Babbling Blueberry

Why do people say “Bei zhing” and not “Bei jing?”  Not only does pronouncing Beijing as “Bei jing” make more sense because that’s how it’s spelled in the Romanized form, “Bei jing” actually sounds more like how Beijing natives pronounce the name of their city.  Where did this “Bei zhing” come from?  Are they incorrectly trying to sound more correct?  Or more French?

I love a good cheesy Olympics athlete story.  Dara Torres is 41 and competing to qualify for the Olympics, 24 years after her first trip to the LA Olympics in 1984.  Competing against people that could barely walk or who weren’t even born during her first Olympics trip.  She volunteers for urine and blood tests to prove that she is not doping.  And her times now are faster than her times from 24 years ago.  In fact, she set her personal best tonight in the semifinals of the 100 M freestyle race, qualifying for the finals in 2nd place.  That’s spectacularly amazing.

From a NYTimes article from Nov 07:

I went to Pagolac (Yelp, Menupages) in the Tenderloin last night with a fun crew of dinner eaters.  We were in San Francisco, but throughout the whole dining experience, I kept having all these flashbacks to being in Vietnam.  It was an unusually warm night for San Francisco, so that helped.  The rest of the effect is probably from the comfortable, unpretentious atmosphere inside and from the great food.  One result of all this good Vietnam food and the Vietnamness was that I had this flash of worry when one dessert came with ice: “Oh no, we forgot to ask for no ice!  We can’t eat this.” While this is a common thought when traveling in places like SE Asia, I don’t usually have that instinctive reaction in the U.S.  (I should note that this reaction wasn’t because the place looked unsanitary… I think it was because I felt like I was away from home.)  Also, when passing through the tiny, cramped kitchen in the back, because it was extra hot back there, I felt like I was a kitchen in Taiwan or Vietnam or another hot Asian country.

More about the food:  pretty much everything was great.  I especially liked the imperial rolls (with taro inside!).  There was also a really interesting noodle (fat rice noodles) dish with dried shredded pork, coconut milk, and other toppings.  Anything wrapped up in rice paper with noodles, herbs and greens, and fish sauce (assembled ourselves) was great.  The imperial rolls were really yummy eaten this way as was a shrimp ball wrapped around sugar cane.  Such a symbiotic relationship with the sugar cane and the shrimp - both components come out way tastier when cooked together.  (You’re supposed to chew the sugar cane to get the juice out rather than chew to swallow.  But if you’d like a little bit more fiber in your life, it can be eaten, as we all witnessed last night.  Mark, thanks for the demo!)  The best dessert we had was this rice pudding and taro dessert - it also had coconut milk.  It was so warm and pleasant and comforting and yummy!

I’d recommend staying away from the ice cream because while it was flavorful, the texture wasn’t great.  There are way more yummy things to eat at Pagolac so there’s no need to order the ice cream, in my opinion.

I haven’t reviewed the dishes and pottery of a restaurant in a while, probably because I haven’t seen anything memorable.  But Pagolac had some great pieces.  They had this one black bowl with pale yellow flowers carved to look like they were scattered on the inside of the bowl - really pretty.  And they had this four-sided teapot with an amazing glaze job - a tenmoku-like (black/copper/red) top, a narrow yellow band, and most of the base was blue.  The different glazes all flowed together and it was very fiery and organic at the same time.

Happy travels!

But unless you forgot about going through through immigration and customs for Estados Unidos Mexicanos, one wouldn’t really know it. Actually, you might have an inkling because everyone says “Hola” instead of “Hello” before continuing to speak in English. But not much more than an inkling.  I don’t think I’m getting an authentic Mexican experience at this all-inclusive resort place. I’m here for a conference. You might think, how lucky! Maybe. My forearms and hands are itchy from the mosquito bites that I got! The jury’s still out. At least this particular jury member.

The resort looks like the community center at Mission Bay. So that’s even more reason why it feels like home. Take a look for yourself:

Community Center at Mission Bay:

Presidente Intercontinental Resort:

The yellow in the resort window is even the exact same yellow as that bar that hangs down and then stops before hitting the ground. There are no horses at Mission Bay, but that’s probably for the best. When you walk around, you randomly get whiffs of horse smell. It’s not pleasant.

Here’s the travel blog for our SE Asia trip. I like maps and Real Travel has a map to track the location of your posts.

My cousin visited an orphanage in China this past summer.  There are two babies there who need people to chip in for their heart surgeries.  More details here at my cousin’s blog.

Additional details at the orphanage’s blog.

Jade:

And Angel:

A Salon article about famine in Africa and how the US is doing everything wrong and how the timing of what little money is sent makes it impossible to prevent famine and put in long-term solutions because you’re too late to treat the causes of famine. Some quotes:

“the cost of the occupation in Iraq is more than $150 million a day. So five days of war, a work week, would feed more than 12 million people for three years. Instead, over the last few months the Bush administration has reneged on about $100 million that it had promised to food aid charities.”

“The Pentagon recently allocated $300 million to fund a propaganda operation to plant news stories favorable to America in the foreign press. Yet if that money had gone to food and development programs, there would be no need for propaganda programs.”

“When asked why they had not given more food aid in the face of the oncoming crisis, American and European officials in Niger say that food aid should only be a last resort. It is far more effective, they said, to give money for long-term development. Unfortunately, this rhetoric does not reflect reality. Foreign aid from rich nations goes almost entirely to military support or disaster relief. Little attention is paid to the aid programs that would help Africans head off catastrophe.”

“While most of the world gives aid agencies cash that they use to buy food locally, 99 percent of the food aid provided by the U.S. is purchased from American farmers at market prices and is then shipped overseas on U.S.-registered vessels…By general consensus, U.S. food aid is inefficient and overpriced, and can be damaging to the African economy. The Financial Times called the American type of assistance ‘a subsidy programme for rich world farmers’…the U.S. would be able to provide twice as much food for the same money because of the savings on transportation alone”

There’s much more info if you read the full article.