So Ubiquitous Jess’s boyfriend Tom is currently in Shenzhen on business [edited to add - he thinks this makes him sound very grown up and official and so perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, "tom's in Shenzhen playing with his techno junkie toys and getting paid to do it".  He prefers to think of himself "hanging in the Zhen"] and he’s been taking in the local gastronomic delights to be had there.  His comment last night was “if i have to watch one more LIVE animal being grilled or boiled…”

Dot dot dot.  Tom is a gentle soul, I can’t imagine him doing anything too violent, though his sense of justice is also acute so I quite understand his disgust at throwing live prawns on a grill.  Ugh.

Anyway, he just sent me a couple of photos which he’s generously allowed me to publish here, taken in a posh “restaurant of the world” (self styled as such of course):

See, when I talk about the “real” China, I guess that I’m talking from a slightly warped perspective.  I lived in a very muslim area in the middle of one of the world’s biggest deserts.  No Fangs, No Claws is, I believe the rule of thumb in muslim cooking.  Also, crocks are kinda hard to come by when the Gobi Desert is between you and the nearest large body of tropical water.

Looks to me like Tom’s found the Real China right there…  Thanks for the pics Tom!

So I’m at home sick today (not homesick, off work sick at home), and have been curled up in bed watching a movie on my laptop.  It got me thinking about being an expat in a non-western country.  The movie was a charming US/Bollywood indie film called Outsourced, about an American call centre manager who’s told that his whole department is being outsourced to India, and to add insult to injury he’s sent out there to train his replacement.

Anyway, this guy is pretty much the only Westerner in the town and at first feels totally out of his element.  Then he slowly begins not only to get used to his surroundings, but to quite enjoy his new life and the people he’s working with.  Just when he’s pretty much acclimatised, he has to go to another town to pick up a shipment, and it so happens that this other town is a tourist haven, with Westerners everywhere.

He makes a comment to his companion, “it doesn’t feel like India anymore!”

Suddenly I had this rush of memories of China, living in Dushanzi where there were just three of us Westerners most of the time, surrounded by Han and Uyghur and Kazak and Uzbek neighbours.  That to me feels like the *real* China.  When I visited my first major tourist spot in Dunhuang, it was so strange to see the place diluted by Western tourists.  And then even more so in Xi’an, like the “real” China that I’d grown to know whas somehow less China with all those westerners around.  And I had this wierd pang of “no, get away from this place, this is MY China!” Almost like the presence of other westerners reminded me of the fact that I was Western myself.  It reminded me on some level of that which I’d been trying to ignore – that I really didn’t fit in as well as I would have liked.

I still think a lot about China, and how much I’d like to go back there. Going there was an easy choice to make 6 years ago, my life was already in transition having finished university, without a full time job, and ready to try something totally different.  But here I am in Edinburgh and I can feel my roots going deeper and deeper here.  I sometimes wonder how deep they can go before I cease to even contemplate leaving, and on some level that saddens me, that I feel myself sinking into the comfort zone that is Edinburgh, rather than testing the limits of my experiences in strange new places…

Having said that… Hello?! This is EDINBURGH! The most beautiful city I’ve seen in my life. I’m really not complaining!

Here it is folks, finally the best interpretation of the social order of the geeks, nerds, dorks and dweebs.  It’s not a hierarchy, it’s a venn diagram!  Enjoy:

See, at this point I’d like to think that I’m a Geek, but I fear that at times I might fall into the Nerd or Dork categories.  But I’m definitely not a Dweeb.  Where do you stand?