The $2.50 dinner

I can see how I'm really becoming a cheapskate.

In Shanghai, you can eat like a foreigner if you want, but you have to pay foreign prices plus whatever it cost to import it. Peanut butter, jelly, bread, and milk are all made locally for local markets, as are some breakfast cereals, but if you insist on having Honeycomb and Fruity Pebbles it will cost you.

After a month and a half here, we’ve gotten a bit more familiar with ways to eat cheaply. One of the things we really like is dumplings (jiǎozi, 饺子). For only 20 renminbi, or about $2.50, you can get a dozen dumplings, a bowl of beef & noodle soup, a Pepsi, and a bottle of water.

For those of us living on intern wages, that's pretty key.

Unfortunately, now I measure everything in terms of 20 kuai. If a dinner is 30 kuai, it seems so expensive, even though it's only $3.75 in dollar term. It's as if I've equated the two currencies in my mind, and now spending even 37 cents for a 20-oz Coke seems expensive.

How lame.