Shamu: 鱼眼看美国,以及中国

Free cell phone services

I have a cell phone with a monthly plan of 450 peak minutes, of which I barely use maybe 200. Now I can play with some free services with those spare minutes thanks to this New York Times article.

I tried the free TellMe information service (1-800-555-8355) and was able to get sports score update.

There is even a number to free International calls (712-858-8883) . Need to try it at the right time when my parents are awake.

Rules of the Road in China

Much has been written about driving in China, but this is the best writing I've seen. It is too hilarious. I am copying it here in case the original page is not available.

More comments later.

(Hat tip to the Oriental List (a listserv for China travel) and in particular Peter Snow Cao)

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From the Irish Times
July 31, 2006
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2006/0731/1154075777635.html

Motoring madness puts spoke in China's wheel

Fintan O'Toole
Letter from Beijing: For the benefit of intending travellers, here are some Chinese rules of the road:

1. Driving is like making cloth or baskets - the skill is in the weaving. If there is more room on the far side of a three-lane highway, your duty is to get into it as fast as possible. Lanes are for bowling alleys.

2. Sound waves are a powerful form of energy. If you blow your horn loudly and continuously, obstacles in your way will disappear, clearing the road ahead.

3. Seatbelts restrict the flow of blood to the brain and may be dangerous. Drivers may buckle up if they are approaching a police checkpoint, but the belt should be removed as soon as the checkpoint is passed. Passengers should on no account wear seatbelts, as attempts to find the buckles which have been carefully stored under the seat covers may distract the driver from an important mobile phone conversation.

4. When approaching a junction with a major road, enter the flow of traffic immediately and decisively. The drivers on the main road will be well aware of your presence, even at night, and stopping to wait for a gap may be interpreted as an insult to their sixth sense.

5. Remember that Kung Fu movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are entirely realistic. Chinese people can sense at all times what is happening behind them, even without looking. They also have lightening-fast reflexes, so any momentary danger will inevitably be averted.

6. Overtaking is a spiritual quest, a homage to the gods of time, who do not like to see their precious gift wasted. The less time wasted and the more dangerous the manoeuvre (for example, overtaking on a hairpin bend on a mountain road with a ravine 5,000ft below) the greater the devotion demonstrated. You will get your reward in the next life, a destination which you may also reach sooner than everyone else.

7. Even the narrowest road has two sides - it is wasteful not to use both.

8. If you find yourself facing a head-on collision with another vehicle, it is vital to assume that the other driver will blink first and take the necessary evasive action. If everyone abides by this principle, then there can be no confusion. All drivers will understand their proper responses in this situation and there can be no danger of an accident.

I offer these rules as a cut-out-and-keep guide for anyone intending to travel to China, because, oddly, they are not published by the road safety authorities and can be learned only by observation. This might suggest that they are not rules at all, but they are universally observed in every part of China I've been to so far, and are presumably so well understood that they do not need to be made explicit.

So deeply entrenched are these rules, indeed, that they turn on their heads western perceptions of what is and is not good driving. In the West, for example, someone who swings out into the middle of the road while approaching a blind blend is a maniac who has no right to be on the road. In China, such a person is genuinely a good driver. If you assume that when you turn the corner, there may be cars bearing down on you (because they are overtaking on the other side of the bend), then it makes perfect sense to stay in the middle so that you have room, if necessary, to swerve to either side.

This kind of skill may explain one of two astonishing aspects of Chinese driving: the relatively low rate of accidents. It is not that the carnage on the roads in China is not appalling, even by Irish standards. It is. In China, injuries from road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 45. Every day, about 600 people are killed and 45,000 injured on the roads. But if you travel in buses and taxis for a while, these figures come to seem remarkably low.

I can hardly believe that I've seen only one bad crash in the last two months. (Though having my eyes closed most of the time may have had something to do with it.) The other amazing thing is the relative absence of road rage. In most other societies, driving would come to a halt because the roads would be filled with the bodies of drivers who had shot each other, or with the burnt-out wrecks of vehicles whose owners had spontaneously combusted. But I've only seen one episode of serious cursing, when a parked car suddenly and without any signal pulled out right in front of a taxi I was in, missing it by a centimetre. The taxi driver turned the air blue and the guilty party gave a sheepish smile and an apologetic wave, as if he had accidentally brushed up against an old lady's elbow.

When only the most egregious offences raise any objections, it seems clear that all the other offences are regarded as normality.

This all means that there's no point in asking Chinese people to explain the awful driving, since they don't regard it as awful at all. On long drives, when I've got tired of taking the holy name in vain, I try to calm myself by thinking up explanations. The most obvious is that mass driving is a new thing here and that China has gone from the ubiquitous bicycle to 130 million motor vehicles in the blink of an eye. But such an explanation would equally apply if Chinese drivers were slow and cautious.

I do think bicycles have something to do with it, though. Most drivers learned their road sense in the bicycle era, when weaving around obstacles made sense and the risks from a crash were small. Another, related, reason may be that the car is still a symbol of personal freedom, an escape from a communal rule-bound world into a private space where you can follow your own instincts.

Or maybe it's just the peculiarly Chinese combination of fatalism ("If I'm going to die, there's nothing I can do about it") and optimism ("Sure haven't I survived worse?") that comes from a hard history.

五彩冷盘

黄豆芽，豆腐丝（俺们美国内陆小城也有豆腐丝卖！）开水抄一下

其他的原料：胡萝卜，黄瓜（$1.79一根的英国黄瓜），香菜。

切啊切啊切啊切

装盘，加盐适量，然后倒上醋，淋上少许花椒油，就可以上桌了。

色鲜清脆美味健康爽口。

此冷盘是用来招待同事来家party的七菜一汤之一。还有一大盘是不加香菜的。极受欢迎，尤其得到印度素食夫妇青睐（我们一共做了四个素菜）。

上菜了:珍珠丸子

生米凉水泡24小时。
猪肉馅和用food processer打碎的油菜（现在健康第一，已经不习惯吃纯肉丸子），生姜，盐和馅。
泡好的米平扑在瓷盘里。
包好丸子，在瓷盘里打几个滚儿，让米粒儿沾满丸子的表面。

装盘，上蒸锅蒸半小时左右，就可以出锅了。

健康美味，