It’s Monday morning, at 7:30 China Standard Time, which makes it 3:30 on Sunday back home. I’m sitting in the airport getting ready to fly back to Shanghai for another business meeting. On the first Sunday in February. At 3:30 in the afternoon. <sigh> I’m sure I’ll hear how the game went somehow.
Before I start, Tracy tells me I can no longer blog unless I have pictures to go with it. I would have loved to have taken pictures this past week, but all of the good opportunities were during business meetings, so it didn’t seem appropriate. I’ll try to do better whenever I can, but no pictures for now. You’ll just have to rely on the theater of the mind!
So, I had an(other) interesting week last week. My boss (okay, technically my boss’s boss) was in town, so we were all over Beijing all week visiting suppliers, customers, and partners. It was good to see more of the city—I went to parts we haven’t been to yet. (Remember, this is a town of 20 million people, so it takes a while to see all of them! J) We visited a factory and saw how folks work—the conditions are improving, but not yet to Western standards. We visited an old government office building, where they don’t provide heat for the building, so the hallways are freezing cold, and the rooms are heated only if someone is in them (think about what the toilet seat feels like). Since these are now companies inside the building, and not government offices any more, it was perfectly okay to smoke, and you could tell they weren’t shy about it. But, as always, the people were warm and friendly!
But the most interesting part was the food. The more time I spend here, the more food I encounter. Wednesday’s interesting dish was goose liver. It was made into a spread to put on some toasted bread (which you almost never see over here—I think it’s a special treat). Thursday’s special dish was dragon meat. That’s a Chinese joke—they serve donkey meat and tell everyone that it tastes like dragon meat, and obviously the joke is that you can’t prove them wrong, because no one has ever had dragon meat! But the donkey was surprisingly good, though they made it with peppers that were hot enough to leave my mouth numb! They were slow acting peppers, so you could taste the meat before the pepper effect kicked in. Then Friday, at lunch, the Chinese participants were served a bowl of clear green soup, with some stuff at the bottom. We westerners were told that westerners don’t like sea cucumber soup, so they weren’t going to force us to endure it. Well, you can imagine our response—we had to man up! The soup itself was good, but I only ate one of the four cucumbers—they were just a bit too squishy for my palate.
This week, I travel to Yantai on Friday—I’ll try to get some pictures from the trip for next weekend’s entry.
