October 22, 2005
Canoodling
In the good old days of single-living, the cup-o-noodles were an indispensable part of the pantry for those lazy days. Although I preferred the packaged ramen since I could toss the salty flavor packet and dress up the noodle myself, although that's kinda cheating (a.k.a. cooking). At first there were just the plain-old chicken/beef/shrimp flavors, but more and more flavors began showing up on the shelves, including some distinctively un-Japanese varieties. I stuck to the classics, and I always wondered who were buying the weird flavors. Turned out that they were heading south of the border. Who knew?
Through the centuries, Moorish spices, French pastries and Spanish citrus have left lasting impressions on Mexico's cuisine. Now Japanese fast-food noodles, first imported here in the 1980s, are filling pantries across the country.
Time-pressed school kids, construction workers and office drones have helped turn Mexicans into Latin America's largest per-capita consumers of instant ramen. Diners here slurped down 1 billion servings last year, up threefold since 1999, according to a Japanese noodle association.
It's hard to resist cheap, fast, and tasty, even if the nutritional value of the salt-carbo-fat combo (give or take a splash of salsa) is basically nil. The instant ramen was born to feed the poor and hungry, after all.
Instant ramen has its roots in aching hunger. It was invented by Momofuku Ando, a serial entrepreneur whose businesses crumbled with Japan's defeat in World War II.
Memories of shivering Japanese lined up for a bowl of noodles in bombed-out Osaka haunted Ando for years, he wrote in his autobiography, "My Resume: The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen."
Ando, now 95, founded Nissin Food Products Co. in that city, guided by the mantra: "Peace follows from a full stomach." He figured out that frying fresh ramen was the key to preserving the noodle and making it porous, so that it could be reconstituted with boiling water into fast, cheap nourishment.
Yeah, instant ramen's great, but I really hate it when they serve them in the middle of the night on those trans-Pacific flights. The greasy smell permeates the cabin and makes it hard to sleep while other slurp away.
October 19, 2005
Warm Bubbles
And I thought Bay Area housing was nutty. At least there it's more a matter of limited supply, with less emphasis on building out. Compare that to Shanghai:
This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City.
That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.
And even with that massive building boom, the prices are jumping up to First World levels and beyond. Plenty of folks are rushing to cater to the nouveau riche, on the theory that even a tiny fraction of a billion-plus population makes for a lot of fancy handbags.
And China Central Place in Beijing is being developed by Guohua Electric, a power company that for 50 years has occupied land in an area the city recently designated as its new central business district.
Guohua's real estate arm is now building a $1.2 billion complex that consists of three high-rise office buildings, a 1.8-million-square-foot shopping mall, 1,300 luxury apartments, two five-star hotels and a man-made lake and river walk.
Hey, I do believe that's where our company's new Beijing office is gonna be. If you can't beat 'em… At least we're paying in cash, so if the bubble pops we'll still have a fancy river-front office, if nothing else. It just can't be a good sign for the big Western firms to be jumping into the real estate market. Sucking optimistic Western suckers investors dry has been Asian business practice for centuries.
All that construction and stuff is burning a lot of coal and oil in the process. But at least we don't have to worry about global warming or anything like that, nope. Hope they enjoy Hurricane Wilma down in Florida, but what I'm really looking forward to is Hurricane Alpha, now that they've run out of assigned names for this year's Atlantic storms. I wonder how that Gulf water got warm enough to drive a hurricane from Category 2 to a Cat 5 monster overnight?