Got Milk?

That used to be simple enough question, but now with four babies dead and 13,000 sick because of tainted baby formula, milk, and other milk products it's become a serious question.


When we first moved to Shanghai we bought and used the local milk. It tasted fine, but shortly thereafter, however, after microwaving the milk in the microwave because our girls liked warm milk for their naps at the time, we noticed that there was seperation in the milk where an oily film could be seen in their sippy cups. Since the girls go through a significant amount of milk, and having enough skepticism at the time that perhaps something with the milk was just not right, we stopped buying the Chinese brands of milk.


We switched to imported milk... yes, imported milk. If you've ever spent any significant amount of time in Europe, you've seen the "super homogonized" milk that is sold in 1-liter bricks and can sit on your shelf for 4-6 months. That's what we bought, milk from Germany or New Zealand. This milk has a distinct flavor, a slight "burned" taste to it from the increased heat used in the the special homoginization process. These liters are also $3/liter here in Shanghai, so about $12/gallon. Again, with the amount of milk that we were going through, we looked for something different.


So anybody who has visited here since last October knows that we use powdered milk that we order from the States in our home. This has fit the need for us, it makes our cereal eatable and the girls like drinking it. It does have a slight sweet-vanilla taste to it, but we've gotten used to, although I don't pour a glass of milk to eat oreos here. At any rate, we like it, it's healthy, and it's cheap.


Then the story hit this past week that Chinese baby formula was tainted, and two days ago it was announced that the scope has expanded to milk and milk products. Here's what has been happening:


"The raw milk had been watered down and the chemical added to fool quality checks, the newspaper said.

Melamine is commonly used in coatings and laminates, wood adhesives, fabric coatings, ceiling tiles and flame retardants."

This Melamine boosts the protein content of the liquid so that it passes the inspections testing the quality of the milk.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/18/china.tainted.milk/index.html

Btw, this is the same chemical that was put into dog food last year that killed and made dogs sick in America.


Can you believe this? Two people thus far have been arrested, but there is no way that just two people were able to corrupt the entire dairy system here in China. It will be interesting to see how many people are convicted because of involvement with this, and those who are convicted, in light of the deaths that have happened and could have happened, I hope that they are tried for murder and attempted murder. This isn't a mistake, this was a conscious decision to put people's health and lives at risk.

So is this what the U.S. was like back in the day before the "muckrakers" exposed the bad industry practices?

Mid-Autumn Festival

Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节 Zhongqiu jie), also known as Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival, is one of the main national holidays here in China and throughout many Asian countries. It is celebrated on the full moon of the eighth lunar month of the year, so sometime in mid- to late-September.

While there are multiple stories as to the origins of this 3,000 year old holiday, the bottom line is that it is the time to gather and admire the harvest moon, in a way similar to Thanksgiving.

Families do travel to be together over this holiday, and we got a special treat this year by being invited by a classmate and her husband to join them and her parents who came from out-of-town to celebrate together.

It was a wonderful evening... as you can imagine the girls were a huge hit. Adayla continues to amaze and entertain us with her wit and her Chinese. She spent lots of time with Glenny and her parents, especially with Glenny's dad who loved this little foreign girl who could speak Chinese with him.

Here are a couple of pictures from the evening:

They prepared a feast, with various beef, pork, pig intestine, fish and vegetable dishes. They served these various dishes with a thin pancakes similar to a crepe, that we filled with the various dishes and ate with our hands. This is a Jiangsu province type dish. Glenny laughed when she described them as Chinese burritos (we had real burritos last week on an MBA class trip to Hong Kong that I still need to blog). It was mostly quite tasty!

The highlight of the meal was when they brought out the duck soup. You know chicken soup, right? That's something more of what I was expecting. Then they brought it out.... I didn't realize that duck soup would be a soup with an entire duck in it! Yup, here it is, head, beak, neck and everything. The duck was actually very good.

Mooncakes:

One of the traditional/popular parts of the festival is eating mooncakes. Here's a brief explanation of mooncakes, taken from wikipedia.com:

"Most mooncakes consist of a thin tender skin enveloping a sweet and slightly oily filling. The mooncake may contain one or more whole salted egg yolks in its center to symbolize the full moon. The saltiness of the yolk balances well with the sweet filling in the mooncake. Rarely, mooncakes are steamed or fried.

Traditional mooncakes have an imprint on top consisting of the Chinese characters for "longevity" or "harmony" as well as the name of the bakery and filling in the moon cake. Imprints of a moon, a woman on the moon, flowers, vines, or a rabbit may surround the characters for additional decoration.

Mooncakes are expensive and considered a delicacy, and production is labor-intensive and few people make them at home. Most mooncakes are bought at Asian markets and bakeries. The price of mooncakes range from $10 to $50 (in US dollars)."

I can't believe the price suggested in the description. I've seen a range of $.50 to $5 per mooncake here, and they typically are about 2-3 inches wide and an inch thick.

The funny part of the description above is that it must be written by somebody from China, as they think that mooncakes are somewhat sweet. They are hardly sweet by American standards. Popular "sweet" fillings include: lotus seed paste, sweet bean paste, sweet potato paste and jujube paste. The closest thing I can compare them to would be a giant Fig Newton, sometimes with a whole egg yolk inside (to symbolize the moon).

I would also compare mooncake to fruit cake, not in taste but in tradition. Why do people give fruit cakes for Christmas? Because its tradition... but why? Does anybody like eating fruit cake? The same thing can be said of mooncakes. Everybody here gives them to each other, but hardly anybody actually likes eating them ;-)

Here's a picture of a mooncake:

Unfortunately we haven't been able to see the moon during this year's Moon Festival -- the typhoon that has been hitting Taiwan has completely greyed out the skies here in Shanghai.

So since we can't put a picture of the Mid-Autumn Festival moon, here's a picture from last year...

See the moon at the top of the picture? BTW, the little boy who Morgan is holding is little Tally! It's been a year already?!

September 11th Rememberance

7 years on, Sept. 11 is so far and yet so close


By Erin McClam - The Associated PressPosted : Monday Sep 8, 2008 17:20:48 EDT

It is not a tidy anniversary this year. Seven years between that awful day and this Sept. 11, the terrorist attacks linger somewhere between the immediate, a conscious part of our days, and the comfortable remove of the distant past. No longer yesterday and not yet history.


What happened seven years ago colors American life today. There are the two wars, of course. But in smaller ways, too: We sing “God Bless America” at the ballpark. We weigh “evil” as a campaign issue. We slip off our shoes at airport security, buy the zip-top bag for liquids and gels.
And yet there is an unmistakable distance now. No one speaks of the “new normal” anymore. All of those things are just normal.


This Thursday — Sept. 11, 2008 — will be nothing like the first anniversary, when people were allowed, even encouraged, to take the day off work to reflect, when airports were eerily empty, when silence settled over cities.


But it will also be nothing like what life in America was on Sept. 10, 2001, the day before.
What does 9/11 mean, seven years on? What do we make of it now?


Seven years means we are far enough away that Sen. Joe Biden can joke in a Democratic debate that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani only mentions three things in a sentence, “a noun and a verb and 9/11,” and bring down the house.


Yet we are close enough that video of the towers’ collapse — the actual smoke, the crumbling — is so painful it almost never airs anymore, and when it is shown, as in a montage at the Republican National Convention, it is utterly halting.


No one will forget. But when is it OK to move on?


For the people who were left behind, left without a spouse or a child or a parent or a friend on that day, it is a very real question, something to turn over in their minds every day.


For some, seven years means enough time to pick up, sometimes to pack up, to start anew.
Cathy Faughnan’s husband, Christopher, a 37-year-old bond trader, was killed in the trade center. She was 37 then, too, and remembers thinking she was too young to be a widow for the rest of her life.


Now she is 44. Within two years after the attacks she moved back to her home state of Colorado, and has since been remarried, to a widower she met in New York shortly after Sept. 11.
She does not like to watch TV coverage of these anniversaries. Her family remembers Christopher in other ways. September also means the start of college football, and they go to cheer his beloved Colorado Buffaloes once a year.


This year, for the first time, she took the three children she had with Christopher — Siena, Juliet and Liam, who are now 14 and 11 and 9 — to ground zero, where steel from the rebuilding now pokes above street level.
At the visitors center across from the pit, they saw the pictures of thousands of people who died when the youngest of them was just 2 years old.
“I think that was the first time it really maybe hit them how many people died,” their mother says. “I saw them with their mouths open.”
For others, seven years is an instant.
One morning last month, Diane Horning was watching a webcast of the federal government’s briefing on the mechanics of the collapse of Building 7 at the trade center complex.
A half-hour later, she saw a television report speculating on the vice presidential prospects for Giuliani and was outraged: “He can’t put two words together without talking about my son’s death.”
Her son was Matthew Horning, 26 years old, killed in the north tower. Tiny bits of his remains were recovered from the site and from the Staten Island landfill where a million tons of debris and human remains were taken.
The years have not lessened her anger. She is appealing the dismissal this summer of a lawsuit that would require the city to move the material at the landfill to a separate burial plot.
“I just can’t stop,” Diane Horning says. “I need my son to be treated with dignity. He has been treated like garbage, and I can’t imagine a mother sitting back and saying, ‘You know, it’s OK.”’
Seven years also means some people say to her that she is “obsessed.”
Exactly how much the nation has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, is a matter of perspective.
“There were economic changes, psychological effects,” says Alfred Goldberg, who retired last year as the Pentagon’s chief historian, and who points to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He says he believes the tragedy of Sept. 11 was compounded by the national response, and perhaps by an exaggeration of the threat posed by al-Qaida. “We are in many ways a very changed nation because of those attacks,” he says.
And while that is indisputable in a broad sense, it is a point bitterly contested by some of the people most directly affected.
For Sarah Arnold of Orlando, Fla., this Sept. 11 will not be an anniversary she cares much about. It will be one year and 21 days since her only child, a son named Britt, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq.
She says she feels a kinship with the Sept. 11 lost because Britt was sent to New York with the Navy to help uncover remains. And when she thinks about how the country has changed, she answers: Not much at all.
“They don’t give a damn about the war,” she says. “Unless you have someone that is actually defending you, you don’t give a damn. You’re secure. You’re doing your daily thing.”
Seven years means Kathy Agarth, who in 2001 lived in a Washington suburb and today teaches second grade at a private school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., must find a way to explain the attacks to children with no memory of it and little understanding.
To these children, Sept. 11 is no different from Memorial Day.
She says her students know the term “9/11” and they pray for the soldiers and may write letters to them this year. She does not teach it as a separate lesson. But they do ask her about it from time to time, and she chooses her words carefully:
“Some men were angry at the United States. They crashed their planes into some buildings. Their actions were evil.”
Evil. That the word resonates in American life, and particularly in American politics, is a sign we are not too far removed from that day. It came up as a specific campaign issue just last month.
Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in California, asked: “Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?”
Sen. John McCain answered simply, “Defeat it.” Sen. Barack Obama said it exists in many places, citing Darfur and child abuse, and that it is “God’s task” to erase it from the world.


Seven years means Somerset County, Pa., where United Flight 93 went down and where, in a way, the legend of “Let’s roll!” was born, is trying to figure out how to get the curious visitors who stream in from all over the country to stay awhile.


County commissioners are busy with feasibility studies, zoning papers, planning committees. A national park is coming. Hundreds of thousands of people will visit. They will need restaurants, hotels, gas stations, shops.


“You’re here looking at the memorial. There are other opportunities,” says Brian Whipkey, editor of the Somerset Daily American. “You can do whitewater rafting, you can do skiing, biking, hiking.”


Sept. 11 as a segue to recreation: How far we have come.


Think back to flying after Sept. 11. Right after. Think about the sheer will it took to board an airplane, what felt like to eye the other passengers, to startle at the slightest turbulence.


“People were mortified,” recalls Jewel Van Valin, a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines who is based in Los Angeles. “They were all hoping, ‘We’re not going down, are we?”’


The months after the attacks were not kind to the airline industry, and about a year later, Delta opted to save a little money by replacing its linens in first class with paper trays. Van Valin decided to pass out crayons.


She did this because she thought the paper trays were tacky. But after 9/11, flight attendants were also there for emotional comfort — Van Valin actually held sobbing fliers in her arms — and the crayons provided a means of release.


Back then they drew firefighters and flags, police officers with tears in their eyes, the skyline of New York. They drew airplanes and they wrote, “In God We Trust.”
Now they draw palm trees and hammocks, tropical drinks, Disney characters. They draw destinations. They draw moving on.

Another gorgeous day!

Today is one of the days that I'll just cherish forever. It's easy to take these days for granted, so I wanted to capture a bit of the beauty even on a simple day.

We went out for lunch at our favorite American burger joint here... Johnny Moo's! It's about a 10 minute walk from our place and with weather like today it makes it even more enjoyable to walk there. I can't remember walking to any restaurants from any of our homes in the U.S., but I really like doing so here. Here are some pictures from our walk to lunch...

Right outside our place...

Ryan loves kicking one of her legs up on the stroller... this is "how she rolls!"

It's such a fun, pretty walk...

Ryann was such a happy girl at the restaurant...

... the only thing that could make me stop kissing her was when the food came!

We then walked around a bit more after lunch, and the thought of having a McDonald's ice cream cone was just too good to pass up. So here's Ryann's first ice cream... she knew what to do!!

And just like that the afternoon was over. Ryann is just so dang cute. She loves to grab your hand and pull it onto her chest... shortly thereafter she's out!

Various People & Places from Beijing

The Olympics are now a week over. We can't believe it. What's this country going to do now since it was so singularly focused on this event? Time will tell, and what it does we will tell you...

So I had better get the rest of my pictures out there. So in no particular order, and without repeating pictures from previous posts on the Olympics, here they are:


The best shots of the Olympics are the night shots... then you don't see the grey skies of the smog

Security:

These army guys were everywhere in Beijing -- and yes, they are Chinese Army and not police. I just really wonder what they would have done if something actually had happened. They just stood at their posts... straight-faced and watched. They had no weapons and didn't even have radios.

The Chinese even thought these guys were somewhat of a joke. Many of them took pictures in front or next to these guys, again as they stood straight-faced.
This may be one of my favorite pics from the Olympics. Here you have four Chinese Army guys and then you have fellow Olmsted Scholar Phoenix parading behind them. You can see that one of the guys is about to crack a smile. If they only knew that an American Air Force Captain was dancing behind them... Here comes the army marching onto the track. The marched so proudly as they took their posts. You can see that every-other seat is empty as this detail marches out. That's because this detail is filling in those seats that the marching detail that came in the opposite direction left. That way everybody could see the army marching in up close. They then sat in place, watching the crowd for two games over the next five hours...
You can see the army guy guarding the line that ropes off this corridor at Summer Palace. We could walk up to the line from either side, we just couldn't cross the line. So instead, everybody walked around. We never figured out the purpose of this guy and his line...

Communism stresses the community. What could bring the community together better than squatting and pooping next to each other, giving each other your "undivided" attention:


Air conditioning

It was hot, but who needs air conditioning when you dress this cool? Can you imagine what the swass must be like on this mom's arm?
Olympic Spirit

Non-Chinese were popular with the Chinese. I have no idea how many pictures I took with people who just wanted a picture with a foreigner. If you had a foreign flag, you were even more popular. I walked up this street, and back down about an hour later. This guy was still taking pictures with random people...

Here is a group of Germans. Again, with their flags, they were wildly popular.

The Olympics would be such a fun place to come with a large group of crazy people. Perhaps a future family reunion? A group of friends from the past? I can't imagine that the hosts in 2012 (London) will be that interested about seeing Americans, but perhaps in 2016? The final four cities for the 2016 Olympics are Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Chicago.

This is a picture from the men's semi-final game between Nigeria and Belgium. The Nigerian team was so much fun. After each goal, they got together and then one of them touched each one on the head, like a televangelist, and the teammates fell down one-by-one. You can see them falling in this picture, it was pretty funny. Nigeria went on to win the silver medal in the next game.

There was another Olmsted Scholar family (also Air Force) at this game... Barry's family from Nanjing. We were planning on getting together with them after the game. Silly us didn't even check where our tickets were. Amazingly our tickets were right next to each other! I guess we can thank the government here for that... I think putting our tickets made it easier for the folks "watching" us to keep an eye on us if we were together.
Chinese people are the the world's fastest sleepers. This gal's head was bobbing a couple of minutes after she sat down. Three stops later, at the end of the line, I woke her up so she could get off the train. That's quite a talent!

With gas prices at all-time highs, the Chinese are doing their part to conserve fuel. These scooters are all-electric. Here is a fuel-efficient family model:
So in an effort to live as the locals, here I am with fellow Olmsted Scholars Jade and Phoenix, and Phoenix's husband Cliff on our electric bikes. Cliff is doing his best impression of a Chinese photo (see below about "Striking a Pose" for more details).
As we were walking on this street to one of the soccer games, we saw this gathering of people...
... as suspected, they were watching Yao Ming and Team China playing basketball:

Workers Stadium is where the soccer games were held. Here's a picture when we entered...

... and when we left. As you can tell, the smog wasn't nearly as bad on this day as you can see a bit of blue in the sky above and the moon in the picture below:

Workers stadium in Beijing. The big section of yellow are volunteer fans. The government gave them free tickets and shirts, and in exchange they cheered for both teams. It was kind of funny to see, but a bit superficial and creepy as well...

The pregame ceremonies of the games took at least 20 minutes. It felt as if each game was a championship game...

These kids were hanging out outside of the beach volleyball venue. The skateboard they were using was interesting to say the least... it only has two wheels. Rocking the board back and forth with your feet "powers" the board to move. You won't see them putting a foot on the ground to speed up. Has anybody seen these before? If not, anybody interested in opening a two-wheel skateboard store in a mall for Christmas this year?!

Here's the outside of the church President Bush went to in Beijing...
...and here's a picture on the inside. I think the Olympic logos of years past make a nice touch underneath the picture of Jesus being sprinkled:

You may have seen this brand throughout the Olympics. It looks like "Lining" but it is actually the name of a person "Li" is the family name and "Ning" is the given name. Li Ning was a Chinese gold medal winning gymnast from the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. He is the same person who lit the Olympic torch in the Opening Ceremony here in Beijing.
Li Ning is now doing pretty well, being the president of the sports apparel company that bears his name. Many of the Chinese teams and some of the foreign teams wore this brand during the games. NBA star Shaquille O'Neal even has a shoe contract with Li Ning.

Does anybody have/wear Li Ning apparel? If so, where did you get it?

Has anybody even seen this brand in the States? If so, where? I'm interested in hearing when the first sighting will be.

New meaning to the term "tourist trap." You definitely felt trapped in some of these market areas...

This is one of the premier spots in Beijing, close to Forbidden City at the start of the popular Wangfujing Street. You can see this the location of the flagship Olympic store and a huge TV where crowds gathered to watch the games. It is also home to McDonald's!

These food items make me laugh. They have knock-off pictures of Donald Duck on the packaging and what are they selling? Duck's feet... Mmmm, delicious!

Most of the Olympic advertising that I saw in China featured both China and the US together. Looks like the want to make it a competition between our two countries...

Finger painting

This artist took finger painting to a whole new level. He dipped the side of his hand in to the black ink to use for larger areas, then used his pinky fingernail for various details.

I was fascinated by him and watched for a quite a while. I ended up buying two of the works I watched him paint...

Strike a pose

Chinese love taking pictures... of themselves! Whether it grown men taking pictures by themselves with Cinderella at Hong Kong Disneyland or here at various sites, it's generally not with friends or family, it's by themselves. It's all about me!

And it's not good enough just to take the picture, you have to strike a pose. Many Chinese hold up two fingers when having their picture taken. I asked several folks why they held up two fingers. Sometimes I asked if it was because they were #2. Some said it was a "v" for "victory," to which I asked victory over what? Nobody said it was the hippee sign for peace. So hold two fingers up, for no meaning, it just makes you look cool...

(I also like the above picture with the basketball court on the Forbidden City grounds)

Sunny days

Westerners lay in the sun to get darker, Chinese use umbrellas to keep their skin lighter...

They're 16!

The plan is that our kids won't date until they're 16 years old. Even if the Chinese government gives them passports stating that they're 16, they're not dating until they are actually 16. As for their women's gymnastic team being 16, you make the call...

Four star toilet

I was actually kind of scared to try this. I had never used a four star rated toilet before. What further service could they provide that I hadn't seen before. Would they insist on wiping? I'm happy to report that there is nothing unusual to report. I just wonder what a one star toilet looks like...

The government controls what the government wants to control

The shop below is on the grounds of Forbidden City, after you've paid your money and given your entrance ticket to get in. So these vendors, and what they sell, are directly controllable.

See the white hats below? The hats with the flying Air Jordan on them?

Yup, they are fake Air Jordan hats... unbelievable, being sold on a government-owned tourist attraction. I'm sure Nike/Jordan would love this "Sport" brand with their logo...
You know what I didn't see in Beijing? I didn't see any fake Olympic stuff... no fake hats, shirts, toys, etc. I just shows that if the government wants to control it, they can. As long as it's only foreign companies losing money from counterfeit and pirated material, who cares right?

And finally, Ryann's first Olympics! Adayla and Tally stayed with Ayi while the three of us went to the soccer game. Here's a picture of Morgan & Ryann...