water Cube must be in even worse shape since it's not a big tourist attraction.

The last big site near Beijing is the Great Wall. The weather was generally pretty good while we were in Beijing, except, of course, the day that was scheduled for the Great Wall. Yet another reason I dislike packaged group tours! Thanks to the atrocious Air China that we flew to Beijing and their screening of the critically acclaimed The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, I had already learned that the workers who died during its construction were often just buried underneath the wall. It was pretty tiring just to walk a short segment of the wall; no wonder it worked well to keep invaders out.

After Beijing, it was off to Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors. It's a good thing Jet Li wasn't around to bring them to life to raise an army. The villagers in the surrounding areas were forced to work here to put together the individually crafted, life-sized warriors. Unfortunately, that also pissed them off, causing them to break in to the tomb, destroy them all, steal their weapons, and start an uprising. Now they have to go through the slow process of excavating and then reconstructing each soldier. They must be working pretty slowly since it seemed about the same number of soldiers as the last time I went.

After seeing all the historical sites, it was off to Shanghai, where we first visited the nearby Hangzhou and Suzhou, famous for the scenery, lakes, and gardens. They were all pretty nice, but it's hard to relax and enjoy nature when it's also overcrowded by tourists.

To wrap up our stay in China, we spent a couple days in Shanghai, which is a massively metropolitan city. The traffic conditions were exacerbated by ongoing construction to prepare the city for World Expo 2010. For all the downsides to a Communist government, they sure can mobilize quickly to transform a city to put on a show for a world audience.

Here is a link to all of the pictures. I'll post about Singapore and Thailand if I still have any readers left :)

How 'bout that sun?

Been meaning to post after Match Day, but been too busy packing. At least we're using movers this time. We've finally got almost all of the furniture wrapped up, but still have random odds and ends. It is somewhat satisfying to throw out old junk...

At any rate, I'm glad we're heading back to CA:

I hate it when this happens

We rented Body of Lies today since it just came out on video, but I had forgotten that I have already seen it before. Except... I don't remember when and where :( This happened with The Inside Man too, but at least I remembered watching that in the theater.

Dang, it's been a long time since I posted on this blog. Probably because the last 7 months have all been related to medical school applications, and I didn't want to write anything since this blog isn't exactly anonymous. If there are any visitor still out there, stay tuned for news of where we end up in a month :)

Chef Pan

My new favorite food recipe website after we had to cook again for our House Church group last Friday is Recipezaar, mostly because the printouts are so snazzy looking. We used it last week for our "breakfast for dinner" to make a chorizo scramble and some cinnamon french toast.

For tonight, I decided to go all out with the shrimp that we bought for the first time to make some honey-walnut prawns. I figured it was a decent recipe since it had 16 reviews and was rated 5 stars and it came out great:

While the dish was tasty, it took me freaking two hours to make, most of it spent prepping/cleaning the shrimp and preparing the walnuts. I really should have actually read the reviews, many of which suggested alternatives to spending an hour on the nuts. With candied walnuts and pre-peeled shrimp, I might be able to churn it out in 10 minutes like the restaurants!

Whee, one year!

Wow, the first year of marriage flew by rather quickly. Having our anniversary be the last day in June is great since it gives me the entire month to remember not to forget about it! It's been a blast getting our own place in downtown Dallas, setting it up with a bunch of furniture, and living together after doing the long distance thing for two years. I think I've managed to mostly keep in Ruth's good graces and made some progress in developing my latent culinary talents. We even took the plunge and added some parental responsibility to the mix by adding a dog to the household :)

After spending our one year dating anniversary at Gary Danko (which may not have been the best move to set low standards from which to build up), we visited one of the acclaimed restaurants of the DFW area, Abacus. We stuffed ourselves silly, particularly enjoying the lobster shooters and sushi roll appetizers so we could hardly finish the main course. We'll definitely have to come back during Restaurant Week in August. Good thing they just posted the restaurant list today so I had something to link to :)

Happy anniversary, silly wifey!