Well eaten, warm and happy in Shanghai

Before this trip I wrote about Jinlin being Hungry, Cold, Broke and Desperate in Shanghai. Yesterday was a nice antithesis of these. We've had good food and happiness together on the earlier days as well, but now we also fulfilled our plan of buying her warm clothes for the increasingly chilling Shanghai winter. That will be needed: It's been still 12-15 C here in the past week but on some days next week the day temperatures will not rise above 5 C. We bought a coat, trousers, hat and shoes. It was nice to observe her combine practical aspects of the clothes with stylistics ones. Most women I know are very thoughtful about the appearance of their clothes and Jinlin with her art-student background is definitely no exception, to the contrary. She was extraordinary grateful and happy for my support (谢谢 你的 钱 , 我 很 开心, Xiè xiè  Nǐ de  Qián  , Wǒ  Hěn  Kāi xīn) and I was equally happy to able to use some money for something so useful when she was in need. 

I have been increasingly glad that I did in the end come to visit her this time. It is true that her studies have limited out time together and before the trip she was even hesitant whether she wants me to come now at all because of these limitations. But in the end this has not taken away much from the happiness together. It has been very nice to see how her mood here with me has seemed so much better than in some of our earlier pre-travel chats (or the days of silence that resulted from her being hesitant in chatting on bad mood)

The good food

Talking of being well eaten, the food is great here on the days we can go eating together with Jinlin. When I go to restaurants alone, I am still very limited in my possibilities. I can ask for a menu in Chinese, do the small-talk with the waiter and in the end ask for the bill and pay. But I can only read the simplest Hanyi so the menus are mostly useless to me and in the end I have to negotiate with the waiter something simple outside the menu with my "huge" food vocabulary of "meat", "noodles", "rice", "fried", "chicken", "beef", "vegetable" and "egg". Jiading is a suburb of Shanghai with few foreign tourists, so most restaurants do not have the kind of picture menus (or English menus) that can be found downtown.

Very tasty, very large lunch

But boy when we eat together! She quickly orders the table full of exquisite delicacies that explode taste-buds with delight! And here "table full" also refers to quantity: she tends to order so much food (in form of so many dishes) on one meal that 3-4 hungry people could be fed from that. In China it is considered polite to order more food than the people in table can possibly eat and Jinlin is no exception to this habit of showing how you are "generous" to your guests. If you are having the role of a "host" on a meal, you are supposed to take utmost care that your "guests" are not left hungry even if this care leads to lots of waste. Personally, I find this habit distressing, given that every year, the world wastes 1.3 billion tons of food, 33 percent of all food produced. Especially in China, with still real issues of getting its huge population fed and where dying of starvation was common in the 1950's, I feel it's sad to leave the table every time with piles of good food. There are attempts of recycling programs for the restaurant scraps but they are not working very well. So I've new tried to suggest to Jinlin in as polite and mild way as possible that we could perhaps sometimes order little bit less food. Let's see how that goes. Meanwhile I try to keep my conscience in check and enjoy :-)