Onion Soup Mix...

Apparently, our lives here in Shanghai revolve around something called “onion soup mix.” More importantly, the Smith family must have created a shortage of the aforementioned product since we have shown up in China and have been purchasing it from the international grocery stores. Apparently, the mix in this little miracle bag is the key ingredient to several Smith family favorite meals: Chicken in a cranberry red sauce, chicken and wild rice casserole, beef roast and various other meals frequently crossing our table each evening. Normally, it hasn’t been a problem getting our hands on this key ingredient, but we apparently have been the only ones purchasing it as we have not been able to find it now for several weeks here in Shanghai.

Before moving on and talking about other little bits of food, I thought that I would just add a quick note to Jessica’s last post. I love college football. One problem that I have always had though is that I am from Missouri, which doesn’t really ring out as a football power house. The college that I went to, being an engineering school, hadn’t won a football game in the two years before I arrived and did not win a game the whole time that I was there. I have a Google page and an MSN page that I log into to get key news and sports information that I am interested in. I have always had the University of Missouri listed as one of the teams to follow. You could usually find me on Saturday or Sunday looking over my shoulder to make sure that no one was looking while I logged on to see how the Tigers had done that weekend.

This season was of course different though. You don’t ever really have to know anything about college football to know that Missouri came within one game of reaching the national championship. Who knows if it will happen again, or how well they will do next year. I may have to go back to always looking over my shoulder when I check scores and articles. But in the mean time, here is a sight that I really never thought that I would see in my lifetime…just too bad it didn’t last.




So anyway, back to food...

The grocery store that we normally go to is right across the street from our apartment. It has always amazed us at some of the advertisements that you see that are in English that you just chuckle at, or sometimes even better the products that they actually are selling over here (see the flavors for potato chips in the last post). However, the one that always trips us up though is the meat area of the grocery store here.

The delivery and selling of meat products is pretty interesting over here. It doesn’t matter if it is a big chain store like the Carrefour or Pines that we go to, or one of the local Chinese markets or even side street markets: The meat is basically just dropped off and put into large piles for people to pick through. In the smaller city that I work in, it is hilarious to see some of the Chinese people actually start to fight over the meat when it gets dropped off.

Anyway, at the Carrefour where we normally shop, it is more like you would find in the States. That being said though, there are still some pretty big differences. For instance, the fresh fish area is a little more open and not as sanitary. In the pictures below you can see the open fish meats, the tanks that you can get live turtles out of, another counter of fresh fish, the fish heads (for soup).

All around this area, there are also fish and crab tanks that the boys like to spend time looking at. It is interesting to explain to them how people will buy the fish and take them home to cook them and eat them. Just seeing the looks on their faces makes for a fun time.

Then, there are the meat counters. Most of the pictures that I took didn’t turn out too well, so I will go back and get some more at another time. Again, it is similar to the States: You just pick out the meat that you want, take it to the butcher type of person, and they wrap it up for you. One big difference though is that you pretty much just pick through it all by hand (your own) and then take it to be packaged. We on the other hand are not as adventurous as this. We pretty much only buy the pre-packaged meats. We pay a little more for them, but at the same time we don’t have to go through the theatrics of getting the meat like this…





In other food news, Jessica has mentioned before that Maddox has taken a real liking to Chinese food. At first, we thought that he just liked the idea of eating from chopsticks. However, it really doesn’t matter if it is chopsticks or not, the kid just likes Chinese food (suits me though, as I do too). The big favorite though is rice. Doesn’t matter if it is fried rice, rice noodles, of just plain steamed rice; Maddox likes them all.

A few days ago, we decided to go ahead and let Maddox try and eat the rice by himself. I am not sure how much rice he actually was able to eat, as you can see in the pictures below he was at least as much on the floor as he was eating. Afterwards he came into the kitchen asking for a ‘towel’, as he wanted to help clean up the mess that he made. As you can see though, things just got spread out more.





The big news to share though as it relates to food is a recent discovery that we have made in Shanghai. A couple of weekends ago, we were walking around an area on the other side of Shanghai from where we live called Hongqiao (Hong-Chow). We knew that there was a large international grocery store there called City Shoppe, so we were looking for it when all of a sudden we stumbled across a Cold Stone Creamery. It was like experiencing a little piece of heaven right here in Shanghai. Even better was that the following weekend, we found another one in the People’s Square area of the city. They have waffle cones, waffle bowls, our favorite ice creams, our favorite toppings, everything. Unfortunately though, it has become a recent addiction.




I know that there is so much more that is more interesting that you could see when it comes to food. For instance, on nights when I am staying in Wuxi and walking around the downtown area, you can see people along side the streets that have small grills hanging off of the back of their bikes that are cooking small animals that are tied to skewers. I could tell you about some of the ‘snack’ shops on the sides of the busy streets that have things like duck tongue and chicken feet for sale. I could even spell out the meals that I have had to endure during the countless supplier visits over here. I guess that I will try and get some pictures of those and get them loaded as well. In the mean time, this stuff will just have to do...

Just plain 'ol potato chips...

OK, so Jessica isn’t really keeping up on this. So, I guess that you guys will just have to put up with me for a little while. I actually typed this up a few weeks ago, I just haven’t had the time to post it yet. I actually have a bunch of stuff to put on here, so sorry for the overload…

Since Jessica returned from visiting her family early in the year, I have gotten a lot of requests to just provide some thoughts in general. Plus, I have gotten several requests to show people around the world the stuff that I have to do day in and day out. In typical fashion, I plan on just keeping this as sarcastic as possible. You certainly won’t be getting any deep thoughts or anything like that out of me here. Most likely I will just focus on the random and absolutely pointless. I will probably spend most of my time focusing on the things that just make us laugh over here instead of the real cultural stuff that Jessica puts up on the other blog. For all of you Facebook people, I will load a lot more pictures into there that I will on the blog as we can actually get access to Facebook anywhere in China…but alas not Blogger. There is no telling what type of mayhem would occur if the government here would open up Blogger. Weird country sometimes, but I will get into that I am sure in subsequent posts.

I hardly know where to begin. Today alone was filled with exposing our boys to gambling and cricket fighting, squirrels with obvious mental issues, fish heads being pushed around the floor of the local grocery store and various other adventures. I think that I will focus instead of snacks. Yep, that is right. After a couple of weeks of having company stay with us and a week off from work where we did something almost every day, Jessica and I chose to just have a night in at the apartment and not really do anything. We ordered dinner from a restaurant that has become one of our favorites over here. Later on though, I decided that I just wanted junk food. Pretzels, chips, cookies…whatever. A quick survey of the cabinets yielded nothing, so I headed across the street to the local equivalent of Wal-Mart. I head off to the aisle where the potato chips are located in search for my favorite chips over here…Lay’s Stax. Basically, they are just like Pringles…except for the flavors. Oh yes my friends, today I discovered that the land of salt and vinegar, BBQ, sour cream and onion are all long behind us. Tonight, my options were “tomato,” “crispy prawn”, “green cucumber,” “black pepper rib eyed steak,” and “finger licking braised pork.” I can hardly imagine a better selection of flavors. One problem though was that I could not find “authentic original flavor”. Yep, just plain old potato chips. Finally, after searching high and low, I found this island in the middle of nowhere that had two or three cans of them set up in some pointless display. Of course realizing that the display was pointless, I just reached up and took it apart to the point that I could get the chips that I wanted and walked away with my container of chips.

There was another customer there that also thought that the display was rather ridiculous as they walked away from their cart and came over to me waving a finger at me and talking in a very excited tone. I didn’t understand a word that they were saying, but obviously they were very happy with me because they followed me all of the way back to the international foods area where I was going to pick up a bag of pretzels. The person was also nice enough to grab some of the employees at the store that were close by and explain to them how the display didn’t make sense. They even went so far as to grab the chips out of my hand and act out all of the work that I had to go through just to get the chips in the first place. Though I certainly appreciate this persons excitement, it was wearing off quickly now because they had just taken the potato chips that I had to work so hard to get right out of my hands. Tiring of the celebrity status that I had now attained given that a crowd was starting to gather, I just politely said ‘excuse me’, grabbed my chips and headed on my way to the check-out counter. The things that you have to go through just to get junk food. It’s easier just eating all of the healthy stuff that we have back home.

Oh well, the chips were great. I enjoyed every one of them. In case you are wondering about the random nature of the display, they were nestled in neatly with Maxwell House coffee and Lipton green tea, which has stacks of Oreo and some Chinese brand cookies on top of them. The only flavor of chips that were in the display were original and green cucumber, and they were in the clothing area. This was of course the first place that I would have ever thought of to look at for snack food.

Pretty much, that is an absolutely pointless story, and you just wasted 7 minutes of your life reading it. I will have to see if I can dig up the pictures that we took of introducing the boys to cricket fighting and will get those up.