Road Trip and Rollerblade Ninjas

So this is something I have seen a couple of times over the past couple of months, teenagers walking around twirling nunchucks, and then different sets of teenagers setting up small traffic cones and rollerblade around them at night.  but last week as I was on my way back from Latin, an all you can eat brazilian bbq place(it was good, and pretty cheap but not as cheap as the all you can eat sushi place I go to which is sushi, so no contest)  Anyways, so on the way home from Latin I was riding past one of the many billboards of Deng Xiaoping and in the little plaza around it I saw a group of these rollerblade kids skating around only this time they were all twirling nunchucks.  That's it, thats the story, no real moral or point just thought it was interesting.
Number two, roadtrip, the more Ive been thinking about coming back to the US, the more I am again coming to the conclusion I'm not sure what I am going to do when I get back.  Anyways, as the prospect of a job job is coming to look clearer I am thinking of all the things that I want to do that are difficult to do with a job job.  One of them is a road trip, not just a small one but a big one, specifically I have been thinking about Route 66.  Chicago to LA, so I've been looking into that some, and it seems doable but a knotty problem about the trip is how to get me and a car to one of the starting places, either way if I drive from Phoenix to LA or Chicago I would then have to backtrack most of the way, which I'm not sure would be bad or good.  So with that preamble, anyone that may read this is invited to PLEASE help me think of a solution!

Tomatoes Tomatoes Tomatoes
Here in China they do not have salad, I mean they have the necessary ingredients but unless you go out to a more expensive restaurant that actually has western food you have to make it yourself.  This was made easier by the discovery of salad dressing in certain supermarkets western sections, in particular a sesame dressing which is very good, not as good as the miso dressing at home but still good, especially considering the only other salad dressings they have are thousand island for the most part.
Anyways, I digress, back to tomatoes.  So cucumbers I can always get and it is actually fairly easy to find romaine hearts as well.  But tomatoes are easy to find, or at least chinese tomatoes.  Now I don't mean that these are a new variety of tomatoes from here in China or anything, in fact a fairly common dish is chopped tomateos and eggs which is pretty good.  But by Chinese tomatoes I mean that they aren't very good, no real flavor, all very faded red, not entirely ripe but what can you do right?
Wrong, you see there are also lots of fruit stands, or to be more precise fruit vans that set up everywhere and until then I hadn't really frequented them unless I was walking by the and was hugry at that moment.  BUT then I saw cherry tomatoes at the stand near one of my friends house.  So I bought a kilo of them and ate them in like two days, they were amazing, juicy flavorful and ripe, really red, all the more so because of the alternative.  So now I can finally have good tomatoes with my salads.  But I have to be honest, I have not actually had them on a salad yet, both times I bought them i finished them before I could have them on a salad.

So Thailand was nice enough I guess, I really didn't get a feel for the country as a whole just Thailand and a few days on an island but I have to say that Cambodia was alot alot alot of fun. That country was really nice! Especially after how crowded and busy Bangkok was it was nice to go to a country that was alot more laid back and not as crowded. I only went to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap but both were really nice. Phnom Penh, even though it is the capital isn't really that developed relative to Bangkok or Shenzhen. It has something of an expat district along part of the river but it is really small. It was also pretty hot, I cannot imagine what it must be like in this region come summer, at least Phoenix is a dry heat. Siem Reap was alot of fun even if it was really touristy, but it wasn't in an obnoxious way and the Cambodian people were all very friendly as well. We rented bicycles to explore Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom etc and that was alot of fun. The food was good, even though I don't normally eat bread every day and especially not in China I had forgotten how good french bread was until I hit Cambodia, where it was everywhere. They make this really good sandwhich with cucumber, green onion, cambodian fish sauce, and what I think was condensed milk which they use alot, along with some sort of meat but the meat didnt really add anything to the taste. I have taken an ungodly amount of pictures it will be at least 500 or so by the time this trip is done. Digital cameras and large memory cards have unleashed the inner artsy photog snob in all of us. I need to go to Laos at some point but not this trip, and have to go back to Thailand but after the end of this trip I think I can cross off Cambodia and Vietnam of places to be visited.