I was sitting at my desk watching crazy droves of traffic last night, when my stomach grumbled. I looked around and it being 7:30pm, not many people were left. George was heading to a dinner meeting with the China navstar crew, and seeing as most of the meeting would be in Chinese I totally bailed on them. It's not like sitting at a table with a whole pile of Chinese speakers will make my life any more difficult, but I had a better option that night. I went to supper with Autumn and Robert.
Even though Robert wanted spicy food, Autumn and I convinced him that it wasn't in his best interest to eat spicy food. So instead we went to the super expensive Cantonese place. Oh btw, Sechuan sounds like Sit-chew-ahn, Hunan sounds like who-nan and Cantonese sounds nothing even remotely close to Cantonese. It's Guangdong sounds like wan-don kinda... Anyways, it's what English people translated to Canton.
Autumn doesn't really like Chinese food, so it's kinda funny having her here in China. We were joking that she could always order sweet and sour chicken balls. That's her favorite when we go to Chinese food in the US. Pretty much the only thing she'd eat in a Chinese restaurant.
Anyways, we leave for the restaurant. When we get to this fancy restaurant, on the 7th floor, they sit us by a window, awesome view. We're sitting there for 30 seconds and the guy at the next table lights up a cigarette... great... so we ask for a non-smoking table. And so we get sent to a dark corner of the restaurant next to a fountain. So much for the nice view. At least we can breathe.
Autumn and I start looking through the menu and lo and behold, right there on the menu, sweet and sour chicken balls. WTF? So we order that, steak + asparagus + garlic, a BBQ sampler and season vegetables. The BBQ sampler is your choice of 3 BBQ dishes, I got pork, goose and chicken. Autumn like the chicken balls and the steak cubes. I loved everything especially the BBQ pork. Well, the broccoli kinda sucked, it didn't have any sauce, just steamed broccoli. And Robert, the only Chinese guy at our table didn't like anything. So he figures maybe he'll like the dumplings better and orders some. The dumplings tasted great to me, but still not up to par according to Robert. Maybe we shouldn't have talked him out of spicy food... And this cost about $40... kinda lame for what we got.
Back at the Hotel, I take a quick shower to try and cool off. The AC in my room keeps it at a cool 26 degrees Celsius. Hurray for AC! A window woulda been better at least it's only 20 degrees outside. The problem is the AC shuts off when you leave the room, so you have to be in the room a while before it cools off. So I lie down on the bed after my shower and I come to realize that the bed feels more like a piece of plywood than a mattress. It didn't feel that hard the night before, probably cus I was super tired. Oh and I got George to ask for a lighter blanket, cus the one I had was too hot. I ended up with a smaller blanket, doesn't even cover the mattress, but it's the same thickness... something definitely got lost in translation.
This morning I went up to the buffet, had some food, the meat dumplings were really good this morning. When I ask the waitress if I had to sign anything (they got me to sign something yesterday) she asked me for my room number. So in my broken almost non-existent Chinese, I say ba wu yi liao, 8516, she wrote down 8510. 0 is ling, but the other waitress corrected her and so she put down 8516, checked her list and said "ok thank you". Then both waitresses giggled at me as I said xie xie (thank you) and went on my way. I probably sound like a little kid when I say numbers in Chinese, but whatever.
I started to make my way to work alone this time, nobody to escort me. But hey, no problems there. I got to work without a hiccup. Then I did work... so let's skip the boring part. On to lunch. George, Lin Hongzhu, Wang JingBin and I went to a lunch spot right by work. We had some fish head soup, ribs, green beans and meat, spicy shrimp and rice. All was tasty. pretty cheap, about $20. On the way back to the office a street vendor was making what looks like onion cakes, George says they're 2 RMB, so like 30 cents. I'll have to try one soon, they looked really good.
My neighbor at my desk is Kuang HuiHeng, his English is ok, but not great. He's been helping me figure out what things are in Chinese... cool guy, he's the one who told me how to pronounce GuangDong. He's got a cool program that he can type words into and it gives the English words, I need something like that but the other way around!
As a side note, since I have no place better to put this, it's 25 degrees out, note that my degrees are all Celsius. 25 is 77 for you American type people. Anyways, I'm in shorts and t-shirt (surprise surprise) but the kicker is that at least 50% of people on the street are wearing jackets! Some of them even look like winter jackets. I will never come here in summer, and never live here... I think I would die of heat stroke on the plane.
Tonight I plan to go to an electronics store and find some stuff... so stay tuned for some crazy shopping stories. Apparently there are no good electronics stores in the area, only women shopping according to Lin Hongzhu.
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