Grub Club: Le Triskell

Last night Fearless Leader chose Le Triskell for this week's grub club, a creperie that Five has previously tried to talk me into but I've never gone for.  I've eaten crepes before - in Paris, no less - and I just wasn't convinced that they make much of a meal.  However, in the history of Grub Club, I've only missed one dinner, and as I've already had one good experience with the French this week, I figured it was a Sign. 

I imagined all the food was going to be crepes, and I couldn't have been more wrong.  Domestic Goddess, being on a quest to eat her way through the animal kingdom, decided to try the rabbit.  I can't imagine where they found a rabbit in Mongolia, but the waitress assured us that it was local.  Go figure.  The phrase, "It tastes like chicken," was used, as well as the phrase, "Gamey chicken."  I'm pretty sure I've eaten rabbit before, what with growing up with Shaggy, so I let her and Five keep it all to themselves.

It is possible that crepes do not make much of a meal.  We wouldn't know.  If you've wondered why bread is called the staff of life, you've obviously never eaten French bread.  Our server brought out a couple of these baskets of sliced baguettes, still warm, complete with butter, and we devoured them like a plague of locusts.  And asked for refills.  Twice.  Note: refills aren't free.  Also note: we were all happy to pay.

I chose savory crepes for myself, the "complete" which included egg, ham, and cheese.  It was delicious.  It also came with a bit of salad, which was also yummy, but not as yummy as the french fries that came with whatever it was that Geek ordered.  I could've stolen all her fries and not regretted it for a second.

However, dessert was the best.  Domestic Goddess wanted a sampler platter, and some genius (me!) suggested everybody order a different one, and then just pass them around.  The same genius knew what she wanted and didn't want to share, and I'm pretty sure as people were eating the crepe Five ordered (also what I was having) she was wishing she'd done the same.  Most of the club agreed that ours - the "Triskell" which had caramel and ice cream - was the best, although there were a couple of dissenters in favor of the caramel and salted butter.

Le Triskell is north of Sukhbaatar Square, if you take the street running along the east side (the ballet side).  It's on the left as you go north, less than a block past the French Bistro.

OH, and I just realized that I forgot to tell you one of the most amazing things about them, and had to edit this - the owner saw us standing outside to hail taxis, and offered us his driver to get us back to Zaisan.  How awesome is that?

Dreamer's Ball

I've been dreaming of going to see the jazz combo at the Peace Hotel for many, many moons.  As I mentioned last fall, I've seen jazz a time or two in my life.  Socrates may have been right; he said that for most people it would be pretentious, but that he had a feeling I genuinely appreciated it.  As for that, I don't know.  My tastes in music are eclectic, to say the least, but I actually don't listen to that much jazz, unless it's live, and for that, I blame Paul Senzee, who took me and Christa to the Majestic as impressionable young freshmen.  Ah, memories.

One way or another, I decided the Peace Hotel was on my hit list for my revisitation of Shanghai, and JoAnn and her hubby volunteered to come with me, being musicians themselves, not to mention my host-es with the most-es this week.  I was thrilled to have the company, especially since each table has a minimum order of 750 kuai.

The Peace Hotel was built by Shanghai bighead Victor Sassoon as the Sassoon House, which included a variety of offices as well as the Cathay Hotel, in 1929.  It was the most prestigious hotel in Shanghai until the communists had their say.  It is also famous for its beautiful Art Deco architecture, which you can still see.  After we found our way to the bar, I went back and took photos of the fixtures, which were dazzling.  Someday, I might have a house.  If I do, there's a very good chance I'm gonna decorate the hell out of that sucker, and put magic art deco swirls all over it, like the art deco fairy got violently ill all over it (or maybe just in one room - I may have plans for other rooms).  Either way, there's just something about that style that appeals to me, for the same reasons that I love reading fantasy...this world is just a little too mundane for my liking.

They've had jazz there nearly as long as it's been open.  According to the blurb on the menu, originally the musicians were brought in from other countries, but before long Chinese musicians caught the fever and became the staple performers...for as long as it took the "new management" to decide jazz wasn't part of their dogma and shut it down.  Years down the road the jazz bar was reopened and to this day the original performers are there every night at 7, belting out jazz standards and a few that aren't.  Apparently you can request songs at 30 kuai a pop, and this is supposed to improve the experience, but I didn't realize that until just now.  Also improving the experience would be to not go with a couple of musicians, who definitely enjoyed the ambiance and the history but found the music to be quaint, and the musicians "sweet."  I love JoAnn and Michael, and wouldn't have traded them for the best listening experience in the world, FYI.

But at the same time, you have to respect the hell out of these guys, for the passion they have to keep making music, and for what they must have gone through, being jazz musicians in the time of Maoism.

We invited Socrates to come with us.  I wasn't sure I wanted to see him while I was back, because I can't always count on him to play nice, and as he's been offered a job in Africa this seemed likely to be the last time I saw him, possibly ever.  I didn't want my last memory of him to be a negative one, and it turned out that it wasn't.  We had a nice chat and he wound me up a little with his view of marriage and I probably annoyed the hell out of him with my unwelcome honesty, but I did miss him.  (If he is reading this, yes, I threw the title of this post in here for you - I assume you can figure out why it's an apt reference.  I already used "All that Jazz" for a previous title and was at a loss - I like to think I'm witty and this is the best I could come up with).  After the Peace Hotel Michael suggested a few other live music venues, but only the first one, Oscar's, panned out, and it ended up being an early evening, which suited me fine, since unlike UB, Shanghai hasn't banned smoking in public and I've been fighting getting sick since before the vacation.

(shang)High Lights

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  My two years living in Shanghai were an even bigger roller coaster of emotions than the typical expat experience.  I learned and grew a lot in those two years, but learning and growing is not necessarily a pleasant experience.  And I kind of hold that against Shanghai.  Don't take that to mean that I otherwise would have loved the city and its people (far from it), but I can recognize that my feelings about Shanghai are tainted by what I went through there.

So.  Why the hell did I go back?  Most of the time I have almost nothing good to say about it.  Almost.

Short answer?  These kids made me promise.  Not these ones, specifically - this is an old photo because I was an idiot and I didn't take any photos while I was visiting the school - although these girls were in my belly dance ECA and are particularly dear to me.  But the kids I used to teach DID ask if I would ever come back, and I said maybe I'd come for a visit.  And although I love my older students, I've missed the heck out of my little ones, and worried about them.  The transition to a new art teacher has been rougher than it has any business being, and while I appreciate the vindication, I wish for their sakes my replacement had been so good they all forgot about me within a month.

There were lots of things I wanted to revisit while I was in Shanghai, and most of them I didn't get around to.  I made it to Ikea for new pillows, and Marie's for screen printing inks, and ate at Whisk (and had the Coco Cabana for dessert, since, as Roisin always said, you can count it as a serving of fruit) and ordered in a Brooklyn from New York Style Pizza.  And I did all the touristy things I'll write about in another day or two.  But as I was walking down the street to catch the subway to Tianzifang, after telling Siobhan I wouldn't meet them for lunch, I looked around the street corner where I used to live, and realized that the shopping and the food wasn't my life for the last two years.  They were good, no doubt about it, but they weren't what Shanghai meant to me.  The essence of Shanghai could be summed up with just these few photographs.  My students, of course.  My street, above.  I walked down Hongquan Lu through the heart of K-Town several times a day.  Our school was there.  I was in that grocery store constantly.  The smells of Korean food, and the safe and peaceful feeling I got from the surrounding apartment buildings, like they were sheltering me from the more tumultuous moments in my life.  The sound of the bell ringing at 7-11, which I could hear from my apartment and which kept me company when I was illustrating after midnight; I didn't feel like the only person alive in the world.

And, of course, my friends...these two bitches most especially.  Gemma and I were roommates that first year, and she put up with my passive-aggressiveness, my moods, and people who took advantage of me and still lets me hang out with her, in spite of the fact that she is MUCH cooler than me.  And then there's Siobhan, who is one of the nicest, most genuine people I know, and has supported me and encouraged me, even though I don't think I give much back to her (other than answering some pretty embarrassing questions about being Mormon).  And I was going to ditch them to go to Tianzifang?  Screw that.  I ended up doing the last of my shopping in Qibao's old town.  Which meant that I had to smell stinky tofu one (looooong) last time, but I think that's a fair price for a little more time with my girl friends.

(And here is what I had to go to Tianzifang for...I promised to bring Lit a coin purse back like the one I had that said, "Money is fucking my favorite."  They no longer carry that one, but I found a decent replacement...I'll let you wonder which one I got...)

Long, Strange Trip

I can honestly say I've never been so pleased with a trip that included food poisoning and a flight delayed 13 hours after already spending 9 hours in the very, very cold Beijing airport (I'm not kidding about the cold...having no other option I bought a bottle of water, drank it all, then filled it with scalding hot water.  That did the trick).

I had big plans for yesterday.  I was going to busily upload photos to facebook and start blogging about the trip - starting with the food poisoning!  (That post is to come).  I figured I'd be in my apartment before noon, fix myself a delicious bowl of pasta for lunch, maybe go get things in order at school so I could kick out all my reports.  Instead, at 11:30 I was being shunted from one place to another...I think we were either being ushered back through immigration or waiting for a second shuttle bus.

See, apparently it was windy in UB.  There were lots of conspiracies floating around - that the wind wasn't that bad, for example, and they just didn't want to send off a flight that wasn't full - but today there are four or five teachers out whose flights were completely canceled, and the flight home was probably the roughest I've ever been on, so I don't doubt it anymore, and therefore, all the vitriol aimed at the Air China representative was probably misplaced.  I didn't yell at anyone, for once.  When I was talking about the fact that this would be great blog material with my new friends, I was warned to avoid bitterness, that nobody likes a bitter blogger...well, I know at least one of my six readers looks forward to my angry blogs (right, Emily?) but I ended up finding the whole situation remarkably copacetic.  I just wanted a blanket or a hotel room or something, because DAMN that airport was cold.

I did mentally complain a little about the loss of the time to unwind and unpack, but I couldn't get too upset about it.  Because in the process of being led off to the hotel in the airport, and then to the hotel outside the airport, and then back again through immigration, et cetera, I got to know a couple of my fellow travelers - a French guy and an Israeli/American one who live here.  I NEVER do this.  I usually find talking to the people I'm stuck on a plane - or in an airport - with awkward and pointless, but these guys were cute and interesting and so I spent a lot of the day talking to them and ended up trading numbers with them.  Whether or not we end up meeting again in UB (which I would like) I was really grateful to have met them yesterday, because it meant that instead of writing this as one of those bitter, angry posts, I'm telling you about another rainbow.  And as much as I would have liked to be at home in my bed, now that it's over with, I don't think I'd trade the experience.  Which is not to say that I'm going to start chatting my seatmates or anything, because I still stand by the fact that people are annoying - one only has to go to China to figure this out.  But more on that later.

Grub Club: Nagomi

It's a good thing that sushi is my new favorite thing, because Mad Science picked it for our latest grub club adventure.  There is - as far as I know - one kaitenzushi (conveyor belt sushi) place in UB, and Nagomi is that place.

If you've never had kaitenzushi before, each plate has a couple of pieces on it, and whatever you want, you just grab off the train.  Or if you wait too long to make up your mind, you can ask your friends to grab it for you...or hope it comes around again.  The plates are color-coded according to their price, and at the end, the waitress just adds up the values of all your plates.  I don't know how much I care for conveyor belts delivering our food, but there was one great thing about it.  We didn't have to wait long for our food, which is a constant problem with grub club.  That meant we had the time to visit Five's favorite place - Ti-Amo, conveniently located right across the street - for ice cream.

At first I was not impressed.  They didn't have the variety that I loved about Sho - or the cute, Cali-trained sushi chef (owner???) who came over and talked to me and Five when I dragged her there last Saturday after visiting the orphanage (we were also offered free wine, and then beer on that visit - I've never felt so bad about having to decline a drink before!)  But there is something nice about getting to see your choices before you make them, and all the dishes that we took off the train were really fresh.

I had a couple of different things - their kappa maki (cucumber rolls) were good and the egg thing, pictured above, was really nice.  They also had inari sushi - rice stuffed in sweet, fried tofu wrappers - and that was delicious.

However, most of their plates consisted of your classic sushi - a slice of raw fish on a gob of rice.  This one was spotted...something.  I didn't have that one - I stuck mostly to salmon - but Mad Science and Fearless Leader made it their goal to try everything.  And if you can't tell by their stack of plates, they very nearly succeeded.

Nagomi is on Seoul Street, the first block east of the circus, on the north side inside the Khan Bank building.

The Greatest Show on Earth

Barnum, Bailey, and all the Ringling Brothers can eat their hearts out.  For - I think - the second time since I came to Mongolia, there's a performance on at the State Circus, in the heart of UB, and it's a doozy.  It was an international collaboration that involved performers from Mongolia and twelve other countries, each better than the last.

While the state circus is a permanent building, it's built on a small scale, and I thought this performance gave you more of an idea what a traditional circus (minus the animals) might have been like back in the days of PT and his humbug.

I mean, we had a freaking ringmaster, for crying out loud...

 ...not to mention a live band...

...and real roustabouts pulling the ropes to raise and lower a couple of very buff Canadian boys.  None of this electrical pulleys nonsense.

I went on the second night of the engagement, while some more of my friends went the night before.  I was warned about the Canadian boys, who I can not deny are quite toned.  I have to say there is something a little more homoerotic about men performing together than there is about women.

See what I mean?  However, Geek and I both agreed that didn't bother us in the least - still talking about the men here, although the Mongolian contortionists were amazing.  We were particularly intrigued by the fact that one of them was what we considered "real person sized."  Most contortionists are ridiculously skinny, but one of these girls was big enough to be noticeable.  Five and I both walked away thinking we ought to try it.

But then again....maybe not.  This was the American contortionist, and if the first minute of the first performance proved to me that circuses exist purely to drive home exactly how inept I am when it comes to anything involving coordination and athleticism - and it did - this was just showing off.  I mean, I couldn't hope to shoot that bow and hit the target, let alone do it with my feet while upside down and twisted like a pretzel.  Come ON!

Once upon a time my great uncle Ray taught me a couple of rope tricks at the Duncan family reunion and I felt pretty proud of myself.  Good thing I hadn't seen these guys!  They later did a performance in which they jumped - from a run, no springboards involved - through hoops.  Stacked on hoops.  Stacked on more hoops.  They looked like seals flying through the air and then sliding onto the ground.  The finale of that performance required one of the acrobats to stand on the other's shoulders in order to stack the rings to their full height.  If you have to stand on someone's shoulders to finish the stack, mere mortals have no business jumping through the damn thing, but he did it.  It was crazy.  I have no pictures of that part, because that was after the third time the usher told me to stop taking pictures, and I was starting to worry I'd get kicked out.

The Russian act had the biggest OH MY GOSH THOSE GUYS ARE GOING TO DIE! factor for me.  Remember what I said about a more traditional circus?  The men throwing these tiny little Russian devotchkas back and forth set up their equipment at half time, and the "net" was a strip of what looked like plastic two or three feet off the ground.  It held up the guy with the broken arm (how did he break it?  One does wonder these things) standing on it without too much give, but I was just as glad those girls didn't get dropped.  I might have screamed like a little girl at one point.

Remember what I said about the first act driving home what an athlete I am NOT?  This was the first act.  I can't double dutch, jump rope backwards, or cross it.  I'm doing good if I can keep up a good rhythm.  Apart from a lot of other really neat things (four Mongolian guys stacked horizontally jumping rope, or the one skipping rope by flopping off his belly like a landed fish) you had these show-offs.  Need I say more?

This guy was amazing, too.  Not to mention fun to look at, with all his pretty muscles.  He did a sort of contortion/Mongolian dance thing which was amazingly fluid and beautiful.  It was like watching poetry.

Finally, what kind of circus doesn't have a clown?  Not this circus.  Their clown hailed from Spain.  I wasn't that impressed with his first act, mainly because Geek got pulled up to be given a balloon swan after he popped his big balloon in my face.  He also pulled Fire Marshall into the ring, but you'll have to read about that on his blog.  I have to say that the most magical moment of the whole night was hearing the kids in the audience giggling over his antics.  His gags were killing them like a minute after they were finished, and it was infectious.  I'd go again in a heartbeat if I weren't busy the rest of this week, even if the tickets weren't the ridiculously reasonable price of 15,000 tugrugs.  I'll have my fingers crossed this becomes an annual event, because it was awesome.  Needless to say, I have spent the last 24 hours dreaming about running away and joining the circus, and not just because of the gorgeous men. Although they definitely help.

A Wild Sheep Chase

FYI - The title of this post is stolen from a Haruki Murakami book.  I'll try to make it up to him with this little blurb - A Wild Sheep Chase is an excellent read.  In fact, I've liked all the books by Mr. Murakami that I've read.  If you're into fantastic realism but don't want to spent a month trying to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I suggest a Haruki Murakami novel.  I particularly liked South of the Border, West of the Sun.  Anywho.

I decided before I came to Mongolia that this would be a GREAT place to do felting with students.  As a teacher, of course I believe in multiculturalism, but I also believe in preserving and cherishing my students' own cultures.  To that end, I've been looking for someone selling wool since the beginning of the year.  I was starting to believe I was going to have to buy raw fleece and REALLY teach the kids about wool and felting when I turned the project over to our office Wonder Woman.  She made a few calls and found me a wool supplier.  Ironically, they are the people who supply the Tsagaan Alt Wool Shop, which is one of the places I went, asking if they sold wool.

The lady in charge told me a little more about their programs.  Her English was great, and she's been all over the world teaching about felting.  I'm hoping I might be able to get her to do a workshop for me - I wouldn't actually mind having the students clean and dye the wool, if I knew a little more about it myself.  She took me to their storage room (a few blocks west of the office/workshop) and we got a kilogram of white wool and a variety of other colors.  I'm going to start with my ninth-graders, having them felt a small wall hanging of white, with a design they will create on top.  She asked if we had carders, and I said we didn't, so for a small fee, she helped me card my wool.  Let me tell you, carding a kilo of wool is hard work!  The workshop was awesome, equipped with enough spinning wheels to make Sleeping Beauty nervous.  I'm excited to be able to do more with my kids.

I was supposed to meet the girls for - get this! - Sleeping Beauty at the ballet that night, so I decided to walk back, stopping at Namaste for some Indian for lunch.  I took a detour next to Sky Department store to walk across a footbridge, and along the way found out where ice sculptures go to die.  Some of them were actually recognizable, but most of them were featureless by this point.