I unexpectedly found myself on the side of the road Friday when my bus driver declared “last stop” rather sooner than usual. Making the best of it I walked down to the grocery store, and my route took me past Chapters. I have a hard time walking past a bookstore. My poor-studenthood used to keep the bibliospending in check, but now it takes all sorts of mental effort. As I neared the entrance I started enumerating all the reasons why I shouldn’t stop: I still have books I haven’t read from the last Amazon order, I have one more library book to finish and two more I’m planning to borrow, I just bought a copy of The New Yorker the other day, etc. As I passed a group of patrons sitting outside the attached coffee shop, a young woman turned to her friends and articulated the reason she wouldn’t be going into the bookstore:

“I haven’t read a whole book since like grade 4.” How could I argue with that? I walked on.

A couple weeks ago in the wake of the aforementioned amazon order, I signed up for an Ottawa Public Library card. I’m not sure why I didn’t do so sooner; public libraries are awesome, especially in the age of the interweb. The library catalog is searchable online, books can be requested online, renewed online, etc. The chance to read widely and with no risk (don’t like the book on the history of parsnips in 18th century France? Take it back and get one about the frogs of the Amazon) is something I’m quickly going to be unable to live without, I’m sure.

I am a little puzzled about how libraries are allowed to exist in our capitalist society. The intellectual property giants scream and cry against file sharing, but never seem to complain about libraries: state-sponsored institutions that will lend you as many movies, cds, and books as you want, for free. Perhaps, because libraries traditionally deal in books and, as such luminaries as Steve Jobs well know, books don’t matter, they are given a free pass? Who knows. Don’t knock it. Get a library card.

It’s not exactly a secret that “Chinese food” as often experienced in North America (egg rolls, chicken balls, fried rice, fortune cookies, etc.) is not something a typical Chinese person would be familiar with. Finding out exactly where and how this particular deep-fried cuisine originated would probably make for a fun project, but it isn’t my project today. I’m going to talk about the food I ate while I was in China. Thanks to Shengrong’s cooking and the occasional trip to a more authentic Chinese restaurant (they exist), I didn’t find the food to be totally outlandish, but there were a few strange bumps in the culinary road.

In Beijing, we stayed on the campus of the China University of Geosciences, and ate a few of our meals at one of the University restaurants, “LocalFood.com”. One of my favorite things there were battered chicken wings heavily spiced with cumin. Shengrong ordered those on our first day since they’re more like the kind of food I’m used to. That was really the only meal in which I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to manage the food without any trouble, as I was really tired and jetlegged at the time. After that I ate everything happily, and when I got back to Canada I found my own cooking kind of boring for the first few days. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot better at handling chopsticks.

At the entrance of “Local Food” - it was pretty large and usually full of diners.

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I’ll write more about China soon, I promise. Here’s a photo of a giant Buddha to tied you over.

In the mean time, I bring you an observation. Tonight I subscribed to a magazine and ordered a video game. In both cases I ordered online from American websites. The best thing about buying things online is the instant gratification factor. I think the reason the iTunes Music Store does so well, for example, is that you can listen to your new song in a few minutes. Buying a CD in a shop is still pretty quick (if you can find what you want), but you still have to take it home and peel the plastic off. That being said, not all online purchase experiences are created equal.

My magazines will start arriving in 6-8 weeks. My video game could have shipped tomorrow, but instead of a boxed copy I elected for a digital download. At time of writing, I need to wait another 23 minutes for my game.

Four to six weeks vs. 30 minutes. I know that magazines are inherently different from video games in that one is printed on paper (and although it can be read online, there really is something to be said for paper) and mailed to you while the other is made of bits and can be transported magically over wires, but it’s hard not to draw old media vs new media comparisons here. The “new media” understands that having something now, or at least soon, is quite compelling. Whereas, I really don’t understand why it’ll take two months for me to receive the first issue of my weekly magazine. What are they going to do for the next 7 weeks between taking my money and mailing me my reading material? Chop down the trees by hand, make the paper, and ink the pages themselves? It doesn’t make much sense to me, especially given that “old media” has been predicting it’s own death for some time now. Come on guys, the giant New Media T-Rex that is eating everything in sight is getting closer. The least you can do is run a little faster.

More China in a bit, but today is Canada Day! We saw the RCMP musical ride at Parliament Hill.

This is about as Canadian as possible.

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