in Malaysia and Singapore: not very hot from a very fine ground in a pot that brews all day, deadly bitter, poured carefully over a thick layer of cream and sugar that you stir into it.

in Belgium: from a stovetop machina, with ice cream.

in the Netherlands: like the French, but with Stroopwaffeln instead of sugar.

in New Orleans: with chicory and a beignet.

in China: any damn way you can imagine it. Usually bitter and poorly-brewed with lots of sugar. Why aren't you drinking tea, you masochist?

in Boston: at Dunkin Donuts.

in Bali: from a powdery grind spooned into a dry cup, over which is poured hot-not-boiling water. Milk is optional. Leave the mud at the bottom of the cup.

in Austin ca. 1994: Americano.

in Hungary: like Italians: a wet espresso served in a demitasse with a little sugar.

in Taiwan: at Starbuck's.

in Nebraska: percolated or drip, one teaspoon of canned grounds per cup.

in Berlin: with many many cigarettes.

in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas: Folger's automatic drip, strong and dark, if you're lucky it's from this afternoon's pot and not this morning's. You better put cream in it.

in Twin Peaks: black as midnight on a moonless night.

I don't get all the annual hate over fruitcakes. Have you ever had a well-made fruitcake? They make it with rum.

Am I making myself obvious here? Fruitcakes are booze. They're basically cocktails in dessert form. How can you not like this? Fruitcakes are heavy and dense for the same reason highball glasses only hold 8 ounces. You're not supposed to consume a lot of them.

I reckon most people only encounter prepackaged fruitcakes a là Trader Joe. That's like judging martinis because you can't stand Shirley Temples.

Imagine a spick-and-span roadside cafe, Wyoming, 1970. About 10 years previous, the owners (Mr. and Mrs. Neil Stuckles) decked the place out with Gunsmoke-inspired decorations: wagon wheels, art prints of Bama and Catlin paintings, Navajo blankets, real pinewood panelling, and a pair of crossed Remington repeaters. The place smells like french fries, coffee, sagebrush and diesel. Next to the register is a display case selling all four kinds of Wrigley’s gum, and a few Indian trinkets handmade on the nearby rez. But because it was all decorated in the 1960s, this stuff has a kind of Googie space-age twist on it. Red checker tablecoths over teal formica with shiny vinyl seats. The Stuckles call it Pinto.

Mr. Stuckles, a former ranchhand, runs the back kitchen. Years of slinging hash as a cookie on the ranch taught him two things really well: grass-fed steak, hot offa steer’s ass; and beans. Mrs. Stuckles bakes a mean, mean pie; especially the fruity kind. And you can wash this all back with free coffee, better to keep your eyes open when you’re back out on the road.

My version of Pinto would transplant that scene — the road trip, the usual EAT roadsign, the unexpected quality — into the requisite North Portland locale. There aren’t a lot of menu options to confuse you: steaks, burgers, maybe trout when it’s in good season, a pot pie or two. And chili and beans. Western comfort food. Each dish may have a few variations, “Mexicali” style or whatnot. And breakfast all day long.

Pinto serves only grass-fed, organic Oregon Country Beef, local vegetables in season, and plenty of vegetarian and vegan options on the “Beans” side of the menu. Pies and breads are baked on the premises. And free coffee with every entree.

Because we’re in North Portland, let’s throw in Open 24 Hours, to catch the post-bar crowd, and maybe a deal with Voodoo Donuts.

Jenny and I actually came up with this idea a couple of years ago. We were imagining a restaurant with a range of entrees for both of us (myself a hearty carnivore and herself not so much); in fact, part of Pinto’s appeal is that it would be hard for any American person not to want to eat there. The Oregon version would sell local beers and wines. This would all happen at prices somewhere south of, for example, Higgins. A good place to take your parents, or a good answer to “I don’t know, where do you want to eat?”

This Very Good Idea is free for the taking. Hell, I might pay someone to open this joint.

Much of what passes for “Western” in Xiamen would more accurately be called “Sinicized.” A good example is the local version of “coffee shops.” These are actually restaurants that serve Western dishes like sandwiches and french fries (and perhaps actual coffee), in a setting that is vaguely Western ( e.g. white tablecloths), but with Chinese notions of service (i.e. a bevvy of beautiful xiaojie welcoming you before you order, after that: does anyone actually work here?), and the food has a weird “Chinese” flavor. And of course the menu is seldom in English or (more likely) the “English” on the menu is Bizarro-English and only tangentially related to the menu items (Roman letters are purely decorative, natch). It’s as if someone saw a movie about a coffee shop once and decided to open their own coffee shop, but without ever having been in a real European coffee shop, or having eaten Western food, or having actually drank coffee. All of which contributes to a strange “let’s pretend” feeling for a Westerner who braves such establishments.

For example: Last week, my boss took our group out to a new Western restaurant near the office. This was a farewell lunch for our intern, an American college student who was working in our department for the past month. This particular restaurant — a new one, I think — had brasswork and linen napkins and photo-murals of Paris and a piano floating in a pool surrounded by ersatz rain. The Chinese notion of “Fancy Restaurant” is usually summarized as “hot and noisy,” which are regarded as Good Things. This place, for example, seats perhaps 200 patrons, all within eye- and ear-shot of one another. Eating out in China is a festive, social, and above all public affair. See and be seen. Westerners’ desire for privacy (in restaurants and all other situations) is regarded, as our guidebook poignantly observes, as variously “eccentric, arrogant or sinister.”

So this restaurant had some of the details right: linen tablecloths, a menu with items called “steak” or “pork chops,” a piano, etc., but the entire gestalt was wrong. It was like a fancy Chinese restaurant, but with European accents. For example, I ordered a sirloin, which arrived smothered in a black pepper sauce atop a bed of spaghetti with a fried egg on the side. And a glass of iced green tea. This all tasted good enough I suppose, but “Western” only in the most oblique sense. Our Chinese coworkers, like most of the patrons, cheerfully shared out their meals to one another; sharing food is a basic fact of eating.

I wonder what the typical Chinese person would make of P.F. Chang’s. Probably the same as above, but in reverse.

A rash of putative “coffee shops” have sprung up along the lakeshore near our apartment. They are all uniformly bad and overpriced, but have at least figured out a) how to make espresso and b) the notion of a coffee shop as a place to hang out. The older “coffee shops” (described above) are more accurately restaurants, and don’t brook much with hanging out. Interesting, though, that half a dozen or so nouveau-cafés have opened literally side by side along the same block. It’s almost as if opening a truly European coffee shop (let’s call them cafés, to differentiate from Chinese-style ersatz-coffee shops) was all the novelty the proprietors could stomach. “What kind of establishment is this? Where are all the xiaojie? Who will obsequiously and noisily greet the customers, then ignore them for two hours? Your strange notion of café frightens and confuses me.” Best not to push our luck by putting them, you know, somewhere far away from the other cafés. It’s like we have our own, brand new, Café District. This is not only really unhandy (because when you want a coffee, you have to take a taxi to the Café District instead of hitting the corner café), but also strikes me as hard for business. Everyone gives the same two or three cafés (the best ones) all the business, walking right past their unfortunate competitors.

Culturally, such novel ideas seem to happen “all at once.” This is what happened in our brand new Café District. Another example: apparently a year ago you couldn't get a cake anywhere in Xiamen. Then, all of a sudden, all the bakeries and coffee shops started serving cake. It was like, everyone was waiting for someone else to start selling cakes, then all of a sudden everyone was selling cakes. Kind of like how penguins jump off ice floes in nature documentaries. The cakes, by the way, are gorgeous and taste like air.

The easiest way to cope is just to pretend that these new putatively Western things are actually artifacts of a third culture. For example when adjusting to the local beers. All the local stuff tastes the same: like Miller Lite. There’s a profound aversion to hops (and to “bitter” food in general). A few imported beers are relatively widespread: Erdinger, Carlsberg, Heineken, and Corona. So it’s all lagers. There’s one restaurant that serves Sam Adams. I used to hate Sam Adams, but now it tastes like sweet, sweet manna. I would miss PDX beer but our lives are so different from Portland that, in this regard at least, it’s easier just to readjust my expectations. When all aspects of X are completely unlike America, things that are like 50% the same are actually more noticeably different. (This is why you seldom see actual Westerners in “Western” restaurants.) So having beer that’s half good is worse than drinking Chinese pisswater.

So I just pretend I’m not actually drinking “beer,” but a different local beverage, a slightly alcoholic wheaty unsweetened soda. Viewed in that light, Qingdao is actually a good beverage, and a steal at 5 kuai (65¢) for 620 ml (20oz) — much cheaper than Coca Cola. There are, by the way, actual sweet beers. Pineapple beer, for example, or a really horrid product called Blue Cowrie which features a drawing of an Aussie swagman in one of those pin-up hats.

OK, so: here’s what made this past Sunday so damned irritating.

First, taxes. This was actually not any more irritating than usual, and actually turned out a little pleasant. We were expecting to pay a few thousand bucks each to the Feds and Oregon, but TurboTax helpfully informed us that we pass the test as “bona fide residents of a foreign country” (by three days!) and thus qualify for an exemption on our foreign income. So instead of ponying up a few thousands, we actually get a little jangly money back. Still, the whole rigamarole took about 12 hours which I ain’t ever gonna get back, and we did this all online using TurboTax and scans from back home. So there was the usual PRC internet lag, which is a little like drinking beer through a swizzle stick.

Second, allergies. I woke up Sunday sneezing. Even for my heroic allergies this might be a first. It was a little like when you snore so loudly you wake yourself up. All day long I had this painful congestion behind my eyes, mixed in with sneezing jags that bordered on epilleptic. I have no idea what’s in the air here that causes this (particular) reaction...it’s happened two or three times since we moved here.

Sidebar: I have learned over the years to differentiate the source and severity of my allergies, which vary in subtle ways like fine wines. Steady, low-grade nasal congestion accompanied by mounting asthma are symptomatic of my cat allergy. Sneeziness and hives on my neck, back and legs are due to ragweed and other pollen. The same symptoms plus red watery eyes indicate house dust. Mild congestion in the morning or evening comes from mold. And so forth and so on. I swear I am not making this up. China is teaching me a few new ones, although I have no idea what the source(s) are. There is a lot of stuff in the air here.

Third, the air is yellow. Newscasters can euphemize this as “haze” but they ain’t fooling anyone recently. It reached a surreal nadir of opacity two days ago, when we were unable to make out buildings that were no more than a half mile away. This is on a putatively sunny day. And remember (as we are frequently reminded): “Xiamen is the cleanest city in China.” The haze and grime followed us twenty miles into the hills.

Fourth, we, along with a few 老外 friends, accompanied the informal “Big Dog Club” on a day-long outing to a reservoir in the hills near Tong’an, a distant Xiamen suburb. This was quite an adventure. If it weren’t for the allergies and points Five and Six (below), the adventurousness would have outweighed the irritation. There were 5 cars, 19 people, and 11 dogs on our outing. No fewer than 5 of the dogs were Samoyeds, a very popular breed with 20-something Xiamenese hipsters (who mainly comprise this group). The reservoir was about 20 miles from our home on the island, but of course with all those people, cars, and dogs, it took more than 3 hours to get there (about 1 to get back). We spent more time driving, eating, and socializing than playing with dogs. It was entirely akin to a BMW motorcycle club, or a Fiat Spider owners’ club, or somesuch. Most Chinese dog owners view their dogs as lifestyle accessories rather than companions.

None of our Chinese dog owner friends are worried about the new dog law. Some of them said they’d only take them out at night. I think most of them have trained their dogs to eliminate on their balconies or similar spaces within the apartments, and that they don’t often take their dogs out, so the law doesn’t seem unreasonable to them.

Along the way, we stopped at what is in all probability the filthiest restaurant I have ever witnessed in my life (Five). The space around the dumpsters at the Wendy’s restaurant, where I worked when I was 16, was cleaner. At this place, the toilets (adjacent to the kitchen), were little more than an open privy. There is only one table manner in China and that is: never touch food with your hands (corollary: never set your chopsticks down on the table). You can see where this would be a sensible rule. The food was OK, I had duck tripe and pig’s feet and trotters for the first time.

The reservoir itself was not amenable to swimming. The water level was incredibly low, and all access to the actual water was restricted. This did not deter the Club, however, as we scrambled down the spillway-slash-quarry to a unexpectedly scenic stream flowing through the quarry spoils. Some of the dogs (including, of course, Bismarck) took it upon themselves to swim in the only open pool available, which was kind of wedged between some rocks between a pair of small falls. Jenny, Bismarck and I scrambled downstream a long way, until the verticality of the streambank turned us back. This would be a fine place for hiking in the American fashion, with backpacks and heavy boots.

During the otherwise lovely outing my left contact lens stuck to the inside of my upper eyelid and slid up above my eyeball (Six). This has only happened to me two or three times in my life previously, and always while I was actively fooling with my contacts, i.e. touching them with my fingers. This is the first time it’s ever done this unbidden; probably due to accumulations of airborne dust. The experience is painless but really unpleasant nonetheless. There’s a void entirely around your eyeball and if you don’t work out a stray contact pretty quickly there’s a risk it will migrate behind, which I imagine would bring irritation to an entirely transcendent plane. Jenny helped me fish it out, filthy hands and all, and somehow I managed to get it back in my eye.

To top it all, we’re stuck in an endless loop right now debating Bismarck’s fate. There is no doubt that he is legally registered (thus OK to own) but far larger than the 40cm rule prohibiting large dogs. This means, according to the police, that he is not allowed to leave our apartment, ostensibly because he might frighten people. They couched this prohibition as “for our protection” which is really creepy. So we’re left discussing how to deal with this; Bismarck can’t stay in Xiamen and enjoy the unbounded life he’s had since he was born (we didn’t even leash him when he was a puppy). We are also weighing our relative hapiness re: living in China, which is, let’s face it, kind of a hard place to like. Jenny has another year on her contract and neither one of us is wont to quit right now.