Visitors and more

With my recent mention of visitors, my friend, who now lives in Shanghai, had replied to me and mentioned somethin

g I find very interesting. Here is what she said:

We have many visitors this year for the SH EXPO. I have already been there 4 times. The most I have seen are people -- really people mountainpeople sea! I don't have the patience nor can I justify myself to line up for 2 hours (I heard 5 hours!) or more to see anything. My patience for lining up for anything had long been exhausted during my childhood years. At those years, it was for a good cause - line up for food -- a piece of meat notjust fat, a dead fish which could attract neighborhood cats up to a few blocks away. If I was lucky, I could have even bought a pig knuckle for a half of the provision quota. Can you imagine that? Only four knuckles in a pig. It had to be so lucky to get that. I was so driven to get up in the middle of the night,say 3 am in the morning to line up for that! I was only 9 to 11 years old then. I can still taste the one pig knuckle in two styles now -- first boiled it in a big pot of water, with some MSG and imagination it would turn into soup. Then I fished the knuckle out to add soy sauce to make "hongshao", yum! The best partwas not the actual taste. It was the hours, days and even months of delicious anticipation and preoccupation of the taste of meat! Marked on the history book, everyone was entitled to 250gm of meat a month. There were 5 of us then. We had1.25kg of meat for one month! Obesity was unheard ofthen. So it was not all bad :)

This brought me to think how different it is to grow up in HK as compare to the US or elsewhere, the culture, the

available resources and of course the things we take for granted. My friend grew up in mainland China and so I cannot even truly understand or appreciate

what it is like to have to line up for grocery with a quota. It also brought me the feeling of the luck I have, doing what I do now and living so easily and without worry

(although I tend to be worrisome).

But it is also interesting, with abundance supply of food, we seem to not know how to handle it and only

abuse this availability, which causes all sorts of health issue and the now frequently touted statistics of childhood obesity. My wife had just started her own blog

recently and she wrote something about our diet in the past year, give it a read if you would like to eat healthy.

Here's a bike that is recently delivered and I am quite happy how it all came together.

Cheers,