SF Review: To Crush the Moon

Since I was sick all weekend, it gave me a lot of time to read. What consoled me through my sickness was the excellent To Crush the Moon, by Wil McCarthy. Check out my review.

Sick-Jean-Baptiste

You know you're blogging too much when, sick and doubled over the toilet, you think, "Uugh, I just thought of a cool title for my next blog entry..."

Friday night, June the 24th, I went out to Moon River Diner, an american diner in Gubei, whose owner, Greg, is nice enough to prepare poutine for a bunch of homesick QuГ©bГ©cois expats. It's not the cheese and the fries are a bit too "american" (i.e. yellow and straight, as opposed to brown and mushy) for real poutine... But hey, this is Shanghai!

The plan was simple: eat poutine, go over to the bar next door that has Fin du Monde (a QuГ©bec beer), get drunk, get sick. Unfortunately for me, I skipped all the steps and went straight to the last.

I've been sick since Friday night, all the way through Monday; I felt better Tuesday, but relapsed Tuesday night and I still felt queasy this morning. Whew! Talk about a nasty bug. I felt miserable, but most of all, I felt goddam sick of being sick. It's alright now, though; I got myself some antibiotics, and things are looking up.

You'd think digestive problems would be a way of life when, like me, you live in Shanghai and eat cheap and local by default. Interestingly enough, it's usually the Western stuff that gets me sick: pizza once did me in good, and cheese tends to upset my stomach in general. This time, it was not a small noodle shop that got me, but... my own company's catering food!

Still; it gave me some time to relax when I got better Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and I got to watch a few B movie classics such as Gamera, as well as the Гјber-crappy Alone in the Dark, by Uwe Boll.

Hey, I told you I was sick!

Cocktails in the Courtyard

As any long-term expat in China will tell you, the stares and impassive curiosity of our Chinese hosts can sometimes get on our nerves. It's not that it's irritating, in itself, when an old lady stares you down as if she were studying an old piece of gum on the sidewalk; but the frequency at which it happens is like a slow Chinese Water Torture for the mind.

I don't mind it all that much, but it's good when we can get even a little bit. And as far as getting stared down by half the neighborhood goes, we had something of an epiphany, last night.

Helene and I went to our favorite Hunan place across the street from our apartment complex last night, along with two friends, a French and a QuГ©bГ©cois. The night was good, warm but not too much so, and our French friend pointed out what a nifty courtyard park we had in front of our building. "The perfect place for a cocktail, too." Well, well...

30 minutes after dinner, there we were, each of us sipping a homemade martini as if we were attending a garden party. I brought the 4 martinis down from the apartment on a bar tray, drawing many a curious eye. Which was the whole point of the experience, really: to give the Chinese a good reason to stare at us curiously.

And stare they did! Old women came to stand in front of us, trying to look bored but obviously puzzled, trying to understand what the hell four foreigners were doing in the park sipping alcoholic drinks. Couples sat across from us to study us quietly, and people went out of their way to pass between us to understand what was going on.

Feeling we were a bit withdrawn from real visibility, we ended up moving closer to the entrance of the compound, drawing even more pairs of eyes. A QuГ©bГ©cois colleague, stepping outside for a cigarette, even joined our little impromptu party, and we chatted away the evening.

I'm sure we generated some small amount of neighborhood gossip. Hey, neighbors: it's been a pleasure!

SF Review: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Here is my review of Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Cory's book is popular with bloggers and online rights activists, so be forewarned: I didn't like it.

The Perfect Martini - Shanghai Edition

It finally happened. Yesterday, after a hard day's work, I got home and fixed myself a martini. As I sat down to sip it, it struck me. I have made the perfect martini. My quest is at an end.

In other words, I can now flaunt my skills, as they produce a truly enjoyable martini. Allow me, then, to flaunt them by sharing with you my martini recipe:

Equipment

- Shaker & strainer (stainless steel or glass)
- Spoon
- Martini glass
- Fancy toothpick (optional)
- Lemon twist tool (optional)

Ingredients

- London dry gin (I recommend Bombay Sapphire)
- Extra-dry Vermouth (Martini brand ok)
- Spanish olives OR lemon
- Ice

Preparation

1. If you want a perfect martini, it's time to say hello to high electricity bills. Crank the freezer temperature as down as you can. I have a Chinese freezer that's so effective, the vodka actually smokes as it comes out of the bottle.

2. Store the shaker and the martini glasses in the freezer. Make sure your ice is fresh. Avoid at all costs ice that is contaminated by food tastes, as the water from the melting ice is a very important part of the final drink. If you want to make a vodka martini, store your vodka bottle in the freezer. Do NOT store the gin in the freezer, as coldness dims the taste of the gin. Likewise, don't store the vermouth in the freezer! Freezing is bad for the vermouth.

3. Prepare your garnish. Use the toothpicks to spear 2 or 4 olives, and make sure the olives are cleaned of any brine. (When in Shanghai, use pure water and avoid tap water.) If you want to use a lemon garnish, cut a thin strip of the lemon's peel, including the white. (Bartending tools exist that do this.) Set the strip aside for now. For a super-cool garnish, remove the pimento from a Spanish olive, crush blue cheese with a spoon, and stuff the olive with blue cheese instead. Yum!

Mixing

1. Take the shaker out of the freezer, and fill it halfway through with ice.

2. Pour 0.5 oz. dry vermouth in the shaker, followed by 3 oz. gin.

3. Using a stirring spoon, gently stir the drink. Avoid stirring too hard! You don't want to chip the ice, or introduce air in the drink. Stirring is the most important part of making a martini, and requires gentleness. Stir until the water has started melting. (Approx. 45 seconds.)

4. Take the martini glass out of the freezer. Using a strainer, pour the liquid into the glass.

5. Put the olives garnish into the drink. If you want to make a lemon garnish, squeeze the strip of lemon peel over the drink, then twist it into a spring. Compress and pull back the twist, so it adopts a spring shape. Drop the garnish into the drink.

6. Serve immediately on a coaster. Admire what a cool martini you just made by marveling at how transparent and cold the drink looks. Cool, huh?

Gin or vodka?

I prefer gin, but I also love vodka. For that reason, I refer strictly to gin when refering to a martini, but I acknowledge that a vodka martini is a fabulous thing. I prefer olives in a martini, and lemon in a vodka martini, but it's just a matter of taste.

For vodka martinis can be made using flavored vodka. Especially impressive is Vincent Van Gogh vodkas from Holland, which, combined with sweet vermouth, make a killer sweet vodka martini. More traditional, but awfully impressive, is Russian vodka. (One of the benefits of living in Shanghai is that geniune Russian vodka is quite cheap!)

You can go one step further by making a sweet vodka martini, and adding 1 oz. cranberry juice, and 1 oz. Cointreau. Tada! You've got a Cosmopolitan.

Shaken or stirred?

I've tried both, and I prefer stirred, by far, although I'm partial to a shaken vodka martini. Shaking or stirring actually makes a huge difference: a shaken martini is cloudy because of suspended ice particles. This tends to diminish the flavor of the gin, although it seems to improve the vodka. For taste reasons, and because I really like my martinis crystal-clear, I always go for stirred.

It's strange that people associate asking for a "shaken, not stirred" martini as a sign of sophistication, because the true sophisticate martini is the stirred one. I think when Ian Flemming first wrote James Bond, asking for a shaken martini fit his character of a brash, uncompromising playboy-cum-secret agent. It works a lot less when it's Pierce Brosnan working the English charm asking for a shaken martini. If you want to go for the 'suave bastard' impression, ask for a stirred martini, and make a scandal if you get a vodka martini.

Shanghai: The Bonus Levels

For a newcomer to Shanghai, the city's maze-like layout can be quite distressing when compared to a North American city's grid-like order. It's easy - and downright fun! - to get lost in he side-streets of Shanghai, and many cool discoveries can be made.

When you stumble upon a hidden gem in a side-street of the city, it's easy to feel like you've taken a warp pipe out of Super Mario Bros and stumbled upon a bonus level. That's what I've began calling these little secrets of the city: bonus levels. Here are some bonus levels my colleagues or I have discovered over time:

The DVD Bonus Level: Back when the studio was in Pudong, one could walk to an area under heavy construction two blocks away from the office. To get to it, you had to exit the building from the back, climb an overpass, walk over a barren field filled with construction material, to finally get to a huge area filled with pirated DVD stores and game stores. The selection was amazing, despite being totally out of the way and impossible to stumble upon. Unfortunately, the entire block was razed to make way for the new tunnel under the river.

The Plunger Bonus Level: How's that for a Mario Bros reference? A colleague of mine, looking for a plunger to fix his toilet, asked a small store clerk where he could get one. He was redirected to a street address. The address looked like a normal residential building, but when he opened the door, it led to a small courtyard where dozens of merchants sold houseware... including incredibly cheap plungers!

The DVD Bonus Level II: 5 minutes away from work, there used to be a DVD store carrying an awesome selection of DVDs, including many hard-to-find TV series. The place was disguised as a tea shop, so that you had to walk into a cafГ© to get to the DVDs. Said DVD shop has now moved right next to my home, and no longer hides its identity.

The Stinky Tofu Bonus Level: Right next to the very business-like old office in Pudong was a side-street, hidden by a residential gate, where you could get street food like cho tofu for very cheap prices. Helene found it one day, and I've seen a lot of locals carrying street food seemingly coming from this place, but I haven't been able to find it on my own.

The Massage Bonus Level: A colleague of mine claims to have found a massage and baths place, very clean and professional, indicated only in Chinese. He says the prices are incredibly cheap, and he regularly goes there for 5-hour massage binges followed by ginseng baths and other such luxuries. He is keeping the address to himself, not wanting expatriates to flood the place.

The Underground Art Bonus Level: Dongdaming Lu, north of Pudong, is a seemingly innocuous street like all others in Shanghai. But go through a gate, and enter the disaffected warehouse at the back, and you'll find yourself at DDM Warehouse, an underground art space featuring modern art pieces by Chinese artists, and occasionally showing banned movies about such controversial topics as gender roles, homosexuality, and greed in Chinese society.

The Restaurant Supply Bonus Level: After looking for 2 weeks for martini glasses, I went up and asked the owner of a French bistrot where he bought his own glassware. He directed me to a place, called Hotel Equipment Depot, where all restaurants go to buy their equipment. It's the kind of place you cannot simply stumble upon; it's hidden in the back of an alley, you need to go up the stairs in what looks like a disaffected building, and guards look at you crossly as you walk in. The place is filled with bar and restaurant equipment, at a fraction of the price of places like IKEA. Heaven!!