So I bought a little Cyclotron

OK, so you're disappointed, because you thought you were going to see a lot of pictures of Burma right away....well, they're coming, but I want to squeeze a story out of them if you don't mind.

In the meantime, I'd like to relate my latest adventure. Shopping in Asia has always been an adventure. Often the worst part of the adventure is finding out that you can't buy something, something you took for granted, something you thought might be universal. China is the biggest shock for shoppers, especially when they discover that most of the things, especially nice things, that are made in China are simply not for sale in that country.

Korea has always been that way, I remember years ago trying to hobble together the ingredients for a simple hamburger to put on the menu at my bar: the meat, bun, pickles, lettuce, and tomato all came from different stores or markets in completely different parts of the city - so I travelled probably about 50 miles to pick them all up. Exhausting.

Which is why, when I saw a salad spinner for sale here, I regretted not buying it on the spot. Actually I didn't have money on me at the time, but I could have returned the next day to snap up the only model in the store. As it turns out, when I finally got back to the store, it was gone. Not the spinner, but the whole store. wham.

About two months later I found another store that also had one, just one model for sale. But I didn't like this one as much as the previous one, because it was too big. My house is only a 10 by 10 square little box of a studio, so I have to have Japanese-y ways of conserving space. And this thing was BIG, maybe almost double the size of the one from the out-of-business place.

So I passed it up, thinking, maybe if I made a concerted effort, I'd be able to scare up a more decent one. I couldn't.

When I went back to the store the other day, practically hopping from the bitter cold, it was still there. Well, almost. The shop lady and I had to hunt it down, she took my conviction as evidence that such a thing existed and that I would buy it, so she started pulling things off the shelf and digging to the back. There it was, gleaming aquamarine, my very own spinner.

Now I could get down to the serious business of making salads (Korea is one of the best places in the world to buy exotic salad fixings, like dandelion and chicory and the like). Not that I couldn't eat salad without a salad spinner; it's just that since I'm eating mostly water anyways, I'd rather have most of the water on the inside of the leaf than on the outside...call it an affectation of mine.

The only problem is, when I got this monster home, I realized just how damn big the thing is. I mean, it's only marginally smaller than the new CERN cyclotron in Switzerland which will smash protons in an attempt to detect smaller subnuclear particles. I wondered if my new device would get up to the same speeds, and if so, what the accentuated g-forces would do to my poor parsley...

Somehow, I wondered what the Koreans had been thinking when they designed, cast and molded such a device....was it intended as a backup in case your washing machine's motor gave up and you needed to spin most of the water out of your clothes? In America it would most certainly come with a large red Dumb People Beware Warning Sticker: something like this:

"WARNING! This device acheives high molecular velocities! Do NOT attempt to dry small children or pets by putting them inside the spinner bowl. Do NOT stick fingers or sharp pointy things inside device while operating."

Still, it's a lot of fun operating it, even if I'm secretly afraid the crank will get out of hand and break my arm or something.

Thanks for reading...the next post I'll attempt to deconstruct Burma.