The Great Pasta Confusion

I have noticed that the Chinese are very good at getting Western foods, particularly pastas, mixed up. When my mom came back from her teacher-exchange to China, she said that at one point her Chinese host took her to a Western restaurant. In the menu, there was a dish called Steak and Lasagna, except when they ordered it, there wasn't any lasagna; there was spaghetti. Her Chinese host kept calling it lasagna, and my mom tried to tell her, "That's not lasagna, it's spaghetti." (Of course, we wouldn't serve steak and spaghetti together, anyway.)

Now I've noticed a lot of pasta-confusions of my own: in the school cafeteria, which is run by a Chinese restaurant company. I've seen penne called macaroni, macaroni called penne, spaghetti called penne, macaroni called lasagna, etc. Luckily, the Chinese only know about those four types of pasta, because they'd be even more confused if you mixed in some of the more complicated pastas. For example, I'm doubtful that they could find out the difference between ravioli and tortellini, or spaghetti, linguini, and fettuccini.

You want Hello Kitty on the hood of your car?

It's cold right now. Really cold. The weather here fluctuates a ton; just a few weeks ago it was warm out, and then it was cold and wet again, then a bit warmer, and then today it was raining. Chinese weather is crazy. I guess it fits in with the rest of the country!

My bed has been bugging the heck out of me lately, because the mattress itself is rock-solid (no figurative language here, it literally is rock-solid), and the only way to deal with it is to use a mattress pad, except that obviously the mattress-makers and the mattress pad-makers obviously didn't exactly collaborate, because the pad is ever-so-slightly bigger than the bed and is constantly sliding down. Plus, my dad insists that I have my bed pushed completely against the wall, except that if it's against the wall, my blanket can't go over the edge of my bed and that really bothers me. I hate sharing a room, especially when I'm in a tiny apartment and it means that I literally never get any personal space except for when I'm in the bathroom. And when my little brother doesn't bother to knock enough, so he frequently walks in on me while I'm in my underwear, I've got problems, especially when he (or my mom or dad or whoever) fully realizes that I'm getting dressed, but walks off and leaves the door wide open, anyway.

I don't really have too much else to say, because I've been thinking about my drawing and everything recently. John says that I need more pictures on my blog, but that's because this is a word blog, not a picture blog. Anyway, that said, I haven't had much luck thinking of things to write recently. But there have been increased sightings of Hello Kitty-themed cars in the vicinity; three, to be exact. The first one was green with white Hello Kitties on the hood and doors (we have seen this one multiple times, because obviously whoever owns it lives in the apartment complex next to ours), the second one was white with a pink Hello Kitty on the hood, and the third, and most horrifying, was white with pink Hello Kitties on the hood and sides, plus about fifty Hello Kitty bobble-heads and such lining the dashboard. This one was stopped at an intersection, and John and I took note of the fact that there was a man driving. Unfortunately, I haven't ever had my camera with me. The Hello Kitty cars remind me of how I've seen the red Beijing Olympics logo on a couple of items it should never go on, namely another car and a grand piano.

Computers, Food, and Art, What Else?

We got our computers for school finally. I'm a little bit frustrated with them because they're Macbooks, which are great for some things, but they still have their own frustrations. I like Windows for having a task bar on the bottom of the screen , where I can see all of the applications that I have running, and actually having a RIGHT-CLICK BUTTON!!! On the Macbooks, you have to either put two fingers on the trackpad and then click the button, which often accidentally turns into a left-click anyway, or press control and click. When I used Macbooks in the computer lab at my old school, (and, by the way, what's the point of having a computer lab if there's laptops in it?), I never noticed, but that was before I really started using right-click. Augh...

Anyways, I'm going through a SERIOUS Mexican food craving right now. They have Mexican restaurants here, but they aren't nearly good enough. However, as my dad has said already, there are some really good Muslim restaurants around here with Western-Chinese Muslim food, which we have discovered is really good. It's nice and spicy, which satisfies some of my Mexican-food cravings, and there is this really good flat bread called "nang," and one of the restaurants we go to serves this "pizza," which is nang bread with this tasty ground-lamb-with-spices stuff on top. We sometimes call it "taco pizza" because it tastes almost exactly like a good beef taco.

I've decided to take up drawing again. I've tried drawing two or three times before, but then I get impatient and stop. Now, though, one of my friends (an artist) convinced me to start drawing again. I don't mean realistic drawing, I definitely don't have enough patience for that, I'm more doing manga- and anime-based artwork. Before you start imagining little girls with green hair, gigantic shiny eyes, and pointy chins, you need to know that there are many different kinds of manga styles, and some are better than others. I don't like the little green-hair-big-eye-pointy-chin girl, either. I've also joined a website called deviantART, which is kind of like a Facebook for artists, so if you want to see my art, I suggest you email me and ask for the web address to my profile, because I don't really want everyone I don't know who comes across this blog to find my dA page, at least not yet.

I've also been doing some painting, charcoal drawing, and things like that. I think it's a lot of fun! I think that my two favorite media have to be charcoal and thick acrylic paint. Thick paint is so much fun, because you can put in lots of texture and it's really easy to fix mistakes. I've also started designing a character of my own, so if I ever happen to get a story written about her, I'll put parts of it here, too.