William Chow's Personal Web Page

The year is 2006.

China Round 2

Monday, May 8, 2006

Today was a day to go downtown to the equalivalent of "Robson Street" in Shenyang. It is called Zhongshin Lu.

It pretty much looks like it did last year. I wanted to look at the office supply store on top of the Adidas store. They actually have 3 locations along this street. One thing I noticed is that all the various clothing stores has callers in the front of the stores. Usually one guy and one girl. Their purpose is to clap their hands and yell out to the passing by people to come in and check out their sales and stuff and whatever. The second thing I noticed is that they play some pretty good dance techno remix music. Often when I am walking through the stores, I really am tempted to ask them how much for their music CD. Anyway, even at 3 locations of Adidas, they don't carry what I am looking for. They do have all the soccer gear for 2006 but again that is not for me.

Also looked for my digital voice recorder. I actually found something good for a good price at Happy Family. It is like the recorders I saw at Office Depot and Staples, but the price is right and the function is probably about the same if not better. The menus on this thing are only in Chinese but that is ok. The recorder functions like a USB memory stick, with recording and mp3 playback.

While I was Happy Family, I needed to check out the arcade. It is basically was the same as it was last year but they have added a pair of Initial D version 3's, and added another Rock Fever 3's, and a 4 Remix. They more importantly added a new Ez 2 Do Dance machine China Mix. It is the same machine as the old version but with some of the songs changed to Chinese songs. Also costs 5 tokens to play rather than 4. I also was really rusty at playing this game but still never fails to draw an audience playing it. Oh it is 1 token per yuan, if you buy 40 yuan worth, they will give you 50 tokens.

They also still had the Percusion Freaks 1. I played 2 easy songs to figure out that the pads were in really rough shape. Unfotunately by song 3 the only unlocked songs I recognize is Hypnotica and Across the Nightmare, either of which I know how to do without auto bass and some speed adjustment. Oh well, I will try to look up some codes for this machine. I also observed some other people play, and in general nobody knows how to play this game.

There was some vendor on the street that was selling smokies on a stick. I don't know what possessed Ami to buy one for me but I had one. I think I got a stomach ache from it. Bad food.

The Experimental Chinese Food Of The Day is:
Kraft's Chocolate Wafers

This basically looks like it is made by the people who make Oreo cookies. But that is Nabisco, not Kraft. Now a Kit-Kat is a wafer and chocolate candy made by Nestle (was Hershey). So what happens? Kraft comes along and makes a chocolate wafer candy that has a dark chocolate on the outside rather than milk chocolate, uses dark chocolate wafers inside, and uses an Oreo like white cream as one of the layers inside.

Well, the chocolate still tastes very sweet and not bitter like dark chocolate usually does. It is crisp like a Kit-Kat. The bar is individually wrapped which can be a pain if you are a fat pig and eats like 4 of these in one shot. Which is not too hard because the package is about 18g each, so 4 of them would be about 72g which is what a 4 strip Kit Kat weighs.