Vaccinations, Vaccinations...

When you travel to a different country, you may have to take one for the team, the team being your immune system, by taking certain precautions and taking vaccines.

In about a week I will be venturing somewhere out of the normal life of western culture. China is a very anxious place to me, home to my filial ancestry, but I am afraid that I will feel like a foreigner within my ancestral country. You could say I am vaccinating my own emotional and mental thoughts, preparing to take a deep plunge into what I feel is going to be an eventful month.

I probably have seen more repulsive days, and I am sure a humourous aspect into this whole thing must be the fact that I just drank a vaccine for travellers diarrhoea. You can say that my immune system is filtering my mind to think like this, but I am prepared to see the best, and worst, of a country such as China.

A country where tradition is everything, but everything is changing. A country where capitalism is the new proleriat, in a country adjusted to collectivity. Everything seems so complicated or confusing to me.

Or it might be my immune system acting up again.

Cheese Update

For you fromage fans, you might remember a headline or two back from late July:

CFIA officials aren't too happy after almost a tonne of Quebec cheese was sunk under 40 metres of water in a very interesting but illegal aging process.

Last Fall, the Fromagerie Bovoin in La Baie, Quebec tried a new approach into aging cheddar by submerging 10 barrels containing around 900 kilograms of cheese into the Saguenay fjord.
They had planned to pull the cheese up next month where it had been resting in waters just over the freezing mark. However, Fromagerie Bovoin won't be able to commercially sell this cheese.

It's probably going to turn out better than another batch of Boivin cheese. On Wednesday, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency issued a recall for a spreadable cheese produced by Fromagerie Boivin, saying it could cause botulism.

Well earlier this month, they came to one conclusion after thousands of dollars trying to find that hunk of cheese, interestingly enough, like a bunch of mice.

Sadly, this lump of cheese won't be spread on a cracker. They called off the search at La Baie des Ha ha, and it seems that there won't be that surge of Ritz Cracker sales after all. Mr. Christie. Stick to making your good cookies.