Dain Ti Hill dinner and Electronic Translator

The reason why I haven't uploaded any pics for ages to my blog is because I've been having computer problems. Well not really problems as such but it's just running extremely slowly, it's driving me mad. I should get it checked out but have heard that people that deal with Macs in Shanghai aren't very knowledgeable. Ugh. Anyway despite this I'll do a post with a few pics.

Last night we had dinner in Dain Ti Hill in Metro City. We've been there a few times, but always at the one in Grand Gateway. They are on both the 4th and 5th floors in that building. We had a seat right next to the window, that look out of the huge glass/metal 'globe'.

We ordered a couple of dishes.




Tuna Salad



Chinese-style sushi with prawn, mango, and special sauce



Chicken with pine nuts (except we think they forgot the nuts!)



Fried fish



After that we went to the basement to look for an electronic dictionary/translator for the hubby. He's been going on about getting one for ages and we finally got one. We were there till after 10pm, when the stores were all closing! The one he got is a Besta CD-900. It cost 1300 RMB. It has a full colour screen. The one with a black and white (green and black?) screen cost 850. It is quite a big difference in price but we figure the colour one was better for a few reasons: the colour screen, the much brighter screen, the pen/stylus is stored inside so it won't accidently fall out, it has the ability to add SD cards later which translate between Chinese and European languages, the battery is like a mobile phone battery and fully rechargeable (the B&W one uses AAA batteries).

There are so many features it's mind boggling. It even has this cute picture dictionary. But the main feature of it that's one of the best is the ability to write characters. So if you see a character and you don't know what it is you just write it in and it tells you on screen what it is, the definition, translation, and how to pronounce it. There is audio accompanying all the thousands of words stored in there. It is also an MP3 player and more.

It's pretty cool. I wouldn't mind one for myself except I wanted traditional characters as well, and that model cost more than 3000! Such a huge price difference. Besides, I found myself getting distracted by cameras (as I'm a camera nut). When hubby was looking I wandered to the Canon camera stand next door and asked if I could have a look at their SLR cameras. It's such a difference to hold one of those instead of a small point & shoot camera! I tried the EOS 400d and EOS 40d and there is a huge difference between those two as well. I asked hubby which one I should 'get' (hypothetically speaking) and he said the smaller one. He said, quote, "The bigger one is a big man camera. It's just a big penis extension." Hahaha. Erm. As you can tell he is not into cameras at all. He is happy with his Kodak p&s camera that he got free from work!







In other news, the weather is getting warmer. It's still sunny almost every day which is great, and I can't complain about that. However, it's still as dry as heck. Almost every morning my right nostril is bleeding. Not a lot, not running, but it's still kinda scary to see. :( It's a light watery red, the colour of tomato sauce. And I'm still getting itchy eczema lumps on my face and neck every day. ARGH!