Despite the 32C heat and the relatively difficult terrain, I survived the 10km Great Wall hike and it was amazing. The mountains all around the wall are super cool and the wall itself is most impressive. Back to Canada the day after tomorrow, then I'll write up a real trip journal in the usual place.

I finished up my work stuff in Shanghai on Friday and now I'm in Beijing checking out the city and relaxing before my flight back to Toronto on Wednesday. Tomorrow I do a 10km hike along a really cool section of the Great Wall. Should be fun!

I'm going to China tomorrow! I'm both excited and scared. I'm sure it will be great though. I'll definitely have lots of cool photos to post here in a couple of weeks!

Last weekend Kim and I joined Rob, Janet, and Matt at Chris and John's place for another awesome BBQ! This time we had yummy sausages with sauerkraut, cucumber salad, and an amazing Mexican Salad with Creamy Avocado Dressing brought by Janet. For dessert, Kim and I brought chocolate ice cream, made in our ice cream maker, which was served on top of brownies also brought by Janet. It was so good and rich! I think the key was using good cocoa powder (Valrhona) and good dark chocolate.

Delicious food

Delicious chocolate ice cream

I've added a search function to my blog! Rob was looking for something the other day and was upset to find I didn't have a way to search my posts. So I've added one. You can access the search field in the menu, between the random quote and the random photo.

Implementing the search was super easy! Apparently MySQL has built in full-text search capability. You can mark text columns in your tables and they will be indexed. Then you can add match conditions to the "where" clause of queries on the database. It works really well and returns results sorted by relevance. It's awesome!

It's been too long since my last update but I've been busy and stuff. In addition to preparing for my trip to Shanghai we've also been going out to look at houses fairly often lately. Other things I've done lately include going home home to London, climbing, playing the original God of War remastered for my new PS3, drinking delicious Kellerbier, cooking stuff, creating a search feature for this blog (unfinished), being angry at the rain and the cold and watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Foods I hope to cook soon include this and this.

Last night Chris and John hosted a BBQ on their brand new patio with their brand new natural gas BBQ!! They made delicious shish ka bobs and even had a cake for Kim's birthday (which is next week). It was lots of fun and it was great to be outside and see the leaves on the trees in the park. Summer is almost here!!

Veggie shish ka bobs waiting to be grilled

More veggie shish ka bobs waiting to be grilled

Sunset on new leaves

Meats and veggies on the grill

We even chatted on Skype a bit with Patrick! He makes silly faces.

Kim and her cake

Inside Lansdowne subway station

There's a great Toronto-based online store for getting extremely fine chocolate that I love to order from every once in a while called A Taste For Chocolate. It's expensive, but the chocolate is delicious and I generally eat it slow enough that the cost doesn't seem so bad. A bar can easily last a whole week.

Anyway, the store sends out chocolate themed newsletters and I really liked the most recent one so I thought I'd repost it here. It lists five things to look for when buying good chocolate.

1. Just chocolate. So many of us Canadians call candy bars with a small coating of something resembling chocolate "chocolate bars". Do not confuse candy with chocolate! I admittedly enjoy Snickers at Halloween but for the sugary peanuts and candy, not the "chocolate" coating.
2. Made by a relatively small company. How widely available is the chocolate? If you can find a certain chocolate bar in every store you go into, it is a mass-produced bar likely made with inferior cacao beans. The big chocolate company that produced it had to make some kind of quality sacrifice along the way to pump out such large quantities. Remember also that there are simply not enough finer quality cacao beans to make billions of chocolate bars. Look for bean-to-bar chocolate made by chocolate makers who focus on quality, not quantity. This usually translates into a better quality of life for the cacao farmers as well, but this is another issue...
3. Ingredients. Dark chocolate should always contain cacao/cocoa beans (also called cocoa mass or cocoa liquor) followed by sugar. These should always be the first two and sometimes the only ingredients. Third on the list is cocoa butter and often pure vanilla and lecithin. Vanillin, artificial flavours and colours and other added fats are a quick giveaway that the quality of the chocolate is poor. Nothing artificial in my chocolate please!
4. Cacao percentage. Not so much to ensure you're getting your 70% cacao content, but more to ensure that you know what you are eating. If this is not on the label, you could be eating chocolate that barely qualifies as such (35% cacao is the lower limit to be considered dark chocolate). Cacao content refers to the amount of cacao beans plus any added cocoa butter, so just be aware that not all 70% cacao content chocolate bars contain the same amount of cacao solids.
5. Origin of the cacao beans. Most fine chocolate makers put information on the packaging about whether the chocolate is a blend of cacaos or made from cacao from a single-origin. If there is no indication about the source of the cacao, then the beans from which the chocolate began were likely not very good.

On Sunday Kim and I went climbing at True North Climbing with Mark and Amy. It was lots of fun as usual and I was able to get some good lead climbing in. It was the third time I had climbed that week so by the end I was pretty dead. My fingers are definitely still sore.

After climbing we went to the farmers market near the gym and picked up a box of ten huge mangoes for just $5! So, to use up the mangoes, Kim got out our shiny new ice cream maker and made Mango Sorbet! It was friggin' delicious and very easy to make.

Fresh Mango Ice Sorbet

Well, my trip to Shanghai is already providing me with new experiences and I haven't even left yet. In addition to learning more than I ever wanted to know about the details of acquiring a visa for entry into China, I had an extra-special streetcar experience last week.

On Thursday I went to a travel clinic to get some vaccines so that I don't contract Hepatitis A or Typhoid while I'm in China. This required two separate needles. I've never had a problem with injections in the past, and although I've never had two at once before, everything went fine and I left the clinic in good spirits.

I had to take the streetcar to get home, so I boarded just outside the clinic and took a seat near the back. After about five minutes I started feeling hot and a little dizzy. It wasn't a big deal though so I just relaxed and waited for it to pass. Unfortunately that was when my brain checked out completely and I fainted, collapsing out of my seat and landing on my face on the floor of the streetcar.

Having your face on the floor of any public transit vehicle is never a good idea, a fact which my body seemed to know instinctively because I was pushing myself up and back into my seat before I even knew what was going on. Once seated I realized that something was very much not right because everyone was looking at me and asking if I was OK. Also, the driver had appeared and insisted on escorting me to the front of the streetcar so that he could keep an eye on me while calling in the incident and getting help if necessary. He was extremely patient and helpful, which was good because I was still a bit confused. I was pretty sure I had fainted but that didn't make sense because it's never happened to me before and it's just so weird. Anyway, I had started to feel much better and was able to convince the driver and his dispatcher of that fact. So I exchanged contact information with driver and the streetcar was able to continue its route. I got home with no further incident.

The other passengers on the streetcar were also very understanding, even offering me food in some cases. No one complained about the small delay and no one seemed angry. Nice to see that Toronto is still a friendly place.

So what happened? Apparently I suffered a vasovagal syncope brought on by a combination of the cramped, hard TTC seats and the double sticking I got at the travel clinic. It is apparently not uncommon for some people to faint when given needles or even when seeing someone get a needle. Although it has never happened to me before, I've never gotten two simultaneous injections before. Also, just before fainting, my brain was being a little silly and it wouldn't stop thinking about the injections I had just received. It kept playing them over in my mind and I kept trying to figure out where the stuff they inject goes when they inject it. I guess I thought about it too much.

Anyway, I'm totally fine now, other than a very small bruise on my forehead where it hit the ground and the nagging feeling that my face will never be quite as clean as it was before I smeared it across the floor of a streetcar.