Last day at sea level

Back in Shanghai one last night before we leave for the TAR. My cough has not gone away, and so I have taken my impending altitude sickness as cause for one last feast. I won't have much of an appetite when it hits and all. We went to a Hong Kong chain called, Yi Ge Huoguo, 一哥火鍋, or Number One Hotpot, and ordered all-you-can-eat and ate all of this and more.

Note the delicious and still undulating abalone on the white plate in front. If not overcooked, abalone is one of my favorite things. It tastes somewhat like a silky, soft clam without the seaweed aftertaste. Clearly, the taste is very unique. In terms of phylogeny, abalone are snails with a shallow shell, which doesn't bother me, but then again, I eat most everything. I especially like eating, in my sister's words, "foods that feel like clam."

A boring but wonderful hotel in Shanghai

Now that I've lived in a variety of condos, service apartments, luxury retreats, and one-star hotels in Shanghai, I can confidently offer a recommendation for the place to stay: Rayfont Shanghai Xuhui Hotel, 瑞峰酒店, 7 Zhaojiabang Road (Ruijin Road), 8621-54077000. As the sign says so plainly, this is not a place for celebrities. It's a place for normal people, you know, celeberities.If you want to experience the delights of traveling abroad that come with, say, design details by a hot New York hotelier, mildewed curtains framing a view of the Bund, or midnight calls from ladies offering massages, try any number of already discovered hotels listed in the guidebooks. If you want an exceptionally soft, clean bed, in-room Internet that works, rooms without the taint of smoke, and decent water pressure, come here.

Rayfont has two other locations in the city, but this one is the newest and in the relatively low-key, southwest corner of the French Concession, in an area that was once the stomping grounds of an organized crime family. If that's not enough, the rooms all have flat screen TVs and delicate ceiling lights made of string.
I recommend booking a suite, as they are designed for long-term stays but are offered at prices ranging from Y480 to Y660 a night. The family suite has two bedrooms, a living room, and kitchen with full-sized refrigerator, stove, and washing machine. You can rent dishes and cookware for Y30 a day, so you can run to the corner market and cook up some crab, which is infinitely more luxurious than a mint.

Mian 麵

While in China, I plan to gorge on mian in its innumerable incarnations. Traditional mian is always made from the same two basic ingredients--wheat flour and water. So, it is the method of forming the noodles that gives each variety of mian a distinctive flavor and texture.

There is mian cut from sheets of dough into very wide strips, micro-thin hairs, or somewhere in between. There is mian pulled by hand into long, thin coils. There is mian made by slicing slivers from dough as hard as a block of wood into a boiling pot of stock. There is mian made by piping a long stream of batter into fragrant oil.  There is mian pulled from a roll of dough into small flecks with chopsticks. And so on.

I have experienced some of my most satisfying bowls of mian (and grilled lamb on a stick) in Muslim restaurants. This afternoon we savored a few different types, including the la mian, 拉麵, or pulled noodles, being made here and later steeped in lamb broth and topped with fresh garlic and black vinegar.

My grandfather used to make la mian for us without much ado. Maybe to him, it was like making a sandwich. Beginning with one coil of dough, he would flick his wrist and suddenly it became two. Then again and two became four. With a few more swift movements and twists, suddenly he had an armful of white noodles, all just the same length, width, and thickness. It was magic.

Up, up, and away

In preparing for this trip to Tibet, I've been learning about altitude sickness. It is basically what happens when you slowly drown in air. Everyone new to altitudes above 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) will have some symptoms, but genetics are the dividing line between feeling sleep and cerebral edema. Lhasa is more than 12,000 feet (3,600 m) above sea level.

My genes are of the low-land variety and I tend to act mildly drunk for the first few days above 9,000 feet. I kept a journal when I was studying butterflies in the Rocky Mountains in college. Here is a quote: "Gathered butterfly data today and sampled nectar with micro-pipettes. Why aren't they called, 'tiny vacuums'?'"

I got a prescription for Diamox, which is the standard, Western medicine for this sort of thing. Diamox helps by making you breathe like a hamster (hyperventilate without feeling like you are hyperventilating). This helps lessen the drowning effect but if it gets too bad, the only solution is to head down the mountain. My parents are going the Eastern medicine route of chewing on medicinal herbs, so we'll see which works better.