Breakfast Dumplings

Small soup dumplings are one the best foods in Shanghai. They're like a little bread/pastry type ball with seasoned pork inside. The word "soup" isn't particularly apt; they have some watery stuff from the meat in there, which does taste good, but not exactly something you could sip from a spoon.

Mind you, there is enough in their to cause accident and injury; on one occasion I bit into them and this soup stuff, which was boiling had, I might add, spayed out onto my cheeks. I was in immense pain. On a different occasion the soup took a more upward trajectory and shot up my nose. Fortunately the temperature was a little less extreme and suffered nothing more than the smell of soup dumplings for the rest of the day.

The photo was taken on a weekend morning after a wander around Zhongshan Park. A wonder for me. A run for Laura. Right before this guy served these up he went out for a smoke then came in and spat on the floor of the kitchen. It wasn't enough to put us off our dumplings.

The Podcast

I'm working on the school podcast, the Extra-Curricular Activity I'm teaching this term. I've finished the artwork (pictured), though it may change, and I'm working on the theme music this afternoon. In the first meeting we had I got the students to record a few sound bites to go at the start and end of each episode; they went crazy for the whole recording process. I used my condenser microphone, something they've obviously never seen for real before, and gave them a script and said, "go".

It was funny to hear how nervous some of them got. I remember when I first tried to record myself, for some reason you can't help but talk different. Normally you just talk, not at something. As soon as you're aware your have to talk into something, everything you know about speech just goes out the window and you convince yourself you need to do something special. Nevertheless, they managed it, and it's sounding pretty good. We should have our first episode made in  about 2 weeks.