Like a Virgin....Smelling Shit for the Very First Time

So, I've only been in Asia for a little more than a week, but I feel like I can say with absolute confidence and certainty that Madonna's "Like A Virgin" is the single most popular song in all of China. It's the song that serenades you as you buy shoes, wait for trains, eat in restaurants, and pee in public washrooms. I've noticed that popular music in China is a healthy mix of 90s pop (Bryan Adams is HUGE), smooth jazz (a la Kenny G), and a touch of Christmas music for good measure. I'm now in Hangzhou, which is about 1 1/2 hours away from Shanghai. Actually, that's not true; Hangzhou is normally about 3 hours away from Shanghai, but thanks to a snazzy new bullet train that started running a couple of months ago, you can now get here in just under 80 minutes. Hangzhou is quite a scenic town, it's famous for "West Lake", which is quite a lovely body of water. This evening I tried "Beggar's Chicken", which is a Hangzhou speciality; it is a whole chicken that has been wrapped in lotus leaves and baked in a clay pot. To be totally honest, I didn't find it to be particularly wonderful...in fact, I thought it was kind of tasteless. My mom, however, couldn't stop talking about how great it was, and how fantastic it is to eat a Hangzhou speciality in Hangzhou.Speaking of food, tonight, I was walking down the street, minding my own business, when suddenly, BAM! I was assaulted by the most vile odour I've ever encountered. It was stinky tofu being freshly fried in a pot on the side of the road. Now for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, stinky tofu is a preserved tofu that smells like shit. SHIT. S-H-I-T. It's powerful stuff, I swear, you could have smoked Saddam out of his hole by wafting in the scent of stinky tofu. Anyhow, what is most shocking is that the stuff is incredibly popular! My mom loves the stuff...she says it brings her back to the sunny days of her youth. In any case, although I think that frying stinky tofu on the side of the road should be made a crime punishable by law, I am quite amazed by how much food is available at street stalls here. Not only the quantity, but the selection and the price. You can get just about anything you want on the side of the road...stinky tofu? done. rack of lamb? sure, why the hell not? fried egg? no problem. Fresh cut mango? sounds good to me! One last thing: I was walking around looking for a good coffee shop this morning (I've come to accept that I can't function without a cup of coffee in the morning), and decided to ask a local guy on the side of the road. He began to tell me about this AMAZING coffee shop around the corner. He'd never been there before because it was too damn expensive, but he imagined that it must be fantastic because they charged so much and so many lao wei (foreigners) went there and sat for hours. He told me that I'd probably never had anything like it before, and that it must be really special....he walked me around the corner, and led me straight to a Starbucks.