I’m not a big breakfast person. Waking up early for work for nearly 5 years (and going to bed late) really messed up my eating patterns, and I’ve found that my lack of hunger in the AM has followed me to China.

The other day a friend called and asked if I wanted to have a late lunch/early dinner (it was about 3pm, I’d just woken up). I thought it would be ok to go with her and have a quick breakfast snack, and off we went onto Nanjing road to what she called a ’soup place’.

Now, I grew up eating soup. Heinz tomato soup was a cornerstone of lunchtime whenever my Dad and I were spending ‘quality time’ together (watching Home and Away and Neighbous). This, however, had done next to nothing to prepare me for the PWOPER CHINESE VERSION. (Edit: Did I say China?! I meant TAIRANESE!)

So in we went to Zhu ji - an ‘authentic Chinese restaurant’ (finally!) (Edit: See bold above)…this translates to small, cheap and with a terrifyingly unique menu.

Ok, first dish…no suprises…it’s like beansprouty thing with peppers and an interesting (and rather tasteless) ‘meat’. After we’d finished I asked what it was, and found out it was tofu. I’m all for vegetarians getting their protein fix somewhere, but c’mon…not in my plate. Check out the brown ‘rind’ on it…I don’t know why the manufacturer even bother with trying to make it look like meat. /rant

Now THIS is what I’m talking about! Roast beef, thin strips, in my face. Thanks. I wish I’d had some Warburton’s thick crusty white bread, some mustard and a little butter to hand…Oh gawd….I’m a horrible expat scummy English…

Although I totally forgot pancake day this year (the best of all religious ‘holidays’), I felt a littler closer to God after eating this. Pancakes and chicken and beansprouts and peppers and hmmmm lovely. It was a bit like the calm before the storm because next up…

Soup time! Now, I like to try different things…and this looked pretty innocuous. Hot water, check. Green stuff, check. Meat? Well…if you can call it that…

Out of the soup popped a whole load of stuff which I sure as hell hadn’t seen in any butcher’s shop before (and I used to practically camp out in the butcher’s in Sturton le Steeple to buy drumsticks (the sweet kind not the chicken kind)). I made the terrible mistake of asking if these were mushrooms in the bowl…and my friend replied:

No, they’re all different parts of a cow’s internal organs.

Damn…but I’d come too far to back out, so I slurped down a bowl or two, trying desperately not to chew too long on the bobbly matter that was slipping down my throat. I needed something bland and safe to take away the fear…

…and here it is. A big block of tasteless tofu! With some onions on the top (I think they put them on everything to add the X-Factor).

Next time I go for soup, I’m asking for a full ingredients list and a quality assurance that the meat is organic and farmed away from nuclear plants (and I’ll certainly have a couple more beers before sitting down to eat).

Want to add some spice to your new Facebook chat conversations? Here are the obvious (and maybe not so obvious) smilies/emoticons/emotes that you can use in your Facebook chats! Just type what’s under the picture and it’ll pop up in your chat!

Happy emote: :) or :-)

Really happy emote: :D or :-D

Wink emote: ;) or ;-)

Happy eyes: ^_^

Laughing eyes: >:o

Cat smile: :3

Grumpy: >:-(

Sad: :( or :-(

Crying emote: :’(

Shocked emote: :o or :-o

Glasses emote: 8) or 8-)

Cool shades: 8-|

Rude: :p or :-p

Woot?!: O.o

Dork emote: -_-

Duhhh emote: :/ or :\

Devil emote: 3:)

Angel emote: O:)

Kiss emote: :-* or :*

Love emote: <3

Pacman: :v

Robot: :|]

Weird guy’s face: :putnam:

If you find any new ones, add them in the ‘comments’ and I’ll update this list!

If you found this useful, please DIGG IT! Thanks!

It was just a normal day in cyberspace, when suddenly my Facebook window had a couple of grey buttons at the bottom:

I’d heard that Facebook was testing its chat client across a number of networks…I wonder if China just got added or whether it’s now ‘in the wild’. Either way, I had to click!

Oooh nice little notification window popup, not harming the normal ‘home’ page. It shows your Facebook status just like MSN or Gmail chat shows your status (in grey under the name). By default it is set to ‘offline’, so you just HAVE to click ‘Go Online!’:

Damnnnnnnn nice! All inside the frame, very smooth pop out, all online people at the top and offline or idle people at the bottom. Searching is, as always with Facebook, really slick too.

So I enlisted the help of my good friend CT to test it out…although we both were feeling the pressure of using it for the first time so we made a couple of spelling mistakes :S

Notice the grey bar which now stretches the length of the window, which carries all of your different conversations in (like the windows taskbar does for MSN). Magic. If you have too many chats open (not likely), then it auto hides a few:

It looks like Facebook Notifications have been moved to the bottom right now, next to the chat which seems sensible (and explains why I couldn’t find them yesterday!).

What’s left? Oh yeah…POPOUT! When I clicked on ‘pop-out chat’ I was a bit suprised by the size of the window (click to enlarge):

But it works very nicely, and there’s certainly plenty of space for…well…chatting.

So…it’s here and it’s easy to use and certainly undaunting (which is a major factor that FB had to face to get the ‘casual’ Facebook users onto a chat client). If they haven’t missed the ‘peak’ of Facebook interest (when the casuals were excited about linking up with their old friends from school) then it could be the app which keeps their interest in the medium term, and hurts other web based IMs like Messenger online and Gchat.

File transfer could be an issue which stops them from toppling the client-based MSN/Yahoo/Google, but hey…if you want to send a picture then just link to your Facebook gallery (links work but only if you include the http:// ).

Exciting times! Now where’s the ‘appear offline’ function…

Many people buy McDonald’s (should that be McDonald’s’s?) delicious food when their blood alcohol content is around 0.65, but the next day are left with the sneaky ‘extra’ cheesburger (the one that you eyes wanted but your belly couldn’t take) left sitting confined in its brown paper cell.

Today, I’m going to let you into a secret, previously hidden in the world of professional chefs, which will let you take that drab, limp, lifeless bread and beef patty combo and turn it into the hangover meal that it always dreamed of being!

Recipe - McDonald’s’s’s Cheesburger

Ingredients
1 McDonald’s cheesburger (14-20hrs old)
1 Foreman Grill

Directions

First locate your burger. If you can’t find it, it’s probably underneath the beer cans on your coffee table. If not there, check the bin (it’s easy to throw single burgers away when cleaning up after a McDo binge).

Now prepare your burger for cooking. Be careful to remove all paper packaging BEFORE cooking, as this can seriously affect the taste of the burger (and it can also turn your kitchen into the set of Backdraft).

Now preheat your grill by plugging it in and shutting the lid. Foreman experts will know that there is no temperature setting on this, the red model, and so just wait until the little orange light turns off (DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP).

This step is optional, but I always like to test the temperature of the grill by placing the tip of my tongue on the grill lid and holding it there for around 6-9 seconds. If you can smell the feint odor of burning hair or skin, the grill is ready to go!

Now place your prepared burger on your heated Foreman grill. It should be as central as possible (to take advantage of the vertical grill-lines) and attempt to position the cheese corners so that they point to around 5:20 (am or pm).

Using the handle of the grill, compact the burger from a top to bottom (12 to 6, North to South, Up to Down, There to Here) manner. Make the grill earn its corn, but don’t squash it down too hard, or you will end up with a McSmoothie.

After roughly 4 minutes and 17 seconds, remove the burger from the grill (remembering to lift the lid first!). Repeat from Step 5 if required. Serve on a fresh piece of kitchen roll and don’t forget - throw out that skanky pickled gherkin before taking a bite!

Just like our beloved Ajisen Ramen, 78 is a cheap and fast noodle restaurant near Jing’an Temple (静安寺), on the same road as Burger King and The Coffee Bean. They serve quite a good range of stuff (soups, noodles, hotpots, meat skewery things) and all the main stuff was between 20 and 30 rmb.

Ever since going on a modified version of the Atkins’ Diet (modified with unhealthy stuff), I have developed an occasional longing for fried eggs (I used to eat perhaps six per day while ‘training’ (lol)). The sight of this little beggar almost made me fall off my slightly uncomfortable stool:

It is a hot pot, and I actually burned my thumb on the bowl to prove how hot it was. Bit stupid really. I’m not quite sure where the egg-white went, but there’s something about that yolk that made me want to take it behind the middle school lockers and get it pregnant (TM Tracy Jordan, 30 Rock).

My partner in crime had a soup thing:

With a pork chop chaser:

I really appreciate this idea of being able to order fried meat as a supplement to almost anything, as it does seem to plug the gaps that the soupwater doesn’t fill.

To share we had a slightly uninspiring kebab collection, including tomatoes wrapped in bacon (what sort of devil made up that crooked recipe) and a sausage on a stick. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sausage fan (HEY - NO) but it seemed out of place in the company of the super chicken pieces to its right. Whatever, I still ate it :P