In the US, when you complain and send back food in restaurant, you can expect (at best) a meal discount, or (at worst) a disgruntled waitress spitting in your replacement entree. In Shanghai, it can lead to a shouting match.

On our last night in Shanghai, my boyfriend and I stopped in restaurant near the train station serving Shanghainese and Hangzhou cuisine. We were famished, and ordered a wide assortment from the glossy picture menu: fish in vinegar, sliced pork, braised mushrooms with greens. There was also an odd section for Japanese food at the end of the menu, and my boyfriend started salivating over a picture of the “fresh sushi platter”, piled high with gleaming sashimi. Without thinking, we committed a cardinal sin: ordering Japanese food at a Chinese restaurant.

The dishes came out one by one. The appetizer was good. The fish was tasty. The pork was juicy. Then came the sushi platter, arranged on a tiered tray as though the fish were wedding hor d’ouevres. From afar, it looked great. Upclose, I saw little icicles on the salmon and tuna. The other fish were equally rock hard. It seemed that the kitchen had simply taken the fish out of the freezer and plopped it on the platter without even bringing it to room temperature. So much for “fresh.”

I called the waiter over and, in shaky Mandarin, told him that the fish wasn’t fresh, and asked if we could please send it back and choose something else.

“What do you mean it isn’t fresh?” he countered. “This fish isn’t fresh,” I said. “It’s been frozen, and is still so frozen it’s inedible.”

The waiter called a more senior waiter over. I repeated myself. The second waiter shrugged and said there was nothing he could do. I asked to see the manager. Both waiters disappeared. We waited for 15 minutes, staring at our pile of frozen fish and picking at our other entrees, before the manager made his way over.

I repeated myself for a third time, saying that we could either return the entree or switch it for another.

“Our fish is fresh,” the manager assured me. “We received it freshly frozen from Japan.”

I tried to make it clear that if something is frozen, that means it’s not fresh. Either way, we couldn’t eat sashimi that still had icicles on it. Could we please have it taken off the bill?

“No,” grunted the manager. “This fish is still fresh, so we can’t take it back.”

I raised my voice. He raised his voice. Other diners stopped eating and stared. We went back and forth debating the semantics of “fresh,” until he raised his hands, and grumbled something in his Walkie-Talkie. He carried the platter into the kitchen, and came back with the same platter, the icicle fish removed but the other fish remaining, which had now congealed into a mushy mess. He also gave us the bill, which took off about 10% to reflect the fish that was removed. “There. All fixed,” the manager said proudly.

We gave up, paid, and left. I resolved to never to do 3 things again: 1. Get into a shouting match over $15. 2. Forget that the Chinese, more than most people, absolutely hate to lose face. 3. Think that the definition for “fresh” is universal.

- by Diana Kuan of Indietrekker fame

Chinese New Year started with a bang (literally) on Sunday, with firecracker ceremonies to ward off evil, and runs through the beginning of March. This year is the year of the pig, and not just any old porker, but the golden pig! The piggly portion of the chinese 12-year zodiac is supposed to bring prosperity, luck and fertility, especially so during the once-in-60 years arrival of the golden swine. For the next few weeks Chinese cities and chinatowns everywhere from Beijing to London will be a riot of all things gold and red and elaborate light displays, as everyone tries to amp up their luck for the year to come. In Boston’s chinatown, all the local dim sum palaces are visited in turn by lion dancers to make sure that any nasty spirits are scared away. User Indietrekker just uploaded a clip of the proceedings:



Get extra lucky by checking out New Year happenings in any of these cities around the world:

– New York
– San Francisco
– Los Angeles
– Vancouver
– Hong Kong
– Singapore
– Kuala Lumpur
– Shanghai
– Beijing

Gung hei fat choi!

Cancún for Anti-Tourists
– “36 Hours: Cancún” (NYT)

India
– “Surfacing: Hyderabad, India” (NYT)

Kabul
– “The Mysteries of Kabul” (NYT)

Nepal
– “Nepal at peace” (LA Times)

Northwest Skiing
– “A whimsical, wintry world apart” (Houston Chronicle)

Sardinia
– “Italian dining and decadence in Sardinia” (Times of London)

Scotland
– “A wee dram on a Scottish whisky trail” (Times of London)

Bargain Shanghai
– “In Shanghai, Balancing the Past, the Future and a Budget” (NYT)

South Carolina Kayaking
– “ Heaven and High Water in South Carolina’s New Wilderness” (NYT)

Since Newsweek’s latest issue is trumpeting the not-so-very-recent development of user-generated sites like flickr and MySpace, it seems like a good moment to take stock of what the .com’s second coming offers in terms of travel info. What better place to start than YouTube, the site that launched a thousand clips into blogs and inboxes all over the internets. While YouTube definitely veers toward viral, “Natalie Portman Raps!”-type content, they do have a “Travel and Places” channel that’s chock-full of clips. There are an awful lot of shaky, hand-held shots of sunsets, wildlife, and vacation bloopers to sift through, but a little digging can turn up the goods: nicely shot and edited clips to dream on – like KidPlastik’s reel of street scenes in Shanghai,



self-produced travel documentaries, or what may be the best. airline. advert. ever.