|
Yeah, China becoming more organized and the new policies overhauling the entire for profit ESL industry in China have made expat lifers out here rethink their long - term prospects in China. My old ESL job just switched to an entirely Chinese curriculum, full of extracurriculars. The bilingual school I work at currently, like many others like it out here, is scrambling desperately to hire from the shrinking pool of foreign teachers left. I'm looking to getting out in July. Southeast Asia seems to be the move. I should have my physical teaching credential by then, so I've been job hunting like a demon right now. Worst case scenario, I move back home and get some experience before I try out for the IS circuit again, sans China of course.
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 09:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 05:32 |
|
|
AHH F/UGH posted:Yeah honestly anything boiled to like 500 degrees is going to be edible, except for all the carcinogen poo poo, but there ain't gonna be no living organism or micro organisms in it left at that point. yeah the #1 thing causing food borne illnesses and especially the really, really bad stuff like botulism is food that was prepared and then stored at temperatures that don't inhibit bacterial growth. Food that's prepared fresh (eg if you order some poo poo that's stir fried in front of you) or literally served boiling in a pot (eg hotpot) is almost impossible to catch something from unless there's post cooking contamination. eating food that's been on a warming tray or in a convenience store warm rack is just about the riskiest food thing you can do outside of some really weird poo poo like eating roadkill or sampling bulging cans. buffets and gas stations are really bad about this in particular where the sketchier places will just leave the food out until it sells. bad buffets will just continually add to the same tray basically indefinitely and/or will re-serve stuff days in a row. Many places also aren't checking that their buffet heaters are keeping stuff at a safe temperature and people regularly get sick af because convenience stores warm-food displays are running 20 degrees cool and are operating basically as bacteria farms Smeef posted:I've found pretty good Sichuanese is unexpected places around the world, but it seems like Sichuan peppercorn (hua jiao) just doesn't travel well at all, no matter how recently it was shipped, how it was vacuum-sealed, etc. Some places I've been outside Sichuan have better ingredients and great cooking otherwise, but the numbing sensation and citrus-like flavor of the peppercorn is mediocre at best. Meanwhile in Sichuan nearly every single dish has hua jiao that zings, and on occasion you accidentally get a glob that seems to make your whole body tingle. It's kind of hard in general in the US to get good quality spices. Almost all the mass market poo poo is garbage quality (eg your store brand or mccormick or w/e) or even if it was decent quality, it was ground so long ago and has sat in the package and on the shelf so long that it's had ages to oxidize. Even bougie boutique places that seem like they'd have good stuff usually have such low sales volume that nothing outside of the local mainstays is being sold quickly enough to be meaningfully fresh. You pretty much have to either grow or grind your own or go to ethnic/immigrant markets and find the brands people are buying quickly enough that it is still pretty fresh. Spices in general just do not last very well, despite the perception that you can just toss them in a cupboard and they'll be fine for a while. Alternatively find someone actually wholesaling spices because man there is a lot of variety between different quality stuff and there's even quite a bit of what is essentially counterfeiting going on. there's also the issue of growing conditions, plant age, country of origin, specific species (countries often will regulate that a spice must be a very specific, more sought after species but what gets exported will be a higher producing but lower quality relative) and so on. tldr there's a billion compounding reasons why it's a huge pain in the rear end to get really good quality spices in the us. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Dec 5, 2021 |
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 10:54
|
|
|
i'm sorry for the long foodpost
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 11:25
|
|
|
Forceholy posted:Yeah, China becoming more organized and the new policies overhauling the entire for profit ESL industry in China have made expat lifers out here rethink their long - term prospects in China. Good luck. Bangkok is wonderful if you're thinking about Southeast Asia. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 11:27
|
|
|
Atlas Hugged posted:Good luck. Bangkok is wonderful if you're thinking about Southeast Asia. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. I can confirm that Atlas Hugged is a very helpful dude and knows a lot, even if I didn't end up making the move to Asia from Russia a few years ago. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 12:20
|
|
|
Atlas Hugged posted:Good luck. Bangkok is wonderful if you're thinking about Southeast Asia. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. How accurate is this? https://youtu.be/rgc_LRjlbTU
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 14:33
|
|
|
Atlas Hugged posted:Good luck. Bangkok is wonderful if you're thinking about Southeast Asia. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. Thanks. I've been hitting up Schrole and TES like mad for months. Apparently, with COVID and the China Exodus, this is turning into a weird hiring season for teaching abroad. On the International Teaching subreddit, there are a few stories of experienced teachers with Masters degrees getting radio silence when they would normally get hounded by recruiters from all over. It also doesn't help that the slow gears of bureaucracy take 6 to 8 weeks to give me a PDF of my own teaching credential. Not only that, but lots of schools, like Thailand for one, are hesitant to hire outside of their respective countries. Still, leaving China would be for the best. No choice but to try, right?
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 14:40
|
|
|
Blistex posted:How accurate is this? https://youtu.be/rgc_LRjlbTU Until covid, if you had told me that was a livestream of the downtown clubbing scene I would have believed you.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 15:43
|
|
|
Herstory Begins Now posted:i'm sorry for the long foodpost I'm only sorry that it wasn't longer. Good info!
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 03:31
|
|
|
Blistex posted:How accurate is this? https://youtu.be/rgc_LRjlbTU I am not sure if the chess club is still around — I would be surprised if it were, given its lack of discretion and proximity to police stations — but it certainly was part of the nightlife when I lived in Bangkok.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 03:47
|
|
|
So its official the US is diplomatically boycotting the olympics. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59556613 Regardless of whether or not this is actually a big deal or important, china is going to get real mad about it. What do you think their next step will be? Ban US athletes? 
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 20:11
|
|
|
SerCypher posted:So its official the US is diplomatically boycotting the olympics. Well they put out a statement promising "resolute countermeasures" but what can you do, just do a tit for tat boycott of the next US Olympics like the US/USSR after Afghanistan?
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 21:10
|
|
|
Kevin DuBrow posted:Well they put out a statement promising "resolute countermeasures" but what can you do, just do a tit for tat boycott of the next US Olympics like the US/USSR after Afghanistan? Seems like they could prevent US networks from covering the Olympics or at least make it punitively difficult.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 21:27
|
|
|
I feel like the headlines really over-state what is actually happening. Maybe I'm just Olympics Dumb though and this kind of response is Actually A Big Deal to the people who know/care, but to me if we're still sending any athletes that want to go and supporting them fully, then I'm not sure anyone will truly notice. Seems like very "sending a sternly-worded letter to the newspaper opinion column" energy to me.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 22:10
|
|
|
'No official delegation' just means some public servants don't get an extremely cushy work trip.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 22:14
|
|
|
Rabe Radbury posted:Seems like they could prevent US networks from covering the Olympics or at least make it punitively difficult. The IOC records and distributes all the coverage of the event, rather than individual broadcasters. China could ban journalists from attending, which would reduce their ability to do interviews and stuff, but realistically I don't think that will happen since the entire point of this endeavor has been for China to show off how modern and successful they are.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 22:18
|
|
|
Zarin posted:I feel like the headlines really over-state what is actually happening. Maybe I'm just Olympics Dumb though and this kind of response is Actually A Big Deal to the people who know/care, but to me if we're still sending any athletes that want to go and supporting them fully, then I'm not sure anyone will truly notice. It kind of doesn't matter, but that's never stopped China from getting mad. They will lose their poo poo if a website accidentally has Taiwan as a country in a drop down list. They will get mad about this too (they're already mad).
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 22:46
|
|
|
Yes but have you considered that boneshards in Chinese cooking is just chabuduo Ortolan bunting?
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 00:07
|
|
|
SerCypher posted:So its official the US is diplomatically boycotting the olympics. if you headline this as the Soviets but the U.S. headline brought DEFCON to 2 and then they boycott, you start the nuclear war and auto-lose perhaps not a relevant derail but also a “diplomatic boycott” seems like a pretty irrelevant derail anyway
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 00:13
|
|
|
It was always gonna be an awkward olympics, might as well take it all the way
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 00:44
|
|
|
What odds on a US snowboarder, (or something else), being arrested for "drugs", or "espionage", and being detained in response?
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 01:10
|
|
|
BrigadierSensible posted:What odds on a US snowboarder, (or something else), being arrested for "drugs", or "espionage", and being detained in response? Are any of the snowboarding team named Michael?
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 01:15
|
|
|
BrigadierSensible posted:What odds on a US snowboarder, (or something else), being arrested for "drugs", or "espionage", and being detained in response? More likely that someone will murder the parents of a visiting athlete and jump from a historic tower.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 01:56
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:It's not that people aren't kind and friendly, it's that the expectations of what "service" entails are so different. In China the server comes when you sit down to take your order, brings the food, and otherwise fucks off unless you shout for them. In the US that's considered rude and people (for some loving reason I cannot comprehend) want the server to fake smile and come over every 45 seconds interrupting your meal to "check in" and poo poo. At a restaurant that's Chinese staffed and catering to a mostly Chinese audience, they aren't going to do that poo poo and then they get negative reviews for bad service. I grew up in international schools in the Sinosphere and when I visited the West Coast as an adult the main thing that struck me was how everybody wanted to have a dang conversation even if you're just grabbing something at a convenience store. Chinese service is a lot more "Wham bam thank you mam, next" for the most part. Unless you're an older person asking if the server came from Fujian or Taiwan or Hunan or whatever and then comparing family histories for a few minutes.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 12:55
|
|
|
I found that western service industry employees break the monotony with smalltalk while in China it's with a tv or phone. Every little store/restaurant always had a tv playing somewhere for the employees or owner to watch. While in the US you'd get in poo poo if you didn't direct all of your attention towards the customer. Also with wait staff, conversation = tips.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 15:27
|
|
|
Blistex posted:Also with wait staff, conversation = tips. I wonder if this is true because when the bill comes I never contemplate how the waiter treated me and adjust my tip accordingly, I give the same percentage I always do. It seems like that would be the case for most diners.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 17:35
|
|
|
Kevin DuBrow posted:I wonder if this is true because when the bill comes I never contemplate how the waiter treated me and adjust my tip accordingly, I give the same percentage I always do. It seems like that would be the case for most diners. If you aren't an rear end in a top hat this is what you should do yeah unless you're feeling generous or think they had a hard time with your table or something in which case feel free to go nuts increasing your tip over your standard 20-25% or whatever abolish tip wages, etc. Americans are very entitled when it comes to service employees; they're not your fuckin slave for an hour or whatever
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 17:44
|
|
|
I always use the how often did I want them to be there, and if they have a refill for my drink without me asking. Then again, I drink alot of pop, so this is kind of an issue. I also know it's hypocritical, since when the waiter/waitress is really busy is probably when they deserve the most tips.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 17:52
|
|
|
Blistex posted:I found that western service industry employees break the monotony with smalltalk while in China it's with a tv or phone. Every little store/restaurant always had a tv playing somewhere for the employees or owner to watch. While in the US you'd get in poo poo if you didn't direct all of your attention towards the customer. I love being in a shop or restaurant where the owner/workers are comfortable enough to just do that instead of forced obsequiousness. I remember the first time I saw the George Michael video Shoot the Dog. It was at a convienence store and it was a nice moment of bonding where it was palpable that the two guys I'd been buying beer and smokes from for the last couple months also hated Bush. A real bonding experience.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 18:47
|
|
|
Tomn posted:I grew up in international schools in the Sinosphere and when I visited the West Coast as an adult the main thing that struck me was how everybody wanted to have a dang conversation even if you're just grabbing something at a convenience store. Chinese service is a lot more "Wham bam thank you mam, next" for the most part. Unless you're an older person asking if the server came from Fujian or Taiwan or Hunan or whatever and then comparing family histories for a few minutes. Yeah olds are their own thing but I enjoy the no small talk. Here they do it to me even though I'm wearing headphones. If I wanted to talk to you I wouldn't have these on, dude. I'm only standing here because you don't have self checkout. Wonder if I'll get back out of this country before offing myself becomes the more attractive option.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 19:26
|
|
|
bob dobbs is dead posted:i live in walking distance of sfo and there's like 15 deec chinese places and 5 really good chinese places in walkin distance also I'm near there too. Recommendations welcome; so far the only places I've tried that I'd consider going back to are New Golden Wok and Grand Palace Dim Sum. Grand Fromage posted:When I'm scouting a new place to try this is something I look for. If there's a bunch of Americans bitching about rude/dismissive/inattentive customer service then the chances of it being legit are better. I ignore any review containing the word "rude", it's the ultimate Karen word.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 20:05
|
|
|
royal feast looks like a dump but its awesome wonderful is way too fuckin busy in normal hours but is good, go in off hours
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 20:26
|
|
|
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cong-peiwu-huawei-1.6276308quote:China's ambassador warns that banning Huawei from 5G would send 'a very wrong signal I really just want to quote the whole article, it’s a smorgasbord of ham-fisted Chinese diplomatic language.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 21:36
|
|
|
mikerock posted:https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cong-peiwu-huawei-1.6276308 lol @ all Of it
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 21:48
|
|
|
remember when bloomberg had that entire article about how the Chinese were installing spy microchips into like motherboards, there was a huge uproar, they never retracted it and it kinda like, went away? Whatever happened with that?
|
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 21:50
|
|
|
Seth Pecksniff posted:remember when bloomberg had that entire article about how the Chinese were installing spy microchips into like motherboards, there was a huge uproar, they never retracted it and it kinda like, went away? from what I read from security tech people i trust, it was BS, that never should've been published
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 21:58
|
|
|
Herstory Begins Now posted:yeah the #1 thing causing food borne illnesses and especially the really, really bad stuff like botulism is food that was prepared and then stored at temperatures that don't inhibit bacterial growth. Food that's prepared fresh (eg if you order some poo poo that's stir fried in front of you) or literally served boiling in a pot (eg hotpot) is almost impossible to catch something from unless there's post cooking contamination. This is why, at least in my experience traveling, street food tends to be pretty "safe" so long as you go somewhere that is super busy, and you can see them cooking the food in front of you. Which is funny because a lot of people who are not used to street food are convinced that is how you get sick and will instead happily chow down at the hotel buffet instead. The only time I got horrific food poisoning (spent a week making GBS threads/puking and wishing for death) was when I was doing volunteer work in Peru and the school I volunteered at treated us to a buffet. Never ever trust a buffet.
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 22:19
|
|
|
Something something buffet dodged
|
|
#
?
Dec 8, 2021 00:31
|
|
|
I like having small talk with customers when I work. It’s nice to have a small human connection, if only for a moment
|
|
#
?
Dec 8, 2021 01:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 05:32 |
|
|
Tomn posted:I grew up in international schools in the Sinosphere and when I visited the West Coast as an adult the main thing that struck me was how everybody wanted to have a dang conversation even if you're just grabbing something at a convenience store. Chinese service is a lot more "Wham bam thank you mam, next" for the most part. Unless you're an older person asking if the server came from Fujian or Taiwan or Hunan or whatever and then comparing family histories for a few minutes. Not to start the whole "tipping" derail. But I have found what you describe to be an American phenomenon. When I have been in the US on holiday, I have found the performative over politeness and effusive fake friendliness to be off-putting as well. I always assumed it was because they are either trying to milk you for tips, and the fact that service workers get punished for not being seen as "friendly enough" I did find customer service in China to be more like what I was used to in Australia, where they serve you without fuss and that's it. This is not to say I don't enjoy a little bit of a chat, or a friendly smile when at the counter. It's more that stuff like that can be very offputting when shoved in your face.
|
|
#
?
Dec 8, 2021 01:19
|
|