Milk poisoning

Hey everyone,

I'm about to kill blogger - I think their server in Asia is down or something, but it's been a royal pain in the arse. Anyhoo, I can get in to post but I can't see the blog itself, so I hope that this gets published somewhere...

Anyhoo, things in Shanghai are going OK so far, see my blog for excruciating details (http://www.stanford.edu/~noralev/blog/). Classes start on monday, so I've just been putzing around, running errands, getting to know the city, etc. It seems like everything takes forever to figure out.

Breakfast, for example, has been an epic battle. I wanted to buy some breakfast cereal and milk so I went to the grocery store. I picked out some non-toxic looking cereal and some regular looking milk. Of course when I get home and open the box, I realize that the cereal comes in little mini-ration packets that each contain enough to give to a small rat for an afternoon snack. And there are only 5 packets per huge box. And then I also realize that I can't drink the milk anyway if it's not pasteurized, apparently otherwise all sorts of things will start growing in my stomach and next thing you know an alien will be bursting out of there and getting everything all slimey. So I spent the next three days trying to find the word for pasteurized in Chinese. When I finally confirmed that my milk was indeed pasteurized, my three days of detective work culminated in one bowl of cereal (as all 5 mini-rations fit in a regular person sized bowl). Apparently victory is not sweet, but tastes a bit more like a stale bowl of multi-grain Cheerios.

Anyhoo, hope you guys are all not too bored and are eating nice, healthy, pasteurized breakfasts.

-Nora