Tomorrow will be my first full week of living in China.

Here’s my apt building:

Using a car is impractical in the city, so people bike:

My bike is somewhere in there. I am the worst bicyclist in all of history.

I’m kind of disappointed in the quality of these Facebook hosted pictures. Their Java applet uploader widget is cool and works well, they give free hosting and have a neato people tagging system, they let me use their bandwidth for free, but I still wish the quality of the pictures were higher. I’m thinking about developing a little picture hosting service for myself.

Last night we had dinner out: Chinese food, my favorite category. We ordered this amazingly good dish that I had last time I was here: chicken and chili peppers. The way that it is prepared is fairly straightforward: take 1 chicken and equal parts chili peppers, chop into tiny pieces and toss the whole mess in the deep fryer.

Garnish with ‘Prickly Ash’ – a peppercorn that works like Novocaine, numbing your tongue and mouth to give you some release from extreme spicyness.

It’s very very spicy:

Here is our reaction:

We also had a specialty of the house: sweet and sour fish. A whole fish is deep fried and put in sweet and sour sauce, both of these dishes are crazy delicious.

That’s it for our exciting dinner. I wish Chinese food in the US was that good. Also as cheap: 3 mains, 2 starters, 1 desert, 3 big bottles of beer each – $10 a person, and that’s a fancy pants meal.

Epilogue:

Searching for more chicken amongst the chili peppers:

Getting some watermelon on our way home: