Sealed Shut and You Must Eat

Lunch at a home office is easy enough.  You stock the fridge with the things you want and some time after noon and hopefully before three you head out pop open a can of tuna, add some olive oil and balsamic vinegar, chop up some veggies and sit down with a big salad.   It’s the one time in the work day I allow myself to separate from the computer and try to read something on a printed page that has absolutely nothing to do with work.

In Shanghai, working near the People’s Park, I need to choose each day how it is I’ll feed myself.  It rarely turns out to be an especially healthy choice.  The Starbucks salads aren’t bad.  But if I grab one I’ll usually get eye-candied into the Caesar chicken wrap as well.  There is a sandwich place that I went to yesterday, which plays on a similar logic called “Seewant.”   This must be a broadly recognized hip way to serve sandwiches nowadays, as all four sides of the sandwich square have been sealed shut and you must eat it open.  The insides are tasty but I didn’t want all that bread.

We used to have a salad place down across the street. It seemed popular with all the students and I’d end up chatting with them there.  But they always took so long to make the damn bowl of greens I’d often think twice. Apparently it was a bit too slapdash and folky for this surging neighborhood and its gone now, replaced by a sharp countered milk tea place where everything is red, including the hats and the blouses all the young people who work there have to wear.

I’ve had my eyes on this new salad place not much further up the road.  You get to pick all your ingredients, once by one from a rather extensive menu.  I have the memory of such a place in San Francisco from a decade ago where you always walked out paying much more then you bargained for.  But today I didn’t have a salad.  I had a mere twenty minutes or so to eat by the time I met two friends who were also in town and were kind enough to make their way over to my neighborhood.  Carl’s Jnr in the basement of a mall was clearly not a healthy choice.  But it was quick.  And we had unlimited refills of zero coke, which was good as the young lady took my glass away more than once. The “Portobello Mushroom Burger” didn’t look like it did in the neon picture.  But it went down after a few bites and fries and the ketchup all seemed familiar if nothing else.  And then I dashed back to campus, with another lunch under my belt.

Thursday 06/01/17