People are funny

I had a day off today, thanks to Abe Lincoln. So I spent the morning shopping.

I started out in Chinatown looking for traditional Cantonese breakfast of rice porridge and thousand year egg, and stumbled upon a traditional Northern Chinese restaurant. So for a mere $2.75 I got dou jang (kind of a thick soy milk) and you tiao ( like a long john donut, but without filling). Ah the simple food of North China. The shop was small but tidy and very simply adorned with handwritten signs advertising menu items and prices and a couple of photographs of 1920's and 1930's Shenyang. Shenyang is the fifth largest city in China and is located way up on the Northeast, in former Mongolia. It had been both a Mongolian and a Manchurian city in the past. Today it's a science and technology hub, thanks in part to the Russians, who had great influence in that area of China at the turn of the century.

After breakfast, I bought a few bakery items, some frozen food, and some dried meat. All Cantonese stuff. After I finished shopping for Chinese groceries, I stopped by at Target to buy cake decorations for my son's birthday party tomorrow and craft supplies for Sunday School. Target was as much modern America as the little restaurant was rural China. What a contrast!

On the way home, the radio was playing an old interview of playright Arthur Miller, who died yesterday. Coincidentally I attended a lecture on the Poetics of Walden last night. Miller and Thoreau were both ardently humanist in their own ways, and fiercely independent. They would have much to talk about. The world is ever changing but people are always more interesting that things.