Friday night we went to dinner with two friends who work at the Institute of Psychology. Because of SARS, we haven't seen them nearly as much in the last month as usual, and they've mostly stayed at home and worked from there. Their Institute is being extensively renovated during this time, so it would have been closed anyway. But many of their students have gone back to their home towns and the rest have not had a good place to work or much to do.

For some reason, they'd gotten the impression that we don't eat meat any more. I can trace that back to a conversation on the phone where the woman had been worried that we wouldn't be able to get food on campus. There are some very good stores for getting vegetables, milk and yogurt, and tofu, but not meat (other than some frozen stuff), but I'd said that we could certainly get by on that. So the husband, who is originally from Guangdong and is a wonderful cook, tried to make vegetarian versions of everything he cooked (including what we termed "gong bao doufu gan'r" -- Kung Pao dried tofu). They also made some fish dishes, and it was all very good. What was really wonderful is that my wife was able to really participate in the conversation in Chinese. Being able to speak in your native language to non-native speakers is a skill in itself, and one that not many people have. the wife in this couple in particular is exceptionally easy to speak to in Chinese. She's originally from Northeast China and so has a fairly standard accent, but she's also very good at speaking slowly and choosing words her non-native speaker is likely to know. So it was really a delightful evening all around, and a nice benchmark of my wife's progress in learning Chinese.

In thinking about the meat/vegetarian question, I realized one stupid thing that I do is that I generally avoid eating beef in the U.S. (because the whole concept of "prions" seems extremely weird and frightening), but not over here, because "China doesn't have mad cow disease." It's plausible that they don't, because why would they be shipping beef byproducts here from England and Europe. On the other hand, what's the chance that people would know that they had this relatively rare disease here if they did? Maybe it is time to give up meat after all, starting with civet cats

One of the interesting things about living in China is the ready access to recorded music and video. Certainly some of it is pirated, although it's a bit difficult to figure out. I think the US recording industry is really making a mistake in pricing its products as high as they do -- I think people in the US would be happy to buy DVDs of their favorite movies and TV shows instead of renting them. Perhaps they do and I just missed out on it, just like it took me a long time to figure out that the DVDs look a lot better on my computer screen than they do on our TV.

One of the series I've been watching is The Sopranos, because I've always been intrigued by it when I've seen it hotel rooms when traveling. Also because it's easy to see parallels between the Soprano organization and the current regime here, people trying to adapt the old ways to modern times and having some trouble getting it to work out (NOTE: this should not be taken to imply any *other* parallels between the Soprano organization and the Chinese Communist Party). Anyway, today I looked at their website, and was surprised to see an ad for this book:

described as:

A NEW book that illustrates the strange parallels between the universe of Tony Soprano and the world of Tao Te Ching.

Apparently they run excerpts each week on this webpage: http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/community/tao3.shtml

So you can learn about Taoism and the Mafia together!