As I mentioned the other day, playing Portal left me with a desire to bake a cake. Given the game's contents and my general disposition, this should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. And since my cake-baking urge resulted from playing the game, I thought it might be fun to try and make the cake in the game. Not the one from the bizarre " ( Read more... )

It doesn't balance out the sadness of losing Ichiban, but we do have a new coffee shop and a new market. The coffee shop is called @cafe, and is run by a really nice young woman from Guangdong, named Grace, who is really into coffee. She's also really good at making coffee, and can even make good soy milk drinks (soy milk is hard to foam properly ( Read more... )

One of my favorite Seattle restaurants, Ichiban, closed about a week ago. I wish I had known they were going to close-- I would have had their misoyaki salmon one last time.

First Unicorn Crepes, now Ichiban... it's as if Seattle is trying to make it easier for me to move.

I beat Portal ( Read more... )

El has posted photos from Xi'an!

( Since her post is locked, she's letting me re-post them here. )

Still no internet. When the technician ran a diagnostic and said, "That's really weird! I've never seen anything that weird!" I knew it was going to be a long wait. If it's not fixed by Friday, just canceling my account and relying on the library for the six weeks I still have here. On the plus side, a new coffee shop opened up about two blocks ( Read more... )

My internet at home has been down since Tuesday night. I called Clearwire Wednesday morning, and they promised to look into it. Nothing happened. So I called them Thursday afternoon and asked them again, and they said there was a problem with my tower and it would be fixed the next day. Nothing happened. So I called them this morning, and after ( Read more... )

Actually, I got home two days ago. But on the 24th I was too exhausted to compose complete sentences, and yesterday I spent being lazy until I went to see a movie. After the movie, I was too much in shock to do anything of substance (where substance="more brain-intensive than making cocoa and chatting online ( Read more... )

This afternoon I arrived in Shanghai. After finding my hostel and dropping off my bags, I met up with El again to go book shopping. I found the book I was looking for, the Wang Li dictionary, and also splurged on a book I want to give a friend. I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to find the Wang Li, but I was hopeful when El and I spotted the " ( Read more... )

The next day, we got up pretty early, which gave us time for breakfast before checking out. Breakfast turned out to be a round piece of flatbread filled with spicy meat: beef for me and chicken for El. Then we each drank a bag of strawberry yogurt to stop the burning from the chili. We checked out, moved to our new hostel, which is much less nice, ( Read more... )