But I want to cook, really......

Scott cooked dinner tonight for the boys and me. It wasn't the typical spaghetti with red sauce that I have been "cooking" for him. He went all out and cooked chicken tacos, black beans, refried beans, and spanish rice (90 second Uncle Bens). They went to Summit this afternoon and bought chicken and all the fixins. The cost for his trip to Summit was 437RMB's, that equals about 62$US. Granted he didn't just buy dinner items, he also bought some pop tarts, a couple of cans of Chef Boyarde, eggs, and vegetable oil. While we were eating dinner, I asked the question about how much the chicken cost and that leads us to Sherpa's. Sherpa's is a delivery service that delivers in the SIP area from 197 restaurants, one of which is Casa Zoe's. We have ordered from CZ two times and each time we order from the Tex-Mex menu. The average bill thru Sherpa's for CZ is not quite 200RMB. So, you do the math... it is cheaper to eat out (dine in with delivery from Sherpa's) than to cook. Now if we were to go to CZ, the bill would be about 260RMB because of drinks, therefor restaurants make a large profit off beer and soda sales. It's really crazy when you think of it, but that is why hardly no one cooks at home (and no one has a kitchen that us Westerners consider a kitchen). If you are curious, here is the link to our favorite "restaurant": http://www.sherpa.com.cn/.

Also today, I had the opportunity to go to "furniture city". Furniture city is just that, a 'city' with nothing but furniture. Furniture for what seems like for miles and miles. There is a building (or 2, or 3) for high end furniture, a few for bedroom furniture, some for living room, some for tables, some for carpet, and so on. The prices for the high end furniture was very comparable to stores in the US, if not a tad cheaper. We saw a grade A leather sofa set that was filled with down, that was 22,000RMB, very competitively priced with mid-range furniture but was definitely high end quality. There was a mattress 'shop' that had "ergonomically" styled mattress that would put temper-pedic to shame (and I love my temper-pedic). The whole shopping process was very interesting. I will have to take Scott the next time because he has not gone to furniture city (I think he is afraid!). Although, I think if he knew what was in the city he would not have let me go alone (LOL).

On another note, one of the 'joys' of being here in China is that the government has the ability to block any and all websites that they feel need to be unaccessible. Right now with the unrest in western China in the Xinjiang region (which is in far western China and we are on the eastern seaboard near Shanghai), the government has 'blocked' YouTube (still since spring), this blog site, twitter, facebook, Flickr, and wikepedia. I believe this is in part to the part that Twitter "allegedly" played in the Iranian elections. With the social networking sites so readily available and accessible they could be seen as a way to join forces and get commoners on the same page. Now I can't say that I'm complaining, but, well........ We did choose to live here and we will take the good with the bad.