Sunday, June 17, 2007

The New Muslim Restaurant and T.C.

Luis and I went to the New Muslim Restaurant on JieFang Road last evening.  I am happy to say the place has an English menu and that the food was very delicious.  We had the spicy potatoes, kabobs, Xinjiang noodles,  spicy beef and  potatoes with green peppers.

I have been seeing praise about the TV series The Wire on the Internet.  It has been ranked up there with Rome and Deadwood.  So I have decided to pick up a copy of the series in the DVD shops.  I can only afford to buy the series in a cheaper edition that manages to compress many episodes on fewer discs.  And so last night, looking for this cheaper edition in three local DVD shops I came across many copies of Deadwood and Rome, but no The Wire.

I did meet this interesting person T.C. who introduced himself to me when I was browsing DVDs.  T.C., looked Chinese, but in fact was a Berliner who used to live in Saigon.  His family lived in Saigon in '75 and became boat people fleeing the Communists after the Vietnam War ended (you can thank the Democratic party for that debacle.  Somehow his family ended up in West Berlin and lived with the Wall.  T.C. can speak Cantonese but finds Mandarin to be very difficult (maybe he is trying to learn it from Wuxi People).

I watched an episode from the BBC series In Search of Myth and Heroes last night.  It is hosted by Micheal Wood, who also hosted a documentarry series from twenty years which I can watch over and over again:  In Search of the Trojan War.  The series I watched last night was made probably two years.  It pales in comparison to the Trojan War series because it has gone from the filming style of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series to the style of the overly adjectified Around the World in 80 Treasures series.  The Myth and Heroes series by being subservient to all the fashions of the modern BBC places itself in a time instead of in time.

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