“Mr. Modica made a bull as a present to NYC many years ago. He made the bull then used a truck to transport it to Wall Street in the mid of night and dumped there. The city thought the bull was ugly and decided to destroy it but moved it to a nearby street corner after protest from NYC citizens who liked the bull. Since then the bull has been the symbol of Wall Street. The Chinese Communists want to make Shanghai another NYC and commissioned from Mr. Modica another bull to display in the Shanghai Stock Exchange with pride.

But since the installation of the Shanghai bull, the Chinese stocks have been depreciating significantly and a prominent Feng-Shui expert pointed out that the reason was they restrained the bull inside the house so that the bull had no freedom to jump higher. Now they moved the bull to the Bund Financial Square in the open area, but the Chinese stocks had a free fall recently.”

“The Shanghai World Financial Center Tower is a 101 story building next door the Jinmao Tower. It finished on 9-14-2007 and at that time it was the second tallest building in the world with a square aperture at the top of it. The top of the aperture is the observation bridge which is at the 100th floor and at the bottom of the aperture is the observation deck which is at the 97th floor. The building is 492 meters ( 1614.2 feet ) in height and designed by an American firm. The fund to build it was organized by JP Morgan.

Interestingly to point out that at the design stage, the top aperture was circular as a sun and this caused a big uproar in China. The fund partly was from Japan and sun is represent of the nation of Japan. The tallest building with a sun at the top means Japan overruling Shanghai was not acceptable by both Shanghai people and government and the design was eventually switched to a square shape.”

“In the morning , a lot of people exercise on the road while the store closed. You can see a dog wearing shoes. It is quite popular in Shanghai, but I do not see much here in the States. The last picture was I and my girl friend. Lily has been trying very hard finding who is my real girl friend. To her surprise, my girl friend showed up at last with a young boy. Now the question is whether the boy is my second son or not. “

“The Peace Hotel Old Jazz Band is world renowned and is a tourist attraction in Shanghai. The band was there before 1949 at that time the Chinese Communists took over Shanghai. The band was disbanded and members of the band underwent hard time during Mao’s ruling since they were related to the corrupted Capitalist culture.

After the turning of the policy, these old band members resurfaced and reestablished their band in the hotel to play what they used to play in the old time. I really do not know how many are really belonging to the old band since I saw most of the members were even younger than me. They did not play to my expectation. They did not play jazz but some old Western songs and tunes and the quality was below average. It is just one of the many tourist attractions in China wasting your time.

We were there with our uncle and auntie and drank very poor made but expensive cocktail. We left before the band quitting play.”

“UA served much better food on our way back home than Delta did.

I ordered steak which was well cooked. Lily ordered chicken wings and to our surprise these chicken wings were well cooked and stuffed with chest nut and tasted very good. In the midnight, they even served us Wonton for snack.”

“On 5-19-12 we went to the Lyceum Theater to listen to Lin Bao’s solo concert. Lyceum Theater is an old famous theater built in 1940’s. In recent years it has been refurbished back to its old glory.

Lin Bao evidently is a young girl who gave two concerts in that theater and in the advertisement as her ” first concert in world wide tour “. The advertisement also labeled her as the new “golden voice ” which was named to a very famous singer of Shanghai who was considered the best popular female voice in the 1940’s.

Very disappointed. She sang as a high school girl singing Karaoke and we late learned that her so called ” world wide tour ” only comprised another two stops in Hong Kong and Taipain. With her talent, she will fail in Hong Kong anyway and will not make it to Taiwan with some best Chinese popular singers of this day.

We enjoyed the theater which we were very familiar during old days, and happy to monitored the present status of Chinese popular music.”

“We are back now from China and exhausted with severe jet leg. Due to the bad weather, we did not get into Atlanta airport before 2AM this morning and drove back home after a brief rest.

The last night in Shanghai, we went to the famous Sin Tien Dee ( New Place ). It is a shopping and restaurant complex remolded from old residential buildings near the city center and now is very popular with young people and foreigners.

We found a German restaurant and tried its roasted pig knuckle. It was no good. It tasted so foreign to the real ones as a Moo-Goo-Ga-Pan cooked by an American high school epicurean enthusiast.”

On the phone the other night, Dad complained that Filthy Luxury Life hadn’t been updated in ages.

We had the coldest day of the year and this morning it was snowing with a temperature of around 26 F outside.

Our rabbit might also feel cold and it hided itself under the towel Lily put at the floor of its cage to keep the cage easy to clean.

Lily was amazed seeing this.

Morimoto, our beloved Iron Chef, opened his restaurant on 10th Ave. around ten years ago and is still a big hit in NYC. We went there for dinner that night. I specially ordered Morimoto’s choice Sake. They are good, but very strong.

We were very happy that Angela’s best friend in NYC could join us for dinner. Rachel is a graduate of the University of Pen. Her father is an extremely successful business leader who had dinner with Chinese President Hu Jin Tor during last APEC meeting. He and Rachel’s mother is currently in Sweden participating the World Economic Forum.

Morimoto’s cooking was very impressive and tasting. We all enjoyed together a wonderful night. I especially like the Japanese mushroom. There were very little in a plate, but tasted greatly.

We have a quite warm winter this year. According to the forecasting, we should have the fifth warmest year in local history.

This morning, several hours for people in China moving into the year of dragon, I saw our Fava beans are out. This is good news for us living in Appalachia. We may will have enough food to support us through the depression this year.

Check out Rachel’s Facebook hot dog collection at Tolerable Hotdogs

Angela suggested me to buy bagels from a store on Lexington Ave. The name is Ess-a-Bagel. Angela thought it is the best bagel store in NYC. We went there and bought one and half dozen of onion bagels, one dozen everything and half dozen plain. We asked the Ritz-Carlton people to put these three dozens in their freezer.

When we moved to the Harvard Club, I took there and also asked them to put in their freezer. To my surprise, the day before checked out of Harvard Club, they could not locate my bagels. The good thing was they went to the store instantly to buy three dozen what I asked them to keep for me and delivered to my room.

We have 11AM here now and one hour later people in China will move into the first day of the year of dragon ( China is 12 hours a head of us ).

In Chinese theory, the Dragon is soil and rabbit is wood. We used to use wooden tools to dig the soil to produce food. A dragon year should bring a lot success and achievement to our rabbit. She may climbing from present 3rd in line at the family to No. 1 this year.

Lily combed her hair and cleaned her for a wonderful year a head of her.

First snow of this year and second snow of this winter. Last snow in December was not accumulated on the ground, but this time caused a lot of black ice on the road.

While last winter was the 3rd coldest winter in Johnson City’s history, this winter was forcasted as the fifth warmest winter in history of our region.

This is a small city, but also involved with a lot of national affairs. Elton John came here to sing several years ago. The owner of Bain Capital which has been publicized during this Republic Premier, William Bain is a native of Johnson City and graduated from our local high-school, Science Hill High School. He hired Mitt Romney as Bain Capital’s first CEO in 1984 and made Mitt Romney a half billionaire.

I also just heard a Belgian top rock star is presently living here. While her name is known by every family in Belgian, nobody knows her here. She is going to have a big rock concert in Amsterdam in the near future.

A lot of my friends like the mix drink, Long Island Ice Tea, and most people think the name of the drink was started in NYC. Literally, this drink was invented locally in Kingsport during the probation era. There was a neighborhood in Kingsport with the name of Long Island and the drink was started there using moon-shire as its component at the beginning.