Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 1:49 PM
Subject: China - Day 11
We had a busy day scheduled today – working in the Shanghai office in the morning, lunch with the Managing Director of our Asian operations, and afterwards driving to Suzhou to meet with more customers.
For lunch, 6 of us walked to a nearby restaurant. The food was pretty typical except for one dish I did not recognize – small colorless transparent irregular discs around 2 inches in diameter and maybe 1/8” thick. Following my rule of never asking what I am eating until afterwards, I tried one. It had little flavor of its own, the only taste coming from the vinegar in which it had been soaking. The texture was odd, kind of rubbery, gelatinous and hard to chew. It reminded me of old caulk. “What the heck is this” I wondered to myself while trying hard to finish chewing. I looked over at Sam and it was clear he was struggling with his and was equally puzzled. My best guess at this point was some kind of cartilage, but its transparentness did not make sense. I had to know. “That was good”, I asked Larry (lying!), “What is it?” He did not know the English name, but Kenneth, our Managing Director did. “Jellyfish heads”, he said without so much as a smirk. Jellyfish heads? I didn’t even know you could eat those – I thought jellyfish were poisonous. I can imagine the person must have been really hungry who first scooped one of those out of the water and thought to himself “Hmmm, it’s clear, colorless and slimy – I wonder what it tastes like?” And Just when I thought this $#!t could not get any weirder…
After lunch, Sam, Larry, Tommy (a new Salesman in our Shanghai office – I am underwhelmed) and I drove to Suzhou, an hour and a half from Shanghai by car and I must say, one of the nicest looking places I have seen in China – mile after mile of new industrial park with some of the best landscaping I have seen anywhere, new apartment towers, a large lake surrounded by park and trails, and an unbelievably large Ferris wheel. Suzhou attracts manufacturers from all over the world and many expats choose to live there. We met with one customer. It was around 5:00 PM when our meeting ended and we decided to have dinner in Suzhou rather than eat late in Shanghai. Larry took us to a restaurant area popular with expats. We had beer at the Hoffbrau followed by pizza and pasta at a nearby Italian place. The beer was good, the dinner was not – I had low expectations coming into dinner and these were met.
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| The lake in Suzhou |
It seems a few people enjoyed my description of the foot massage from last December’s trip. To be honest, I really enjoyed the experience and I plan to have one every time I come to China. I also wanted to make sure Sam got one on this trip so I asked Larry to find a place nearby after dinner. A short taxi ride later we were there. This place was much nicer than the one in Wuxi – marble floors, everything spotless, pretty young massage girls in white uniforms – I was liking this already! We exchanged our shoes for slippers (once again they did not have a big enough pair for Sam and his heels were dragging). A girl in a red traditional Chinese outfit led us to our room. Inside were four very large overstuffed reclining chairs with ottomans, tables in between for tea, and a flat screen TV showing a James Bond movie. I was the last one in the room. The girl in red smiled at me, looked at my belly, rubbed it with her hand, giggled a bit, smiled again and left the room. That was a bit odd, but it seems my belly is a source of endless fascination to the Chinese I have met. Larry makes a point of telling everyone we have dinner with that my belly makes me “very strong for drink beer”. One of the folks in our Wuxi office once commented “I think you have six month baby!” In the American bar in Shanghai, the waitress after greeting us looked at me and said “I think you want beer”. I asked why, knowing full well what was coming, and she rubbed my belly. I said “Thanks, I’ll have bourbon”. I guess it is not poor manners here to tell someone how fat they are. Maybe it’s a Buddha thing. Anyhow, we sat in our chairs and soon three girls and a guy arrived with large wooden buckets half filled with hot steamy water. The guy put his bucket down in front of Larry, who protested that he would prefer a girl, so he left and soon another girl came. They removed our socks, rolled up out pant legs to the knees, placed our feet in the very hot water, and added a packet of powder that made the water look like Kool Aid.
The girl who would soon be working me over was probably 17 or 18, maybe 5 feet tall, cute with short black hair, and I feel confident she could crush billiard balls in her bare hands. All of the girls seemed to be having fun with us - they were giggling between themselves and trying to talk to Sam and I through Larry and Tommy. My girl knew almost no English – she kept asking me questions I did not understand so Larry had to translate (in between groans – his pain tolerance is about as strong as his alcohol tolerance). At one point when my girl was talking to the girl next to her who was pummeling Sam, they started singing something I eventually realized was the ABC’s song –Sam and I joined in somewhere around “L”. It was a good time, the girls laughing and flirting, us groaning and laughing too. At one point while massaging my left thigh, I must have winced a bit and my girl said something to me which Larry translated as “too much?” I was laughing so hard at the amount of pain she was causing that she totally misinterpreted this to mean she was not going hard enough – I had no idea how much she had been holding back! She grabbed my inner thigh near the knee and squeezed so hard I thought she would rip the flesh right off – I literally screamed and laughed at the same time. She laughed so hard she nearly fell off the chair. And yes, she left four small finger-sized bruises. She was even more aggressive than the girl in Wuxi, punching, elbowing and karate chopping me all over. This was fine, although I got a bit nervous as she punched higher and higher on my inner thighs – thankfully she knew just where to stop! This was a foot massage of course, and she spent a full half hour on each foot, squeezing, rubbing, grinding with her knuckles, cracking the joints in my toes, and otherwise abusing me. The girl working on Sam’s feet told him through Larry that she thinks he has shoulder and stomach trouble –apparently she could tell from how he reacted as she rubbed different areas on his feet. Sam confirmed that he does in fact have shoulder and stomach issues. The Chinese have been practicing foot massage for 5000 years and claim you can not only detect but also treat all sorts of ailments with this technique. I don’t know how effective it is at either, but Sam’s “diagnosis” was interesting nonetheless.
The massage lasted an hour and a half. At the end, the girls rubbed oil on our feet and legs up to the knee, put our socks back on, smiled, bowed and left the room. We walked back to the lobby, retrieved our shoes and paid. The total bill, 88 RMB each, around $13 US. Larry described this as expensive, saying in Shenzhen it costs around 40 RMB. This is hard to comprehend. These girls work very hard and get paid maybe a third of the price of each service. 90 minutes of work for maybe $3. Larry told us this work is considered a good job for girls with a high school education, better than serving food in a restaurant or working in a hotel. I suppose massage therapy is considered a skilled job in the US too, they just get paid a lot more for their hard work.
By the time we left the massage place it was nearly 11:00 PM. We took a taxi back to retrieve Larry’s car. I slept like a baby most of the way back to Shanghai, feeling very relaxed but rubbing my bruised thigh.
Day 12 preview – The undisputed weirdest eating experience of my life (and that is saying something!)
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