Search for the Holy Grail (of wine in Shanghai)

I was down on Yandang Road on Sunday. Yandang Road is a walking street off of Huaihai Road. They were having some sort of French fair complete with white tents. They were the type of tents you would see at a king's fair, square tents with the tall, pointed apexes, it actually made me feel like I was in a Monty Python movie.

We were thinking of going to DaMarco's to have some pizza, but there were a lot of people and only one waitress. We sat down for about 5 minutes and no one came to take our order so we left.

Now DaMarco's is usually considered to have some of the best pizza in Shanghai, and we were surprised to see another pizza place had opened next door to it. That's a pretty ballsy move.

The pizza was pretty much crap. I thought I'd let you know in case you're a foreigner in Shanghai and happen to stumble onto my blog, and then you happen to be going into that area and were feeling a little bit adventurous. I mean seriously, the chances of getting hit by lightening in the basement of your house are probably a hundred times better than that ever occurring, but just in case...

Anyway, it wasn't so bad because they let me bring in a bottle of wine from the French fair. I went out to the street and picked something cheap (60 kuai) so I could drink it with my lunch. It was this French table wine of no particular variety. It was a little watered down, but decent enough.

When we were finished, I went back out. I needed to grab another bottle to bring home, the opportunity of a find was to much to resist. It's difficult to find a good, inexpensive bottle of wine in Shanghai.

I went back to one that had caught my eye earlier. It was probably the nice looking label that initially drew my attention. Fortunately, this stand was giving out samples. The bottle was only 60 kuai so I didn't get my hopes up. I had a taste and voila, I had found...an inexpensive, decent bottle of wine. But could I get it whenever I wanted?

I asked the woman attending the stand if she sold it in Shanghai. She said yes at city market, uh-oh, city market was notoriously expensive. I asked her if it was the same price, she said it went for 100 kuai a bottle. Not disastrous, but not the holy grail...then she handed me a card, and said I could buy it directly from her at 60 kuai a bottle. I'm not sure what the minimum order is, but I'm looking forward to trying out a few of the wines from this company.

Here's the info:
Mei Pon Fine Wines
8621-63454799

State of the Airlines

Yeah, I'm a world perks member, but that's only a legacy issue. My parents were members and I did a lot of traveling with them so I eventually became a member. Now it's a fucking nightmare. I have about 500,000 miles accrued, but I never wanted to fly Northwest. The three worst airlines I've ever flown are Northwest, Delta, and China Airlines. I don't even know if I can classify my puddle hop on China Airlines with the completely devastating experience of flying internationally on NWA.

I took a trip from Shanghai to Beijing once on China Air and it dawned on me that half the people on the flight had never flown before. I mean, let's face it, half the quality of any flight is determined by the quality of the people sitting around you. Every time you get on an airplane, you end up praying that the person or people next to you (if you're unfortunate enough to get a middle seat) are either a hot or interesting. On my China Air flight, people were actually removing luggage from the overhead bins because they thought that it was their own personal space and throwing said luggage onto the floor, it was chaos. The flight was short and the only other issue was everyone standing up as soon as we touched down. I've seen that happen before, but the only difference was that the flight attendants didn't say a word.

I've flown several domestic flights on Delta and they were all late. There was no concept of service, it wasn't comfortable, it just sucked. That's all I have to say about it.

Out of all my flights back and forth to Asia on Northwest, I've only had one good one. Let's start with a typical example. Once you get on in Tokyo, you have the US flight crew, and that typically consist of 50 year old, fat flight attendants that bump you with their fat asses as they walk down the aisle. They speak to all the old Asians in a very S-L-O-W, but excruciatingly loud voice, and yell at them if they don't understand.

On one particular flight, I had the dubious honor of sitting next to an old American couple. They were both extremely backwards, racist, and obnoxious. The entire time, the (I'll say abusive) husband was drinking and yelling at flight attendant to get him more booze, as the wife was cheering him on. When he wasn't yelling at the flight attendant and calling them bitches, he was yelling at his wife. This lady wouldn't shut up. She kept drinking as well. I was sitting directly next to her as she was dropping her shit and spilling her drinks on me.

Oh the good one...sat next to a girl from Hong Kong named Kiri, was oblivious to any glitches in service...

Virgin Galactic Marketing Campaign

Check out the Virgin Galactic website It's fantastic! The whole idea of it is cutting edge and if you're not into space travel, the design is pretty cool anyhow.

Richard Branson says that Virgin is well on it's way to becoming "the world's first commercial spaceline". A test flight program is scheduled to begin in late 2007.

Apparently, you can also trade in your frequent flyer miles for a ride into space. The trip costs 2 million miles according to The Sun.

Here's some images and a video: