Flies time...

Has it been a week already? Where did the time go? Well, that would be where school comes in. Ah, the beginning of a new academic year. When you're out of school for a long time, you forget that New Year's Day really comes in late August/early September. That sense of possibility, of a reasonably clean slate that we're supposed to feel on January 1. Well, depending on what you occupied yourself with on December 31.

Here's the beginning of our occasional series on the Yankee Hobbit's trip to China this summer.

As I expected, the foodstuffs in China were very different from America. And not just the "cuisine." On one of our in-country flights, we were served these hard candies. Since none of us read Chinese (need an abbreviation for that-- it will reappear a lot!) we didn't know until we ate it that it was some kind of fizzy soda candy. Really cool. It felt like that first sip of a really intense, cold bottle of soda. Spent the rest of the trip trying to find some to bring back to the States, with no success. Actually, very few of us intended to eat the things as we had already been fooled once. Turns out there's a flavor of hard candy with a picture of what looked like lemon on the wrapper. SNOURC, that's all we had to go on. Our trip leader, who actually did have some Chinese fluency, handed them out and told us they were lemon drops.

Now, you know what it's like to have prepared your head for one flavor and then your taste buds encounter another. And you know what it's like when those two flavors are not really related to one another. Now imagine that the one encountered by your taste buds is not only not related to the one you were prepared for, but is one that your experience tells you doesn't really belong in candy form. Now you know what it was like to suck on what alleged to be a lemon drop but was really a corn drop. Ack.

More another day. Must raid the reserve shelf at the library!

ta...