Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:26 AM
Subject: Day 6 5/27/08
I was wide awake at 2:30 in the morning. Last night I couldn’t keep my eyes open at 10:00 and 4 hours later I can’t sleep. Changing this many time zones does unexpected things sometimes.
Today was mostly a working day. I won’t bore you with the details. After work, we were given a ride back to the hotel where we had about an hour to kill before a bus would pick us up for dinner. Every place we go here; to the customer’s plant, to the hotel, to dinner, etc… is on a rather worn out looking shuttle bus. I see a lot of these buses driving around town. I believe they are for hire like taxi’s.
Dinner was in a large restaurant about 5 miles or so from the hotel. It was the typical large dining room with private rooms surrounding it. Our party, around 50 or so people was in one of the larger private rooms with 5 of the usual large lazy susan equipped tables. We were assigned seats – I was fortunate not to be the guest of honor this time as we had the President of the company with us and he gets that honor automatically – no fish head tonight.
I realize that the food descriptions in these emails probably sound like an episode of Fear Factor sometimes, and tonight’s menu was no exception. One of the first dishes out was chicken – and yes Uncle Jack it really was chicken – I can say that definitively because the chicken’s head was right there on the plate with the rest of the bird which has been chopped into cross sections and fanned out. I avoided both the head and the portions on the plate opposite the head for reasons which should be quite obvious. We had eel (not too bad), some beef ribs – not the whole rib mind you, but ½ inch thick sections of them. It was good to get some real meat for a change.
I made the mistake of breaking a rule I set for myself one my first trip here, and that is never ever to ask what it is I am eating. I won’t make the mistake again. The next plate to be placed on the table consisted of portions (all food served in these restaurants are cut into bite-sized pieces) were about 3 inches long, one inch wide, a half inch thick, looked like a honey comb on one side and flat on the other. I had a pretty good idea what this was, but a question to Alex, a Chinese friend I knew from Singapore, confirmed my suspicion – it was stomach. I looked to my right to Shane, an Australian and told him I was game if he was. He replied “better man-up I guess” and we both took a piece with our chopsticks and ate them. It honestly didn’t taste bad, it really had not much flavor at all. It was quite spongy, more so than liver. Shane and I both agreed that one piece was quite enough. I never did find out what it was the stomach of and I really don’t want to – lesson learned. Next time I will just “man-up” and eat.
Next was pigeon – tasted like duck and had the same dark color – if you like duck it is OK. A lot of the other dishes were just unknown. Nothing tasted bad.
The beer was flowing tonight. This is Chinese hospitality – try and get your guests “pissed” as Shane put it. Fortunately it was beer and not Baijo this time.
After dinner, the bus took us back to the hotel. A few wanted to go out for more beer and being my customers I was obligated to go along and pay, so it was back to the hooker bars I detailed in the last trip. We stuck around there probably about an hour. I spent time playing liars dice with the girl behind the bar who was far too young to be serving drinks, and apparently too young to be “working” as well. I call these hooker bars because there are girls there willing to accompany you back to the hotel for a price, but mostly they seem interested in hustling drinks for which they receive half the money. The bartender / child gave me a piece of salted ginger to try. It was far too salty for me to eat – I couldn’t finish it.
Got back to the hotel around 1:00 AM. Tomorrow is another working day and in the evening, Larry and I travel to Wuxi (pronounced woo-shee).
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