I really don't enjoy karaoke. I'm sure it comes from the fact that it had a peak of popularity in North America during my high school years – a time that I don't often enjoy recollecting!

I started to perform live when I was ten and so all of my classmates knew that I had a "nice voice" and I was often cajoled and dragged and/or berated into singing at various parties and school events. Usually, the songs were cheesy love songs with bad keyboard sounds and wind chimes. Whitney Houston was a favourite, I recall, as was "Unchained Melody" by The Righteous Brothers.

When I hear the word "karaoke," I feel a rush of an ancient mortification being unearthed in my body.

On Sunday night, I had the great pleasure of having dinner with my cousin. Well, actually, he's the son of my Mother's cousin and so I suppose that means that we're second cousins, to be precise! He and his partner are on vacation and this was their last night in Beijing. We made plans for dinner and I solicited my friend Rui to come with me.

Remember when I fell in love with the moped? Well, motorcycles are even more fun. In fact, I'll have to upgrade my love affair from moped to motorcycle, which further distances me from the relationship I have with my bicycle. She and I have had a talk and she knows that I can't be tied down to one mode of transportation and so all is well in my original matrimony! Seriously, though, I always feel like a "hot shot" when I'm on the back of a motorcycle -- like I'm right out of the Grease movies (especially Grease 2!) and I'm pretending to be Michelle Pfeiffer. Okay, so it's a remnant of my childhood but it makes me smile!

Rui has a motorbike and I have to admit that I rarely refuse if he offers to drive me home or pick me up when the motorcycle is involved. (Of course there are also helmets on our heads, so don't worry!) I wonder sometimes if he will start to feel used for his motorcycle but I'm careful to thank him and not the bike when I arrive at my destination. It's actually conscious and so I suppose that's the true definition of conscientious!!

Seeing pictures of the proposed new biomedical research center in Chengdu, China (Szechuan province) reminded me of some menu items I tried in that city last year. One reporter called the proposed building "the blob."

The Szechuan province, of course, is home to that terrific spicy food that is ubiquitous in Chinese restaurants everywhere, usually on the menu right next to an asterisk or a nearby 'chili pepper' icon, signifying "this food is hot as hell."

The traditional and most popular way of eating food in Chengdu is the hotpot. Basically, you're given a large bowl of boiling, flavored oil that sits atop your table, while you cook skewers of various foods in the oil--kind of like fondue without the cheese. Most of the time, you have some rough idea of what it is you're cooking, since you picked it off the shelf yourself. The best oil, we were told, was as old as possible: as oil burned off and was eaten, the bowl was topped up; if you cleaned the bowl and used fresh oil, you killed the taste. The older the oil, the better. The table has a hole in it and sits above an industrial-sized propane tank and burner, one to each table. With the cooking-oil-slick floors and open flames everywhere, it's an American trial-lawyer's dream.

Back to the building: the building, it seems, was meant to look like a cell, peppered with meeting room pods which were meant to look like embedded proteins around the outside. And the shape? You can see for yourself. Care for a dip in the interior's "mitochondrial" pools?

Yep, looks and sounds like something I'd be dunking in a bath of ancient, bubbling oil, filled with chili oil and fish heads.