Author: F C

Lost in Translation

AS returned to the land of the rising earthquake today. He was still experiencing culture shock as of last week, when we went to PJ Cooke’s, an American diner type place. He just flew back from Miami, and was having a little trouble reading the English menu, I guess because he’s been in Asia for like 7 years. I was trying to help him out with a little translating:

Waitress: What do you want to order?

AS: [Hopeless trying to read the menu, grunts, finger pointing]

FC: This part of the menu are the hamburgers and here are the brunch specials….

AS: Huh?

FC: Je ge hai ham bo pou…

AS:???

FC: Esto es hamburgesa con queso, y eso es huevos rancheros…

AS: Oh. [Having a double take] Wow, the menu actually says “huervos rancheros”!

…..

Went to Sobaya tonight with P- for Japanese Restaurant Week. I had the duck soba, and she had the chirashi udon. Both very good – rich broths, handmade noodles with bite – impressive. What was more impressive was the starters, especially the yuba “sushi”, which was bean curd skin wrapped around fresh soft tofu, and then offered with real wasabi and dumpling soy sauce. Outstanding, and 20% off this week. Recommended. Afterwards, P- had a chocolate craving, which was satisfied by going to Max Brenner’s Chocolate by the Bald Man, the neighborhood edition. This new cocoa outpost around the corner is way less crowded than the flagship store, but just as audacious. We had crepes to top off desert, but it was just way too rich. Maybe we should have had the ice cream at Sobaya instead.

Trip on Saturday to DC, woo hoo. P- gets a 5 day girls night out….

Posing

Weddings upcoming: our blogger friend MJ in December, my cousin in Toronto in June.

Clips from the recent New York Times: Asian Americans just can’t crack the pop music scene. The hunt for the source of that autumn Windows background.

Friday dinner in Chinatown at Danny Ng’s. Better than average, too much MSG though. Afterwards, went for bubble tea at tea n’ tea on Mott. Not bad.

P’s sister had her birthday/passing the CPA party at Congee Village. Fantastic food, hopeless maitre’d. Once seated, they got 9 dishes out in 15 minutes. Try to go when it isn’t busy.

Brunch Sunday at P.J. Clarke’s with AS and family. That was so heavy that we didn’t even have dinner.

DC trip coming up on Saturday – looking forward to getting away, not looking forward to it being this particular conference.

Yearbook

I was over at P-‘s parents’ house and was looking over her aunt’s yearbook from 1967. Yes, it was from 40 years ago, and it had plenty of pictures of nuns wearing the super-old fashioned whipples. However, it was extremely complete. The sign of a good yearbook is one where the pictures have captions, and that the captions give the names of the people in the photos. In this one, every photo was captioned and had names. You can see the types of things that were important at the time (including Vietnam) and be amazed at number of Chinese students that were there at the time. There was even a Chinese teacher that taught French.

I was editor of my high school yearbook, and I know how hard it is to put together (we had exactly 1 computer, an IBM XT with WordPerfect 3.1 at the time). All of the layout was still done by hand even in my time.