I was stuck in the sweltering hot kitchen yesterday, trying to get some work done when I needed to talk to Chu WenJian about some Navstar stuff. After our quick Navstar chat, I ask him about some paint brushes. He tells me he knows local shops that sell those. So I tell him that he should show me the shops sometime. So he says "Ok! Let's go." And grabs his keys and ushers me out the door. 4:30pm and we're walking out the office door.
First we go to Anta, it's a sports shop like a Nike store. I told him I wanted some shoes. Turns out Chinese shoes are narrow, way too narrow. No shoes for me. So we head to FuJio street and start looking for brushes. These are all local stores, for local artists. The cheap brushes cost 4rmb, the fancy ones 20-80rmb. Depending on what kind of hair they use. Hair ranges from the standard sheep (I think he meant goat, but I'm not sure) to the fancy ones made of wolf hair. In the middle somewhere there's rat and fox and something kinda like a fox, but not exactly a fox, smaller than a fox and kinda not fox like. Clearly it was one of those paint brush hair animals, you know the kind... right?
So we shop, we haggle, I buy brushes. The lady in YuYuen selling her brushes for 260rmb down to 110rmb when I walked far enough away was clearly a rip-off. These brushes were the real thing that local artists use to make their paintings and they were way cheaper. Unless of course you were looking for a fancy gift set. Then those were expensive, in the same way that eating out for supper here at a fancy restaurant is expensive. They're expensive if you think RMB is worth a lot. But it's not. So a fancy set of brushes might set you back $20 or less, if you haggle right. I'm white, so I can never haggle right, the prices always start really high. Haggling well for me means I might be getting near the local asking price, not what a local will end up paying.
Done buying brushes, we walk by a bakery on the way home, I had to stop in and get something. I ended up with 2 different kinds of pork buns, one orange dough ball, one black rice cake and one box of seaweed covered peanuts. The orange dough ball was delicious, the black rice cake tasted very oily, I didn't really like it, and the pork buns are awesome. The peanut thing is funny, it's like peanut brittle except more peanuty. It's like eating peanut butter with a hint of nori.
On the way back to the office we encountered a cute Chinese girl who totally bitched out Chu WenJian. Right after she scolded him he hopped up on the sidewalk. I thought she told him not to walk in the street, but it didn't make sense cus everyone walks in the street. Turns out she works at Telenav, and she was chewing him out about skipping work. I told him to tell her that we were having a "walking meeting" but she was long gone before he admitted what she had said.
I got back in time to make plans to go to Cloud 9. It's a bar up on top of the Jing Mao tower. Autumn, Jorge and I went to supper at a sushi place near the bar. It was normal sushi, very fresh fish, very tasty. Then we headed up to Cloud 9. The bar is all in black and has a great view outside. The windows are about 10 feet from the side of the roof though because it's in the tapered top of the building. So you can't see straight down.
The bar served us the most expensive drinks we've had in China. I mean normally we pay 10-20 rmb for a big beer, 500-700ml but here 20 rmb probably gets you a napkin. One pint of draught tiger beer from Singapore, 85 rmb. One Black Label on the rocks, 85 rmb. One highball called a "unicorn" 90rmb. Then you add a 15% service fee (there's never any tax on anything in China, it's always included in the price). The 15% service fee is probably their way of making Americans feel right at home. Anyways, the total bill for three drinks: 299 rmb. A full sushi dinner earlier that evening: 316rmb. Getting totally ripped off for drinks in the highest bar in the world: Priceless.
At least the service was good, we asked for a table by the window, they told us none were free. We said we'd wait, and they told us to sit at this table and they'll get us once a window table is available. So we did, not really thinking that we would ever get a window table. Ten minutes later, we had just gotten our drinks and the waitress tells us there's a window seat free, and to please follow her. Cool. When each of us finished out drinks the waitress politely asked if we wanted another, and when we turned her down she just walked away. When the last of the drinks were done, she asked if we wanted more and we said no thanks. She left us be, we even had to call her over to get the bill. Once we paid our bill we probably stayed there for another half hour taking up premium window seats and nobody bothered us. We took a walk around the bar and then headed home for some sleep.
This morning I woke up sweating. My AC died or something because my room is back up to 25... this sucks. It took four days to get my room down to a reasonable 20 degrees, now it's cranked up to 25. Apparently I wasn't the only one with the AC problems, everyone seemed to be complaining about it this morning. Hopefully they'll have it fixed by sometime today so that my room starts cooling off.
I had breakfast at the street cart, some orange juice and some vegetable blend. The veggie blend had a picture of lettuce on in as well as carrot and oranges. The only things I could read on the bottle was that it was 100% pure juice, that it was 300ml and that it contained 7+7. I don't know what 7+7 but I'm assuming 7 veggies and 7 fruits. It tasted mostly like carrot and orange juice.
It's crazy sweltering hot in the kitchen where I work now since I lost my corner office. Not that the corner office was any cooler, it was probably hotter. But the point of this is that it's not cold or air conditioned in the kitchen. This QA girl sits in front of me, she was rubbing her arms, kinda like people do when they're cold. I'm sitting there thinking that it's weird because I'm sweating like a fountain. Then she puts on a jacket... Boggle! Apparently 25-30 degrees is bone chilling cold! Clearly jacket weather.
So work is boring, I get some stuff done, chat with Autumn, do more work, sweat a lot, eat some seaweed peanuts, sweat some more, consider the effect of cotton mouth on global warming and then make plans for lunch. We went to a HongKong style restaurant. I ate pigeon and goose! Yummy! Pigeon is to chicken like lamb is to beef. Compared to pigeon, chicken is flavourless. Compared to lamb, beef is flavourless. Pigeon has a strong flavour though, not for the faint of heart. It's got a little kick of what I can only describe as liver. It's not a huge liver flavour, but it's there. As it turns out I like liver, so 95% of people reading this are shit out of luck. Sucks to be you liver hating masses.
I'm thinking of heading out this afternoon cus it's so hot and coming back later to work. I still need to hit the shops before I leave. Maybe I'll go now.
I know I haven't been updating pictures, I promise I will, but the connection sucks from the kitchen. I kinda gave up trying.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Shanghai Expedition - the return of the something cool
One quick addition to my last post. At some point on Sunday, I was approached by a white guy with an eastern European accent. He asks me if I speak English and once I say yes, he asks me if I know how to get to some place. I tell him no, he says oh I'm going to this place and he hands me a paper. I start reading, and I'm completely confused, he handed me an e-mail scam. Like one of those Nigerian scams except for China. And then from my confused look he assumed that either I was not interested in his scam or perhaps I couldn't help him get to where he wanted to go. I don't think he was falling for the scam I think he was trying to scam people because after I blew him off, he went to sit in a lawn chair. I don't know many lost tourist who have their own lawn chairs.
So back to the adventure, we've just arrived in Shanghai train station. We try to get a cab, but this cop type guy keeps shooing the cabs away, apparently we weren't in the correct place to grab a cab. Maybe it was because we were in the intersection. Anyways, we hop into a cab, and tell the cabby where we want to go. He says, sorry I don't go there and kicks us out. So we try to flag another cab down. We manage to get one, and it's this woman, first woman cab driver of my adventure. Her cab is clean, smells nice and has crazy air conditioning. It was actually cool in the cab even though it was 35 degrees out. So off we go. She was the most polite driver we've ever come across, she let people cut in front of her without honking or threatening to drive into their car. She didn't cut anyone off, she stopped for red lights, etc, etc. Unfortunately, polite driving means slow driving. It took us a good 40 minutes to get to the hotel. But who cares how slow the ride is when you're in a clean, nice smelling, air conditioned cab? We didn't.
So, at this point George is heading to Beijing for some road testing. Jorge and I agree to meet at 7pm to head for supper. I take a shower and a quick nap, in my icy cold 20 degree room! Hurray for AC! I got bored of waiting around and I decided to do a couple social experiments. Why not? My first task was to see how dedicated the Nanjing road annoying merchants were.
So I walk to Nanjing road and start my test. I have a pretty long stride compared to most Chinese people. So I start walking very fast down the street. People try to cut me off but most people give up really fast, I hear a lot of people yellow "Hullo! Hullo!" but only a few catch up to me, and they stop immediately when I say no. One guy even stopped 15 feet away, he opened his menu, I gave the no thanks wave and he never said a word. Of all the people there, only two were remarkable.
The first was a shop guy, he was pretty tall and could keep up with me, "bagwatch, t-shirt big size, dvd?" "No thanks" "Ok my friend you tell me what you need" holy crow, this guy's English is good compared to the general population. I tell him "Nothing" and in a high pitched incredulous voice that only Chinese men can pull off he says "Nooooothing?! You must need something! Shoes, pants, come see my shop." I say "Sorry, I'm very busy" and so he gives up.
The second was a very beautiful woman. She was not tall, she was pretty much jogging in high heels to keep up with me. "Hello my friend" "Hello" "Where are you from?" "Canada" "Oh, Janada, very nice" like she's ever been there. "Wait a minute, slow down" ok, impressive English. "Sorry I'm very busy" "Not busy, you have time for bar" "Sorry" then she slapped my back. I guess she was tired of running after me. "Buy me a drink!" "Sorry, no time" and then she pinched me. WTF is wrong with these people. So she probably swore at me in Chinese and stopped chasing after me.
Test phase two. I go and buy a sprite (all that walking made me thirsty) and 3 oranges (they look better than they taste sadly). So I walk around drinking sprite and holding 3 oranges in a clear plastic bag. Now the street vendors come up and say "bagwatch" or whatever I say no thanks. Then they think they have a new plan. They'll offer me what I'm shopping for, so they look at my bag. 3 oranges. You should have seen the look on their faces, I should have been walking around with my camera in hand to capture the look. It translated to "WTF! This tourist has 3 oranges in a bag! My head will explode!" or something to that effect. But they were so stunned that they stopped in their tracks, giving me time to escape.
I get back to the hotel, and sit around in the cool 20 degree AC. 7 rolls around and I head down to meet Jorge. We're trying to come up with someplace to eat. Jorge remembers that we never ate dumplings in YuYuen gardens. So we grab a cab and head for food. The cabby was one of those guys that always speaks like he's completely stunned by what you just said. "YuYuen" says Jorge, "YuuuuuuYueeeeen!!!" in OMG California girl style says the cabby. Then he rattles off that he thinks it's closed. Jorge says stuff, he repeats stuff in his incredulous tone. It's so freaken funny to listen to. Finally we decide we'll go to YuYuen and try our luck. The place is crazy busy, busier than last time. So we head off to get dumplings. We eat six dumplings and a little soup each, but we're still hungry. Unfortunately the dumplings weren't as awesome as advertised, so we decide to try something else.
We go to what was described as tapas style food. Really it's a cafeteria. You grab a tray, and load your tray with whatever dishes you want, they you pay and go sit. Self serve to the max. You even get your own utensils and there are no napkins anywhere. We selected the following, veggies wrapped in tofu skin (not bad), quail (ok), a giant dumpling with soup in it and a straw sticking out of it (I had to get it, the soup was pretty good), chicken feet (very good), pork skewers (ok), fish sticks (not bad), battered and fried crab (awesome), funky meat dumplings (good). All this food for 150 rmb. Good times. We found a place to wash our hands and then walked around.
"bagwatch" was again the theme of the evening, so we decided to head someplace else. We hitched a ride to the hotel and decided to hunt around for a bar. As we're walking around the bund, Jorge gets accosted by a guy who offers him a lady bar/massage, apparently Jorge looks lecherous because he's always getting this kind of offer. After ditching the guy by pretending only to speak french (I kinda saved Jorge with that one, he just spouted out a bit of nonsense and laughed a lot). We were on our way. As we get to a corner, one of those little bike taxis stops right in front of us, and a tourist steps out followed by the girl that pinched me earlier. "It's this way she says" pointing to some direction. She spots me, and I smile, she ushers her guy off so that I don't have a chance to say anything.
We never did find a bar, but we had a god walk. We headed back to the hotel and called it a night. This morning I got up at 8ish, ate at the hotel breakfast, Jorge, Autumn and Robert all happened to show up around the same time. Wrote some blog, did some work, downloaded files for an hour. The interwebs hates me, even when it's map data that I'm downloading. Then I invited ZiPing to lunch. She extended the invitation to Candy, and Autumn came along too.
We had Shanghai hairy crab, it's called hairy because it actually has hair on its claws. It's pretty cool and very very tasty. The body seems to have a lot more meat than your typical crab. They're tiny, like the body is the size of two eggs. ZiPing and Candy are so dainty... they asked for gloves so that we didn't get crab sauce all over our hands. So girly, lol. We ate other stuff too, but the crab was really the best dish, the garlic spare ribs were a distant second. The crab is out of season, apparently it's fattier and has better flavour during July and August. That's when the locals eat them.
Now we're all caught up. My adventures continue, as does the heat. It's about 30-33 out there today, and I lost my awesome window cube. Now I'm in the kitchen. The view is ok, I'm not by the window, but the entire wall is a window so it's ok. But it's much cooler here. The only problem is that even on the 4th floor the cigarette smoke wafts in through the window.
No plans for tonight. Eventually I'll have to go to the LauWei market "City Super Store" and I also need to get knives for Emily. And maybe some brushes for Trish and my dad. I saw some brushes last night at YuYuen but they were cheaply made and she was asking too much for them. The price dropped drastically as we walked away from the stand. Each step was a 10 rmb discount. But she gave me too much time to think about it, she shoulda sold them to me when I said that I wouldn't spend more than 120 rmb on em. Instead she dropped the price to 110 and I still walked away. Why spend $18 on cheap brushes, I can probably find some good ones for less.
So back to the adventure, we've just arrived in Shanghai train station. We try to get a cab, but this cop type guy keeps shooing the cabs away, apparently we weren't in the correct place to grab a cab. Maybe it was because we were in the intersection. Anyways, we hop into a cab, and tell the cabby where we want to go. He says, sorry I don't go there and kicks us out. So we try to flag another cab down. We manage to get one, and it's this woman, first woman cab driver of my adventure. Her cab is clean, smells nice and has crazy air conditioning. It was actually cool in the cab even though it was 35 degrees out. So off we go. She was the most polite driver we've ever come across, she let people cut in front of her without honking or threatening to drive into their car. She didn't cut anyone off, she stopped for red lights, etc, etc. Unfortunately, polite driving means slow driving. It took us a good 40 minutes to get to the hotel. But who cares how slow the ride is when you're in a clean, nice smelling, air conditioned cab? We didn't.
So, at this point George is heading to Beijing for some road testing. Jorge and I agree to meet at 7pm to head for supper. I take a shower and a quick nap, in my icy cold 20 degree room! Hurray for AC! I got bored of waiting around and I decided to do a couple social experiments. Why not? My first task was to see how dedicated the Nanjing road annoying merchants were.
So I walk to Nanjing road and start my test. I have a pretty long stride compared to most Chinese people. So I start walking very fast down the street. People try to cut me off but most people give up really fast, I hear a lot of people yellow "Hullo! Hullo!" but only a few catch up to me, and they stop immediately when I say no. One guy even stopped 15 feet away, he opened his menu, I gave the no thanks wave and he never said a word. Of all the people there, only two were remarkable.
The first was a shop guy, he was pretty tall and could keep up with me, "bagwatch, t-shirt big size, dvd?" "No thanks" "Ok my friend you tell me what you need" holy crow, this guy's English is good compared to the general population. I tell him "Nothing" and in a high pitched incredulous voice that only Chinese men can pull off he says "Nooooothing?! You must need something! Shoes, pants, come see my shop." I say "Sorry, I'm very busy" and so he gives up.
The second was a very beautiful woman. She was not tall, she was pretty much jogging in high heels to keep up with me. "Hello my friend" "Hello" "Where are you from?" "Canada" "Oh, Janada, very nice" like she's ever been there. "Wait a minute, slow down" ok, impressive English. "Sorry I'm very busy" "Not busy, you have time for bar" "Sorry" then she slapped my back. I guess she was tired of running after me. "Buy me a drink!" "Sorry, no time" and then she pinched me. WTF is wrong with these people. So she probably swore at me in Chinese and stopped chasing after me.
Test phase two. I go and buy a sprite (all that walking made me thirsty) and 3 oranges (they look better than they taste sadly). So I walk around drinking sprite and holding 3 oranges in a clear plastic bag. Now the street vendors come up and say "bagwatch" or whatever I say no thanks. Then they think they have a new plan. They'll offer me what I'm shopping for, so they look at my bag. 3 oranges. You should have seen the look on their faces, I should have been walking around with my camera in hand to capture the look. It translated to "WTF! This tourist has 3 oranges in a bag! My head will explode!" or something to that effect. But they were so stunned that they stopped in their tracks, giving me time to escape.
I get back to the hotel, and sit around in the cool 20 degree AC. 7 rolls around and I head down to meet Jorge. We're trying to come up with someplace to eat. Jorge remembers that we never ate dumplings in YuYuen gardens. So we grab a cab and head for food. The cabby was one of those guys that always speaks like he's completely stunned by what you just said. "YuYuen" says Jorge, "YuuuuuuYueeeeen!!!" in OMG California girl style says the cabby. Then he rattles off that he thinks it's closed. Jorge says stuff, he repeats stuff in his incredulous tone. It's so freaken funny to listen to. Finally we decide we'll go to YuYuen and try our luck. The place is crazy busy, busier than last time. So we head off to get dumplings. We eat six dumplings and a little soup each, but we're still hungry. Unfortunately the dumplings weren't as awesome as advertised, so we decide to try something else.
We go to what was described as tapas style food. Really it's a cafeteria. You grab a tray, and load your tray with whatever dishes you want, they you pay and go sit. Self serve to the max. You even get your own utensils and there are no napkins anywhere. We selected the following, veggies wrapped in tofu skin (not bad), quail (ok), a giant dumpling with soup in it and a straw sticking out of it (I had to get it, the soup was pretty good), chicken feet (very good), pork skewers (ok), fish sticks (not bad), battered and fried crab (awesome), funky meat dumplings (good). All this food for 150 rmb. Good times. We found a place to wash our hands and then walked around.
"bagwatch" was again the theme of the evening, so we decided to head someplace else. We hitched a ride to the hotel and decided to hunt around for a bar. As we're walking around the bund, Jorge gets accosted by a guy who offers him a lady bar/massage, apparently Jorge looks lecherous because he's always getting this kind of offer. After ditching the guy by pretending only to speak french (I kinda saved Jorge with that one, he just spouted out a bit of nonsense and laughed a lot). We were on our way. As we get to a corner, one of those little bike taxis stops right in front of us, and a tourist steps out followed by the girl that pinched me earlier. "It's this way she says" pointing to some direction. She spots me, and I smile, she ushers her guy off so that I don't have a chance to say anything.
We never did find a bar, but we had a god walk. We headed back to the hotel and called it a night. This morning I got up at 8ish, ate at the hotel breakfast, Jorge, Autumn and Robert all happened to show up around the same time. Wrote some blog, did some work, downloaded files for an hour. The interwebs hates me, even when it's map data that I'm downloading. Then I invited ZiPing to lunch. She extended the invitation to Candy, and Autumn came along too.
We had Shanghai hairy crab, it's called hairy because it actually has hair on its claws. It's pretty cool and very very tasty. The body seems to have a lot more meat than your typical crab. They're tiny, like the body is the size of two eggs. ZiPing and Candy are so dainty... they asked for gloves so that we didn't get crab sauce all over our hands. So girly, lol. We ate other stuff too, but the crab was really the best dish, the garlic spare ribs were a distant second. The crab is out of season, apparently it's fattier and has better flavour during July and August. That's when the locals eat them.
Now we're all caught up. My adventures continue, as does the heat. It's about 30-33 out there today, and I lost my awesome window cube. Now I'm in the kitchen. The view is ok, I'm not by the window, but the entire wall is a window so it's ok. But it's much cooler here. The only problem is that even on the 4th floor the cigarette smoke wafts in through the window.
No plans for tonight. Eventually I'll have to go to the LauWei market "City Super Store" and I also need to get knives for Emily. And maybe some brushes for Trish and my dad. I saw some brushes last night at YuYuen but they were cheaply made and she was asking too much for them. The price dropped drastically as we walked away from the stand. Each step was a 10 rmb discount. But she gave me too much time to think about it, she shoulda sold them to me when I said that I wouldn't spend more than 120 rmb on em. Instead she dropped the price to 110 and I still walked away. Why spend $18 on cheap brushes, I can probably find some good ones for less.
HangZhou - the city by night
I forgot to mention in my previous post that my camera died halfway through the bike ride. Apparently I should have charged it more. So I missed out on some good pictures, like albino peacocks. And possibly the tower ruins, and the greatest archaeological find too! I did get it charged in time for the tea house though.
In any case, my story left off with us coming back from a day of biking and shopping. We decided to treat ourselves to Lo Wei Lo for supper, a fancy place in the middle of the west lake strip. It's a government run restaurant, and it's really popular. We go there at 7:30 (I think, I can't remember if it was 7:30 or 7, but I'll make all times relative to 7:30). We didn't have a reservation, so we walked in. We went upstairs because there was a mob downstairs, and then when we got upstairs the lady told us that we needed a number from downstairs to get a table. George says some guy told him there was a hundred people ahead of him. So we go downstairs and get a number. I tell George to ask how much it would cost to get a table right away. But apparently you can't bribe this restaurant because you'd have to bribe all the employees, since it's a government restaurant, the employees don't care how much money the restaurant makes. Basically if we only bribed one person, everyone else would get mad.
So we decide we'll take a walk along the lake in order to kill some time. George asked the lady how long till we get seated but she didn't know. So George said it would be more than an hour. As we took a walk, I started asking things like "What happens if they call our number and we're not there?" and "How did the guy know there was a hundred people before him" etc, etc. Mostly because it seemed fishy to me for some reason. Trish would say it's another of my conspiracy theories. Anyways, as we're killing time, George answers one of my questions, apparently they were serving #70 when we left and our number was #86... ok that's a huge restaurant. 16 tables before us, that's like 10 minutes! We've been gone 40 mins. So I tell em we should head back. We get there and they're serving #120 or something. The place is almost empty except for people sitting down, almost nobody is waiting to be seated. George presents our number and the lady lets out a pretty loud "Huh?" as in, "Where have you been, we called that 30 minutes ago" In any case, George talks her into letting us sit before everyone else, so we get a table right away.
The waitress comes along, we order some stuff... Chicken with no sex, as in virgin chicken, as in young chicken. We get some eel, and some fish ball soup. The waitress tells us that we'll starve, we need to order more. So we order a couple more dishes, sweet and sour style fish and some donborro or something like that. Basically a cube of fatty pork. The chicken was great, the fish balls were amazing. They were soft and fluffy and tasted like good fish. Not like the rubbery crap you get in the US. Anyways, as we're eating the waitresses keep coming by and asking if we got all our dishes. They're already rushing to get us out of the restaurant and we haven't even gotten our food. Apparently it's time for them to close and they want us to get out of there pronto. So we finally get all our food and we eat, take our time, relax. They bring us the bill really early, it's pretty much the first time I get the bill without asking for it in China. All this time, whenever someone else gets up from their table and they're done eating, all the waiters and waitresses converge on the table. They strip in clean and fold it up, the patio tables are made to fold up kinda like cafeteria tables. Then they stack the chairs and haul them off into a room. By the end of our meal we're one of only three tables left, and the waitresses have stopped asking if we need anything, and are basically avoiding us. We had already paid, so I guess they didn't care about us anymore. I couldn't even get a napkin, even though we asked twice. So I wiped my hands clean on their fancy table cloth.
We left the restaurant and grabbed a cab. The cabby tells us that it would take him an hour to drive us to our hotel but it's only a 25 minute walk. So we get out of the cab and start walking. There's a path along a road where cars can't drive and that's what we take. We try to rent bikes to get there, but the machines are turned off for the night, so we can't take bikes out anymore. We walk the rest of the way there, it was a pretty relaxing stroll compared to what we had done earlier that day. We hopped on a taxi after we finished the no car shortcut and took a 5 minute ride back to the hotel.
Sleep was bad. It was so hot in the hotel, it had been 35 degrees out the whole day and it didn't really cool off at night. I woke up sweating a few times, took a shower to cool off.
Sunday started off a little early, 8am. Jorge and I headed to a Buddhist temple, and George went to do some shopping. The temple was really cool, there was many caves dug out of marble! And in the caves was carvings of Buddhas and other religious figures. It was really cool. We pretty much had to scale a mountain to see all the caves, but it was worth it. Then we went to the really touristy part, the temples themselves. Many people were praying and waving burning incense around, so we had to be careful. Inside the temple halls were many sculptures, I think most were wood with paint or metal plating. I'm not sure since I couldn't touch them. We didn't have time to visit both temples, it took us almost 3 hours to visit the stone caves and the first temple, so we had to head back for the train.
We met up with George, returned our bike cards, our bike rentals cost a grand total of 39 rmb for the 3 of us. We grabbed a cab and ended up at the train station. We didn't eat lunch so I was hungry, I went to a little stand and got sticky rice and fried chicken. It was ok... hard to eat without making a mess.
When we finally got on the train there was two cute girls sitting in our seats. Sadly they were just squatters hoping that nobody had purchased those seats. When we got there, they left and some guy claimed the last seat at our table with his ticket. Bye bye cute girls... hahaha. I slept most of the way back, I needed to catch up on sleep.
All things considered, I think our trip to HangZhou was a success! We had lots of fun! I ate great food, saw new places and got lots of exercise.
In any case, my story left off with us coming back from a day of biking and shopping. We decided to treat ourselves to Lo Wei Lo for supper, a fancy place in the middle of the west lake strip. It's a government run restaurant, and it's really popular. We go there at 7:30 (I think, I can't remember if it was 7:30 or 7, but I'll make all times relative to 7:30). We didn't have a reservation, so we walked in. We went upstairs because there was a mob downstairs, and then when we got upstairs the lady told us that we needed a number from downstairs to get a table. George says some guy told him there was a hundred people ahead of him. So we go downstairs and get a number. I tell George to ask how much it would cost to get a table right away. But apparently you can't bribe this restaurant because you'd have to bribe all the employees, since it's a government restaurant, the employees don't care how much money the restaurant makes. Basically if we only bribed one person, everyone else would get mad.
So we decide we'll take a walk along the lake in order to kill some time. George asked the lady how long till we get seated but she didn't know. So George said it would be more than an hour. As we took a walk, I started asking things like "What happens if they call our number and we're not there?" and "How did the guy know there was a hundred people before him" etc, etc. Mostly because it seemed fishy to me for some reason. Trish would say it's another of my conspiracy theories. Anyways, as we're killing time, George answers one of my questions, apparently they were serving #70 when we left and our number was #86... ok that's a huge restaurant. 16 tables before us, that's like 10 minutes! We've been gone 40 mins. So I tell em we should head back. We get there and they're serving #120 or something. The place is almost empty except for people sitting down, almost nobody is waiting to be seated. George presents our number and the lady lets out a pretty loud "Huh?" as in, "Where have you been, we called that 30 minutes ago" In any case, George talks her into letting us sit before everyone else, so we get a table right away.
The waitress comes along, we order some stuff... Chicken with no sex, as in virgin chicken, as in young chicken. We get some eel, and some fish ball soup. The waitress tells us that we'll starve, we need to order more. So we order a couple more dishes, sweet and sour style fish and some donborro or something like that. Basically a cube of fatty pork. The chicken was great, the fish balls were amazing. They were soft and fluffy and tasted like good fish. Not like the rubbery crap you get in the US. Anyways, as we're eating the waitresses keep coming by and asking if we got all our dishes. They're already rushing to get us out of the restaurant and we haven't even gotten our food. Apparently it's time for them to close and they want us to get out of there pronto. So we finally get all our food and we eat, take our time, relax. They bring us the bill really early, it's pretty much the first time I get the bill without asking for it in China. All this time, whenever someone else gets up from their table and they're done eating, all the waiters and waitresses converge on the table. They strip in clean and fold it up, the patio tables are made to fold up kinda like cafeteria tables. Then they stack the chairs and haul them off into a room. By the end of our meal we're one of only three tables left, and the waitresses have stopped asking if we need anything, and are basically avoiding us. We had already paid, so I guess they didn't care about us anymore. I couldn't even get a napkin, even though we asked twice. So I wiped my hands clean on their fancy table cloth.
We left the restaurant and grabbed a cab. The cabby tells us that it would take him an hour to drive us to our hotel but it's only a 25 minute walk. So we get out of the cab and start walking. There's a path along a road where cars can't drive and that's what we take. We try to rent bikes to get there, but the machines are turned off for the night, so we can't take bikes out anymore. We walk the rest of the way there, it was a pretty relaxing stroll compared to what we had done earlier that day. We hopped on a taxi after we finished the no car shortcut and took a 5 minute ride back to the hotel.
Sleep was bad. It was so hot in the hotel, it had been 35 degrees out the whole day and it didn't really cool off at night. I woke up sweating a few times, took a shower to cool off.
Sunday started off a little early, 8am. Jorge and I headed to a Buddhist temple, and George went to do some shopping. The temple was really cool, there was many caves dug out of marble! And in the caves was carvings of Buddhas and other religious figures. It was really cool. We pretty much had to scale a mountain to see all the caves, but it was worth it. Then we went to the really touristy part, the temples themselves. Many people were praying and waving burning incense around, so we had to be careful. Inside the temple halls were many sculptures, I think most were wood with paint or metal plating. I'm not sure since I couldn't touch them. We didn't have time to visit both temples, it took us almost 3 hours to visit the stone caves and the first temple, so we had to head back for the train.
We met up with George, returned our bike cards, our bike rentals cost a grand total of 39 rmb for the 3 of us. We grabbed a cab and ended up at the train station. We didn't eat lunch so I was hungry, I went to a little stand and got sticky rice and fried chicken. It was ok... hard to eat without making a mess.
When we finally got on the train there was two cute girls sitting in our seats. Sadly they were just squatters hoping that nobody had purchased those seats. When we got there, they left and some guy claimed the last seat at our table with his ticket. Bye bye cute girls... hahaha. I slept most of the way back, I needed to catch up on sleep.
All things considered, I think our trip to HangZhou was a success! We had lots of fun! I ate great food, saw new places and got lots of exercise.
HangZhou - the weekend warrior
Well, we left off as I was in a rush to get to the train station in order to get to HangZhou. I know the suspense is killing you, so I'll let you know right away, we made it to the train on time. But before we get there, I'm gonna add a little more about the shopping on Friday.
We went to the Chi Fu market or something that sounds quite like that. Autumn calls it the cheapo market. They sell all the knockoffs there. The first shopping mall we went in was really bad. People were hounding us, following us, and even yelling at us to go to their shops. When we decided to leave and go across the street, they didn't like that and told us that it would be even worse, that we'd have twenty or more people following our every move. We went across the street anyways. What a difference. People there were sitting in their shop, and if they saw us walk by they would say "Hello! Come looky looky" or "Come in my shop" and then, they might add "need a bag?" or "rolex" or "shopping". I'm not convinced they knew what they were saying. But in any case, once their sales pitch was done, they'd leave us alone unless we were looking at their merchandise. When we were in their shop, they would suggest random things, sometimes they would even suggest items in the same style. One guy even told me that the wallet I was looking at was cheap and that I wanted to buy the good ones. Which were also cheap imitations... oh well. On the way out, after all the shopping I ate octopus on a stick, and that was yummy!
Anyways, back to the train... We hop on a taxi and we speed off towards the train station. By speed off, I mean, we get stuck in massive traffic. I took some pictures of crazy road signs, the signs have lights in them to change the colour of the roads to show where traffic is (I think). When we get to the train station, it's a zoo. People push and shove, they cut in line, bitch at each other, mumble under their breath, all in all a fun time. we get to the train waiting area, and we grab a few beers to kill the time. These beers are small cans, and cost 5 rmb, where regular beers in China as twice to three times the size for 8 rmb, 12 rmb in a fancy restaurant. This leads me to believe that the train station has the same beer prices as fancy restaurants.
We get on the train, we have reserved seats, many people have standing room only. It's a two hour ride... standing would suck. Our tickets cost 54 rmb each, standing room is probably 20-30 rmb. We watch the countryside go by and we try to take some pictures, HangZhou is the fourth and last stop on the train. The little towns we stop in seem very rustic and small, except for the large factories. One town seemed to be processing coal. On the train they gave us a free bottle of water during the ride, so that was pretty cool. Sitting next to me was another white guy, I don't know if he spoke English but he never said a word, even when I said hi to him when I first sat down, he just kinda ignored me.
We get to HangZhou, and we get out of the train station, grab a taxi and head for a hotel. George had checked out some hotel reviews, and he said there was a five star hotel for 300 rmb a night. We get to the hotel, and not having booked any rooms in advance, lo and behold, nothing is available. Well, there are some rooms for 560 rmb a night. No thanks. George seems to be misinformed a lot. He said we would have no problem finding a room...
We leave the hotel and this guy walks up to us, he starts talking to George in Chinese... this looks very fishy to me. George then says the guy knows a good hotel that's pretty cheap. He'll drive us there as it just turns out that he's a taxi driver. Very fishy. The guy drives us to a hotel as promised, but we walk in and the sign on the wall with electronic numbers says that their cheapest rooms are 480 rmb a night. As George is already talking to the hotel girl, I point our the sign to Jorge, he says not to worry about it, that's just white people prices. George informs us that there's rooms available for 300 rmb a night. It's only a three star hotel, but whatever. So we book some rooms, I notice that there's almost nothing filled out on the page that they want me to sign. I make sure the price is there 298 rmb, that's cool, but then there's no check out date. I ask George, he says "Don't worry about it just sign" so I figure they've already discussed this and it'll just be filled out later. They were using George's card for all the deposits anyways, so whatever, it's his card. I sign the thing.
The cab driver is still hanging out, so I ask George about it, and he tells me that the cabby has agreed to drive us to supper. Odd, and slightly reminiscent of Morocco "My cousin has a shop" but whatever. We go drop our stuff off in our rooms. The rooms are HUGE for China standards, 2 single beds, 2 chairs, a desk, big washroom, it makes the Manhattan look bad. Though the fancy stuff is missing. No free water, no marble floors, no air conditioning, the place is a little grungy, but it'll do just fine for two nights.
Our cabby drives us to a noodle shop, apparently it's the best noodles in town. They have shark fin soup at a reasonable price, so that's what I get. It's not that great, shark fin is like tofu, mostly tasteless. Well, now that I've had it I can honestly say that the sharks can keep their fins.
Once we finish supper, the cabby picks us up once more and drives us to a silk shop. I had been told that this was the place to buy silk, so I wanted to buy some. He drove us to a silk shop, not at all what I expected. When I was told that it was a government store, I expected a small boutique with crates filled with raw and patterned silk. Not so, it's more like a high end clothing store that only stocks silk. The also have a section for beddings and silk duvets. The silk isn't really that cheap, so I'm not really pleased with it,plus the sales people are pushy.
We walk out of the store, having finally abandoned our cabby we decide to walk along west lake (XiHu) and see what it's like. On our little travels we come across a tea house. So we go in. It's like high tea at a fancy hotel... so we have to try it. Turns out that the tea wasn't that great, it was ok, but not my favorite. But the snacks... oh the snacks. Tons of nuts, some fruit and some weirdness. My favorites were, mandarins/clementines with green skin, like a lime, except the inside was a bright orange. They were really sweet and not at all sour, they had lots of flavour. Peanut stuffed dried dates. The dates were hard and crunchy, and inside was a peanut or two. Once you chewed them they exploded with flavour, so yummy. And then my favorite, cookie nuts. I'm sure they're not really called cookie nuts, they're long, somewhat like a tamarind, but inside is like a walnut. And they taste like cookies, a mix of graham cracker and oreo cookie. Thus cookie nut.
So we make our way back to the hotel and the guys decide that we should get on the road at 6am the next morning. Who in their right mind is ready to go at 6am on a Saturday?!? The guys were so set on leaving at 6am that they even offered to come back for me at 9... well I'm not one that enjoys being left out, so 6am it is! I wake up at 5:30, stumble into the shower, stumble out of the shower, stumble into my clothes and stumble my way to the lobby. The plan? Rental bikes!
We get to the bike rental place, there's hundreds of these bright orange bikes with a weird locking mechanism. To get a bike, you buy a card, the deposit on the card is 300 rmb. Once you have your card, you can use it to unlock a bike from one of the pillars, you swipe the card and the lock opens, kinda like the shopping carts, or airport cart systems. The bike comes with a built in lock and the key can only be removed when the lock is in it, just like airport rental lockers, except you don't need to put coins in. The bike rentals are by the hour between 1 and 2 rmb an hour! Hahaha, you even get the first hour free, that's pretty much free.
We head off on our bikes to tour west lake. navigating early Saturday traffic isn't that hard, but the guards won't let us near the lake, we have to stay on the bike paths. Cool enough. We stop at a few gardens, the lake gets busier as time goes on. We stop at one point to get some breakfast noodles, really tasty. The as we bike, there's a loud crowd counting, I call them the army, cus it sounds like they're counting steps like "left, left, left right left, by the left right left" style. It turns out that it's a bunch of flag waving walking old people, they look like a united walk walk-a-thon or something. I didn't really understand what they were doing but there had to be more than a thousand people.
After we bike through the army, we get to a temple, apparently it's really old. Well the temple is brand spanking new, but it's build on top of the ruins of an old temple. So they have the ruins in the middle of the new temple, which is not a temple but really a tourist trap, we paid 40 rmb to get in a tourist trap area... great scam. They were also hosting the biggest archaeological find of the 21st century! Lucky us! Seeing it changed our lives completely! I even quit blogging, a thing I picked up only a few days ago! Ok well, in all honesty it was a nicely build hunk of silver, they said it was pure silver, but I know enough that you can't claim that something is hundreds of years old and pure silver in the same paragraph. I'm sorry, but hundreds of years ago they didn't have the technology to make pure silver. Plus pure silver is so soft that it wouldn't have survived hundreds of years unscathed. But those things aside, it's supposed to be a box that contains Buhda's hair. Sounds like a load of BS, but they seem to believe it, so whatever.
We head back to the hotel to take a nap, now we're riding our bikes in heavy traffic, but we manage just fine. This reinforces the idea that I never want to drive in China. Back at the hotel, Jorge gets into his room and George and I are stuck there, trying to get into our rooms. Keys aren't working. We head downstairs and ask the lady. Apparently they assumed we only wanted to stay one night. And apparently George assumed that they knew we wanted to stay two nights. Uh... about that "how come there's no departure date George?" "Don't worry, just sign". I would like to get back into my room now please. After some talking, we get the problem fixed, they have to take another deposit, because the old one was expiring or something. They just scan the card and put a hold. So we take a quick nap and head for lunch. We eat some good food, nothing too crazy, but it was really good. I can't remember exactly what we had, maybe I took some pictures, I'll check that out later.
Anyways, after lunch we find our friendly neighborhood cabby. George had told him that we wanted to go to the tea village, ling something, and it just so happens that this cabby's sister works there... Morocco part two this time for sure. We get to the tea village, and well, it's pretty much still in HangZhou, not in the middle of the countryside as you would expect. It's more like a suburb. And so it begins, they have us get water from a lucky well and wash our hands in it. Then we go in a special sitting room and the lady shows us three qualities of tea. Cheap at 400 rmb/500g, good at 800rmb/500g, super good at 1600rmb/500g... after a bit of talking she lets us in on a secret, there' s even better tea at 2200rmb/500g. Here I say /500g because a Chinese pound is 500g instead of a US pound at 454g.
Anyways, she serves us the 1600rmb tea, and we start tasting, I ask to try the 400rmb tea and she seems insulted. I get George to explain that it's just to compare, then she's happy to oblige. Well, we've seen a lot of tea in stores, and I have to say 1600rmb is hella expensive, I was expecting savings of like 75%, instead it seems more expensive. This tea was better than what was served in the tea house though, and that was 180rmb for one cup! George says he can haggle her down to 1000rmb/500g for the good stuff. So the haggling begins but it's all in Chinese, when George stops and tells us what the price is at, I make some comments, but I don't think George translated for her. I bet you I could have gotten a better price if the lady spoke English, but she didn't. She told George that she pays her farmers 50rmb per day, and it takes 20 farmers 1 day to make a pound of tea. Well, if she can afford to pay 20 farmers 50rmb per day, then she's filthy rich! I didn't buy it, but George accepted it and didn't call her on it. I'm pretty sure he translated my "I thought that buying direct from the farm would be cheaper than buying from the stores" but she countered with "The stores sell the cheap tea". To cut a long story (at least an hour long) short, we ended up with 2 pounds of tea for 2300rmb. Plus a small package of the really good tea, and a small package of the cheap tea. I got the cheap tea for free, after the deal was done. George got the fancy tea for his wife. I took 1/4 pound, Jorge took 1/2 pound and George took the rest. This very much reminded me of buying carpets. It was so Morocco feeling even before we go to the tea place that I had told the guys the Moroccan story.
The taxi driver had some tea with us and then hop back in the cab, off to more silk places. I like the prices and the atmosphere way better at this shop, so I buy some stuff. I won't disclose what I bought because Trish is reading this blog, and I don't want to spoil the surprise. In any case, this shop didn't have any raw silk either. So off we go to a third shop, this time I hit pay dirt. Lots of raw silk, I buy a bunch for Trish, so she can paint it. They only have one style of raw silk though, it'll have to do. After that we head back to the hotel.
We paid the cabby 100rmb for the afternoon. All in all I think everyone including the cab driver was very happy about this price. He probably got a cut of our purchases at the tea house, and maybe at the silk stores. In any case, we were getting ready for supper at Lo Wei Lo, but I'm so tired that that story and all of Sunday will have to wait until tomorrow... Now I'm going to bed.
We went to the Chi Fu market or something that sounds quite like that. Autumn calls it the cheapo market. They sell all the knockoffs there. The first shopping mall we went in was really bad. People were hounding us, following us, and even yelling at us to go to their shops. When we decided to leave and go across the street, they didn't like that and told us that it would be even worse, that we'd have twenty or more people following our every move. We went across the street anyways. What a difference. People there were sitting in their shop, and if they saw us walk by they would say "Hello! Come looky looky" or "Come in my shop" and then, they might add "need a bag?" or "rolex" or "shopping". I'm not convinced they knew what they were saying. But in any case, once their sales pitch was done, they'd leave us alone unless we were looking at their merchandise. When we were in their shop, they would suggest random things, sometimes they would even suggest items in the same style. One guy even told me that the wallet I was looking at was cheap and that I wanted to buy the good ones. Which were also cheap imitations... oh well. On the way out, after all the shopping I ate octopus on a stick, and that was yummy!
Anyways, back to the train... We hop on a taxi and we speed off towards the train station. By speed off, I mean, we get stuck in massive traffic. I took some pictures of crazy road signs, the signs have lights in them to change the colour of the roads to show where traffic is (I think). When we get to the train station, it's a zoo. People push and shove, they cut in line, bitch at each other, mumble under their breath, all in all a fun time. we get to the train waiting area, and we grab a few beers to kill the time. These beers are small cans, and cost 5 rmb, where regular beers in China as twice to three times the size for 8 rmb, 12 rmb in a fancy restaurant. This leads me to believe that the train station has the same beer prices as fancy restaurants.
We get on the train, we have reserved seats, many people have standing room only. It's a two hour ride... standing would suck. Our tickets cost 54 rmb each, standing room is probably 20-30 rmb. We watch the countryside go by and we try to take some pictures, HangZhou is the fourth and last stop on the train. The little towns we stop in seem very rustic and small, except for the large factories. One town seemed to be processing coal. On the train they gave us a free bottle of water during the ride, so that was pretty cool. Sitting next to me was another white guy, I don't know if he spoke English but he never said a word, even when I said hi to him when I first sat down, he just kinda ignored me.
We get to HangZhou, and we get out of the train station, grab a taxi and head for a hotel. George had checked out some hotel reviews, and he said there was a five star hotel for 300 rmb a night. We get to the hotel, and not having booked any rooms in advance, lo and behold, nothing is available. Well, there are some rooms for 560 rmb a night. No thanks. George seems to be misinformed a lot. He said we would have no problem finding a room...
We leave the hotel and this guy walks up to us, he starts talking to George in Chinese... this looks very fishy to me. George then says the guy knows a good hotel that's pretty cheap. He'll drive us there as it just turns out that he's a taxi driver. Very fishy. The guy drives us to a hotel as promised, but we walk in and the sign on the wall with electronic numbers says that their cheapest rooms are 480 rmb a night. As George is already talking to the hotel girl, I point our the sign to Jorge, he says not to worry about it, that's just white people prices. George informs us that there's rooms available for 300 rmb a night. It's only a three star hotel, but whatever. So we book some rooms, I notice that there's almost nothing filled out on the page that they want me to sign. I make sure the price is there 298 rmb, that's cool, but then there's no check out date. I ask George, he says "Don't worry about it just sign" so I figure they've already discussed this and it'll just be filled out later. They were using George's card for all the deposits anyways, so whatever, it's his card. I sign the thing.
The cab driver is still hanging out, so I ask George about it, and he tells me that the cabby has agreed to drive us to supper. Odd, and slightly reminiscent of Morocco "My cousin has a shop" but whatever. We go drop our stuff off in our rooms. The rooms are HUGE for China standards, 2 single beds, 2 chairs, a desk, big washroom, it makes the Manhattan look bad. Though the fancy stuff is missing. No free water, no marble floors, no air conditioning, the place is a little grungy, but it'll do just fine for two nights.
Our cabby drives us to a noodle shop, apparently it's the best noodles in town. They have shark fin soup at a reasonable price, so that's what I get. It's not that great, shark fin is like tofu, mostly tasteless. Well, now that I've had it I can honestly say that the sharks can keep their fins.
Once we finish supper, the cabby picks us up once more and drives us to a silk shop. I had been told that this was the place to buy silk, so I wanted to buy some. He drove us to a silk shop, not at all what I expected. When I was told that it was a government store, I expected a small boutique with crates filled with raw and patterned silk. Not so, it's more like a high end clothing store that only stocks silk. The also have a section for beddings and silk duvets. The silk isn't really that cheap, so I'm not really pleased with it,plus the sales people are pushy.
We walk out of the store, having finally abandoned our cabby we decide to walk along west lake (XiHu) and see what it's like. On our little travels we come across a tea house. So we go in. It's like high tea at a fancy hotel... so we have to try it. Turns out that the tea wasn't that great, it was ok, but not my favorite. But the snacks... oh the snacks. Tons of nuts, some fruit and some weirdness. My favorites were, mandarins/clementines with green skin, like a lime, except the inside was a bright orange. They were really sweet and not at all sour, they had lots of flavour. Peanut stuffed dried dates. The dates were hard and crunchy, and inside was a peanut or two. Once you chewed them they exploded with flavour, so yummy. And then my favorite, cookie nuts. I'm sure they're not really called cookie nuts, they're long, somewhat like a tamarind, but inside is like a walnut. And they taste like cookies, a mix of graham cracker and oreo cookie. Thus cookie nut.
So we make our way back to the hotel and the guys decide that we should get on the road at 6am the next morning. Who in their right mind is ready to go at 6am on a Saturday?!? The guys were so set on leaving at 6am that they even offered to come back for me at 9... well I'm not one that enjoys being left out, so 6am it is! I wake up at 5:30, stumble into the shower, stumble out of the shower, stumble into my clothes and stumble my way to the lobby. The plan? Rental bikes!
We get to the bike rental place, there's hundreds of these bright orange bikes with a weird locking mechanism. To get a bike, you buy a card, the deposit on the card is 300 rmb. Once you have your card, you can use it to unlock a bike from one of the pillars, you swipe the card and the lock opens, kinda like the shopping carts, or airport cart systems. The bike comes with a built in lock and the key can only be removed when the lock is in it, just like airport rental lockers, except you don't need to put coins in. The bike rentals are by the hour between 1 and 2 rmb an hour! Hahaha, you even get the first hour free, that's pretty much free.
We head off on our bikes to tour west lake. navigating early Saturday traffic isn't that hard, but the guards won't let us near the lake, we have to stay on the bike paths. Cool enough. We stop at a few gardens, the lake gets busier as time goes on. We stop at one point to get some breakfast noodles, really tasty. The as we bike, there's a loud crowd counting, I call them the army, cus it sounds like they're counting steps like "left, left, left right left, by the left right left" style. It turns out that it's a bunch of flag waving walking old people, they look like a united walk walk-a-thon or something. I didn't really understand what they were doing but there had to be more than a thousand people.
After we bike through the army, we get to a temple, apparently it's really old. Well the temple is brand spanking new, but it's build on top of the ruins of an old temple. So they have the ruins in the middle of the new temple, which is not a temple but really a tourist trap, we paid 40 rmb to get in a tourist trap area... great scam. They were also hosting the biggest archaeological find of the 21st century! Lucky us! Seeing it changed our lives completely! I even quit blogging, a thing I picked up only a few days ago! Ok well, in all honesty it was a nicely build hunk of silver, they said it was pure silver, but I know enough that you can't claim that something is hundreds of years old and pure silver in the same paragraph. I'm sorry, but hundreds of years ago they didn't have the technology to make pure silver. Plus pure silver is so soft that it wouldn't have survived hundreds of years unscathed. But those things aside, it's supposed to be a box that contains Buhda's hair. Sounds like a load of BS, but they seem to believe it, so whatever.
We head back to the hotel to take a nap, now we're riding our bikes in heavy traffic, but we manage just fine. This reinforces the idea that I never want to drive in China. Back at the hotel, Jorge gets into his room and George and I are stuck there, trying to get into our rooms. Keys aren't working. We head downstairs and ask the lady. Apparently they assumed we only wanted to stay one night. And apparently George assumed that they knew we wanted to stay two nights. Uh... about that "how come there's no departure date George?" "Don't worry, just sign". I would like to get back into my room now please. After some talking, we get the problem fixed, they have to take another deposit, because the old one was expiring or something. They just scan the card and put a hold. So we take a quick nap and head for lunch. We eat some good food, nothing too crazy, but it was really good. I can't remember exactly what we had, maybe I took some pictures, I'll check that out later.
Anyways, after lunch we find our friendly neighborhood cabby. George had told him that we wanted to go to the tea village, ling something, and it just so happens that this cabby's sister works there... Morocco part two this time for sure. We get to the tea village, and well, it's pretty much still in HangZhou, not in the middle of the countryside as you would expect. It's more like a suburb. And so it begins, they have us get water from a lucky well and wash our hands in it. Then we go in a special sitting room and the lady shows us three qualities of tea. Cheap at 400 rmb/500g, good at 800rmb/500g, super good at 1600rmb/500g... after a bit of talking she lets us in on a secret, there' s even better tea at 2200rmb/500g. Here I say /500g because a Chinese pound is 500g instead of a US pound at 454g.
Anyways, she serves us the 1600rmb tea, and we start tasting, I ask to try the 400rmb tea and she seems insulted. I get George to explain that it's just to compare, then she's happy to oblige. Well, we've seen a lot of tea in stores, and I have to say 1600rmb is hella expensive, I was expecting savings of like 75%, instead it seems more expensive. This tea was better than what was served in the tea house though, and that was 180rmb for one cup! George says he can haggle her down to 1000rmb/500g for the good stuff. So the haggling begins but it's all in Chinese, when George stops and tells us what the price is at, I make some comments, but I don't think George translated for her. I bet you I could have gotten a better price if the lady spoke English, but she didn't. She told George that she pays her farmers 50rmb per day, and it takes 20 farmers 1 day to make a pound of tea. Well, if she can afford to pay 20 farmers 50rmb per day, then she's filthy rich! I didn't buy it, but George accepted it and didn't call her on it. I'm pretty sure he translated my "I thought that buying direct from the farm would be cheaper than buying from the stores" but she countered with "The stores sell the cheap tea". To cut a long story (at least an hour long) short, we ended up with 2 pounds of tea for 2300rmb. Plus a small package of the really good tea, and a small package of the cheap tea. I got the cheap tea for free, after the deal was done. George got the fancy tea for his wife. I took 1/4 pound, Jorge took 1/2 pound and George took the rest. This very much reminded me of buying carpets. It was so Morocco feeling even before we go to the tea place that I had told the guys the Moroccan story.
The taxi driver had some tea with us and then hop back in the cab, off to more silk places. I like the prices and the atmosphere way better at this shop, so I buy some stuff. I won't disclose what I bought because Trish is reading this blog, and I don't want to spoil the surprise. In any case, this shop didn't have any raw silk either. So off we go to a third shop, this time I hit pay dirt. Lots of raw silk, I buy a bunch for Trish, so she can paint it. They only have one style of raw silk though, it'll have to do. After that we head back to the hotel.
We paid the cabby 100rmb for the afternoon. All in all I think everyone including the cab driver was very happy about this price. He probably got a cut of our purchases at the tea house, and maybe at the silk stores. In any case, we were getting ready for supper at Lo Wei Lo, but I'm so tired that that story and all of Sunday will have to wait until tomorrow... Now I'm going to bed.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Shanghai Quest - shopping
Today I start my blog before lunch, I will most likely not complete it before lunch, but it doesn't really matter. When you're going to read this, it will look virtually seamless. The only reason you'll know that there is break in the blog is because I'm telling you that I'm starting it before lunch, yet it will most likely include what I ate for lunch. The reason I'm starting before lunch today is because we're going shopping after lunch, and then I'm leaving for Hangzhou. So I won't have much time to finish the blog.
Last time we left off, I was hunting for deodorant, and I still am. Though I've found directions to an expat market that is bound to have some in stock. I'll have to head there next week and check it out.
Last night George invited Autumn, Jorge and I to go to YuYuen Gardens. He said we should leave at 7pm... I asked him if we should go earlier so we can go shopping and he laughed at me. "That's a LauWei question" he said "In China people go shopping and eating late, 9pm is a good time to eat." Ok, so maybe I don't know the culture.
We hop on a taxi and head to YuYuen Gardens. George warned me to kep my money close, because there's a lot of people there. It was almost 7:30 by the time people got their stuff together and when we arrived, the place was busy, but not packed. We start shopping, it's the touristy place, so I'm looking for a bottle opener fridge magnet. Apparently, this invention has yet to arrive in China. The closest thing I could find was a bottle opener key chain.
As we're shopping, I notice shops closing. It's only 8pm... hmm, so I ask George. He tells me that someone at the office told him it was open until midnight. So he asks a shopkeeper. It turns out it's only open late on weekends. and by 9pm tonight everything will be closed. We shop around some more, take some pictures, buy some stuff. I found a stand selling video games! Stuff for the Nintendo DS... So I rifle through and find Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 12. I ask the guy how much for 1, he says 180. I say how much for two, he says 300. I pull out my phone and calculate the price, $45 for two. As I'm about to protest, Jorge walks up the me, and looking at the calculator he says "What? That's the same price as in the US." He thought I was just buying one game. So on cue, the guy starts to protest, and I tell him that Jorge is right, it's the same price... not a very good deal. The guy is all confused at this point. So I interupt his protests with 230. He says no he can't 280 is best price. 250 I counter and he settles with 260.
The Jorge points out that I should try the games. So I ask him, and he pulls out a DS. FF12 works but FF4 is broken. And they don't have another copy. After asking me if I would like any other game and suggesting every second game on the shelf, one by one. Finally he resigns that I'm only gong to buy one game. So he says 150 for one game. I laugh and I say no, 130. He says ok ok. I pay and walk away with the game. $18 for a copy of FF12, I dunno if it's such a good deal, but I had fun haggling. Trish will say I suck at it, but whatever, I got him down to 65% of his original price. I could have done better I'm sure, the guy jumped at 130 way too fast, but whatever.
Anyways, everything closed at 9pm, including the food shops. So we left. We headed towards people's square. There was a group of girls who were very dressed up for the area, they looked like they were going to a club. Jorge and I tried to figure out if they were "professionals" but it didn't really look like it, the way they were acting.
We ended up at people square, or at least nearby. And hunted around for some food. We ended up at a fancy Sichuan restaurant. Ate some stuff, nothing really new or special. A dish I hadn't had before was buns in the shape of mushroom caps that you filled with pork. It was a good supper, very tasty.
We went back to the hotel, and I slept like a rock until 9am... doh! So I took a quick shower and ran out to grab some more of that tasty street breakfast. I finally found real 100% orange juice, it's 5 rmb for 300ml instead of 3rmb for 500ml of the punch. Crazy.
At lunch I went shopping with ZiPing, Autumn and Robert. ZiPing is great, she would haggle and get mad at the vendors when they said LauWei. I could make out the word, it was pretty funny. I got a new wallet for me and some pressies for Trish. I had some street food on the way to the office, octapus on a stick, it was really tasty.
We ate at a Shanghai style restaurant for lunch, my favorite dish there was pinapple sticky rice. It was served in a pinapple! It was pretty awesome.
I'm in a bit of a rush because I have to pack for HangZhou, so this blog will be cut a little short. And by short I mean it ends here.
Last time we left off, I was hunting for deodorant, and I still am. Though I've found directions to an expat market that is bound to have some in stock. I'll have to head there next week and check it out.
Last night George invited Autumn, Jorge and I to go to YuYuen Gardens. He said we should leave at 7pm... I asked him if we should go earlier so we can go shopping and he laughed at me. "That's a LauWei question" he said "In China people go shopping and eating late, 9pm is a good time to eat." Ok, so maybe I don't know the culture.
We hop on a taxi and head to YuYuen Gardens. George warned me to kep my money close, because there's a lot of people there. It was almost 7:30 by the time people got their stuff together and when we arrived, the place was busy, but not packed. We start shopping, it's the touristy place, so I'm looking for a bottle opener fridge magnet. Apparently, this invention has yet to arrive in China. The closest thing I could find was a bottle opener key chain.
As we're shopping, I notice shops closing. It's only 8pm... hmm, so I ask George. He tells me that someone at the office told him it was open until midnight. So he asks a shopkeeper. It turns out it's only open late on weekends. and by 9pm tonight everything will be closed. We shop around some more, take some pictures, buy some stuff. I found a stand selling video games! Stuff for the Nintendo DS... So I rifle through and find Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 12. I ask the guy how much for 1, he says 180. I say how much for two, he says 300. I pull out my phone and calculate the price, $45 for two. As I'm about to protest, Jorge walks up the me, and looking at the calculator he says "What? That's the same price as in the US." He thought I was just buying one game. So on cue, the guy starts to protest, and I tell him that Jorge is right, it's the same price... not a very good deal. The guy is all confused at this point. So I interupt his protests with 230. He says no he can't 280 is best price. 250 I counter and he settles with 260.
The Jorge points out that I should try the games. So I ask him, and he pulls out a DS. FF12 works but FF4 is broken. And they don't have another copy. After asking me if I would like any other game and suggesting every second game on the shelf, one by one. Finally he resigns that I'm only gong to buy one game. So he says 150 for one game. I laugh and I say no, 130. He says ok ok. I pay and walk away with the game. $18 for a copy of FF12, I dunno if it's such a good deal, but I had fun haggling. Trish will say I suck at it, but whatever, I got him down to 65% of his original price. I could have done better I'm sure, the guy jumped at 130 way too fast, but whatever.
Anyways, everything closed at 9pm, including the food shops. So we left. We headed towards people's square. There was a group of girls who were very dressed up for the area, they looked like they were going to a club. Jorge and I tried to figure out if they were "professionals" but it didn't really look like it, the way they were acting.
We ended up at people square, or at least nearby. And hunted around for some food. We ended up at a fancy Sichuan restaurant. Ate some stuff, nothing really new or special. A dish I hadn't had before was buns in the shape of mushroom caps that you filled with pork. It was a good supper, very tasty.
We went back to the hotel, and I slept like a rock until 9am... doh! So I took a quick shower and ran out to grab some more of that tasty street breakfast. I finally found real 100% orange juice, it's 5 rmb for 300ml instead of 3rmb for 500ml of the punch. Crazy.
At lunch I went shopping with ZiPing, Autumn and Robert. ZiPing is great, she would haggle and get mad at the vendors when they said LauWei. I could make out the word, it was pretty funny. I got a new wallet for me and some pressies for Trish. I had some street food on the way to the office, octapus on a stick, it was really tasty.
We ate at a Shanghai style restaurant for lunch, my favorite dish there was pinapple sticky rice. It was served in a pinapple! It was pretty awesome.
I'm in a bit of a rush because I have to pack for HangZhou, so this blog will be cut a little short. And by short I mean it ends here.
Shanghai Mini - the tiny edition
So I saw my first traffic accident today, I thought I'd report before I forget. These two mopeds bumped together. One woman was claiming to have an injured foot. People were yelling, people were watching and I asked DongBing about it. He says accidents in China are normally settled on the spot, the person who hit the other gives his victim some cash. If the amount of cash is too small, if nobody wants to admit they're at fault or if it's a big accident and people are really injured, they call the cops. He doesn't know much more because he doesn't drive.
I was also shopping a bit by myself, it's kinda funny, I walk into local shops and then there's always someone keeping an eye on me. They try to be discreet, but it's pretty obvious, I tested it. I changed isles, the lady "reading" the newspaper changes isles nonchalantly. I change back to the previous isle, and now something on he shelf in the previous isle has caught her attention. I change back again and suddenly she must count her bottles of pop, or milk or whatever it was that happen to be in the same isle as me. I thought it funny at first, but then this happened in every store I walked into. About 8 stores in total.
Sadly I'm looking for deodorant, I'm gonna run out soon because I only packed my gym/camping one, and I didn't check it, and it's almost done. Turns out that deodorant is rare in China, people don't use the stuff here. They stock it only for foreigners. I'll have to ask George if he knows where I can get some. I bet it'll be expensive, hahaha.
Anyways, as I was shopping a thought crossed my mind. They're watching me to make sure I don't steal stuff. Is it really common for LauWei to steal things in China? Or are they just generally mistrusting of foreigners. I ask because the stuff that was locked in the glass case cost at most 20 RMB, and everything else was dirt cheap. I was walking into their store with about 800 RMB in my pocket, I could literally buy more than I could carry, even if I had two people to help me carry stuff! And yet, they were watching me to make sure I didn't steal a bar of soap worth 30 cents... Boggles the mind.
Anyways, my quest continues, but I now know what happens in case of an accident. If you carry money you can avoid the police!
I was also shopping a bit by myself, it's kinda funny, I walk into local shops and then there's always someone keeping an eye on me. They try to be discreet, but it's pretty obvious, I tested it. I changed isles, the lady "reading" the newspaper changes isles nonchalantly. I change back to the previous isle, and now something on he shelf in the previous isle has caught her attention. I change back again and suddenly she must count her bottles of pop, or milk or whatever it was that happen to be in the same isle as me. I thought it funny at first, but then this happened in every store I walked into. About 8 stores in total.
Sadly I'm looking for deodorant, I'm gonna run out soon because I only packed my gym/camping one, and I didn't check it, and it's almost done. Turns out that deodorant is rare in China, people don't use the stuff here. They stock it only for foreigners. I'll have to ask George if he knows where I can get some. I bet it'll be expensive, hahaha.
Anyways, as I was shopping a thought crossed my mind. They're watching me to make sure I don't steal stuff. Is it really common for LauWei to steal things in China? Or are they just generally mistrusting of foreigners. I ask because the stuff that was locked in the glass case cost at most 20 RMB, and everything else was dirt cheap. I was walking into their store with about 800 RMB in my pocket, I could literally buy more than I could carry, even if I had two people to help me carry stuff! And yet, they were watching me to make sure I didn't steal a bar of soap worth 30 cents... Boggles the mind.
Anyways, my quest continues, but I now know what happens in case of an accident. If you carry money you can avoid the police!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Shanghai Quest - Food for Thought
Back at this blog thing again... Finally got pictures up, I used remote desktop to access my US machine and then I used our shared servers to transfer my pictures over from China. So now it's like uploading the files from the US. Woot! So scrolls down to the old blogs and see the pictures!
Anyways, we left off last time after the electronics hunting trip. I did some work that afternoon, and then supper time came along. Looks like Autumn is my food partner for the trip, she's discovered some food that she likes, so that's pretty cool. We hooked up with Peter (his real name sounds nothing like Peter, but right now I can't remember it) and Lu Ye. Both these guys are on Autumn's team, and they both kinda speak English, bonus!
We head out to yet another very fancy very new restaurant. I don't think anyone will ever take me to their favourite (still U for Trish) restaurant. Probably because they see us as an opportunity to try some really fancy restaurants. Actually I don't blame them... if you had some moneybags guy ask you "Wanna go for food? The company is paying and money is no object." would you take them to the place you eat at all the time? Obviously not, you'd take em to the fanciest place you can think of. So that's what these guys do.
Off to another Sichuan restaurant. I know I've been spelling Sichuan differently depending on what day it is and where my fingers hit the keyboard that day, but really it doesn't matter... it's always the same place, no matter how I spell it. The name isn't originally English, so I can spell it however I want and it's never a mistake. If you disagree, prove me wrong! Oh that's right, you can't, cus every third Chinese person who can spell words in English spells it differently. I win.
So back to my story, Sichuan restaurant. We had some awesome food, and I even took pictures! We had a bowl of fish drowned in some oily sauce, some spicy frog legs, peanut butter lettuce, some strange cucumber style veggie, some cabbage, and a cool pumpkin thing (it was cool looking, but kinda bland) all in all a good meal. We also had some beer, Tsing Dao and Steinlagger both Chinese, though I think the Steinlagger people want to be German. They're not though, Germans don't make weak beer. So we split 4 bottles, 2 of each kind. This is how it worked: First everyone gets a half glass of beer, then my glass is topped up. Then as I drink, my glass is continuously topped up. Maybe they were trying to get me drunk. But I swear that Peter's face slowly turning red was the only indication that there was any alcohol in this beer. Real beer would flatline these people easy I think.
So as we leave the restaurant, Peter was very red in the face. He laughed when he saw his reflection in the mirror, I think he was a little embarrassed. Anyways, he got to the subway ok, he said he was sober enough for that... he better have been sober enough, he only had about half a bottle. Lu Ye walked us the rest of the way to the Hotel, he seemed to be handling the booze much better than Peter.
After a quick stop at the Hotel, and an attempt to find George (he told us he would take us visiting places, but he bailed) Autumn and I decided to go to the Bund. Now I no longer feel bad about not finding the Bund. To be honest, there's not much to find. About 3/4 of the Bund is under construction. We walked along the last quarter of it while being harassed with salesman and their "bagwatch". There a couple new things to add to the list now "laser" and "jazz mean" aka. jasmine. I now have a new hatred of beggars. The Chinese beggars are quite different than their North American counterparts. They don't speak English for one, they don't even try. At least the vendors learn the word for what they're trying to sell. These beggars could learn "Please help" or something like that, instead they make gestures like they want to eat something and then shake a bowl or cup at you. The first beggar walked up to Autumn and I then started making these gestures. I thought she wanted to sell us food because we had been harassed by vendors already. I told her no thanks, there's no way I wanted food that touched this old lady anyways. Clearly "no thanks" was not an acceptable response because she stayed there, shaking her coin bowl at me. I didn't even know it was a coin bowl yet, I still thought she wanted to sell me food, maybe candy from her bowl. So I just turned around and ignored her. She tapped my arm a couple times and then left.
Some more hate for the beggars. Many of them will actually try to stop you from walking by them. And if you do make it past them they will follow you as far as they can, for as long as they can keep up with you. And the whole time they will push against your arm with their cup of change. It's only once you've passed the cup that they will leave you be. It's probably the first time I was happy that someone had difficulty walking and couldn't keep up with me. One guy was sitting on a board with wheels, some sort of wheelchair type thing, and he almost tripped us when he tried to cut us off to get money. I mean sure, feel free to beg, but don't go trying to bully people out of their money. I felt like punching some of them. There was quite a selection to pick from.
Anyways, the beggars didn't really ruin the evening, we had lots of fun walking around and seeing the sights. But I was happy to get back to my hotel so I could shower and sleep. It's crazy hot, so I end up taking two showers a day, just to keep cool. No wake up call this morning, so that was good!
I did have a breakfast date with Xu ZiPing, she's a really nice girl. She showed me the street vendor that made breakfast for Kevin and Emily. A really nice couple, and they seemed pretty skilled at making the breakfast. A couple of things to note when buying street food:
1) If you're picky about cleanliness, give up now, go to a restaurant
2) If you're not with a local, you will end up getting the LauWei discount, things cost %50 more when you're a foreigner
3) Eggs are brown, they have a dark yellow yolk, and the shells should be throw at your feet in the street
4) If you drop your utensil that you use to flip food, scramble eggs and do whatever else needs done, simply pick it up from the street, bang it on the side of the cart a couple of times and you're good to go, it's as good as new
5) Always use a lot of oil! Oil is good for you!
6) You don't need napkins, just eat your food out of the tiny plastic bag they gave you, be careful not to burn yourself, that stuff is hot
7) Enjoy your tiny piece of Chinese heritage, it's more authentic than anything served in the fancy restaurants
So breakfast cost 3 RMB normally it's 2 RMB but an extra egg is 1 RMB. It's a rice dough pancake with eggs and green onion cooked into it with some brown sauce. The sauce is something I've had before, it's sweet and kinda like gelatin consistency. I can't remember what it is. Anyways, it's delicious.
Then I went to work... I had to do a phone interview with someone in the US... what the hell?! Anyways, I did the interview, the connection sucked, it was a pain. But it's done. Then lunch... Autumn, Ed (he's Chinese but from the US office), Cheng Hua, DongBing and I went to a fancy restaurant. Autumn's been there before.
The first thing I noticed on the menu was that something really strange was shown on the cover. So I ask "What's that", nobody knew what it was in English, but DongBing noticed that the menu was written in English and Chinese. So he finds the dish in the menu... Sea Cucumber!!! So I tell him that I have to try it. He tells me it's 118 RMB per person... ok... that's like $18 or whatever. Done, I want it for lunch. Then he tells me it's very small. Still not caring, must have. So then he says ok, we'll only order for one person. Why they have the price per person is still beyond me. It's one whole sea cucumber, the price should be per sea cucumber. For those of you who don't know, a sea cucumber is actually an animal, it's not a veggie. We also ordered a meat platter that turned out looking like a butterfly when they served it. We got some veggies, some chicken, some smoked fish, some noodles, and some pork. The pork said "pork ribs" in the menu, and the picture made them look small, but you ordered per piece. I was expecting chicken wing sized pieces, as was DongBing. To our surprise it was pork hauks! And we ordered 5... one each! Oops! In the pictures, the butterfly is made of sliced cured meat and the gross looking thing in the orange sauce is very delicious and tender sea cucumber. It's kinda like jello in texture and uh... nothing else tastes like this, you'll just have to try it... or not.
There we have it folks, Sea Cucumber has made it off the to-eat list! And I found a friend to eat dog with!!! Chu WenJiang will take me to a Korean place where they serve dog.
Also to note, George bought us some train tickets to Hangzhou, we leave Friday evening and get back Sunday. Sounds like a blast to me. I should still be able to blog from there, if I have time.
Anyways, we left off last time after the electronics hunting trip. I did some work that afternoon, and then supper time came along. Looks like Autumn is my food partner for the trip, she's discovered some food that she likes, so that's pretty cool. We hooked up with Peter (his real name sounds nothing like Peter, but right now I can't remember it) and Lu Ye. Both these guys are on Autumn's team, and they both kinda speak English, bonus!
We head out to yet another very fancy very new restaurant. I don't think anyone will ever take me to their favourite (still U for Trish) restaurant. Probably because they see us as an opportunity to try some really fancy restaurants. Actually I don't blame them... if you had some moneybags guy ask you "Wanna go for food? The company is paying and money is no object." would you take them to the place you eat at all the time? Obviously not, you'd take em to the fanciest place you can think of. So that's what these guys do.
Off to another Sichuan restaurant. I know I've been spelling Sichuan differently depending on what day it is and where my fingers hit the keyboard that day, but really it doesn't matter... it's always the same place, no matter how I spell it. The name isn't originally English, so I can spell it however I want and it's never a mistake. If you disagree, prove me wrong! Oh that's right, you can't, cus every third Chinese person who can spell words in English spells it differently. I win.
So back to my story, Sichuan restaurant. We had some awesome food, and I even took pictures! We had a bowl of fish drowned in some oily sauce, some spicy frog legs, peanut butter lettuce, some strange cucumber style veggie, some cabbage, and a cool pumpkin thing (it was cool looking, but kinda bland) all in all a good meal. We also had some beer, Tsing Dao and Steinlagger both Chinese, though I think the Steinlagger people want to be German. They're not though, Germans don't make weak beer. So we split 4 bottles, 2 of each kind. This is how it worked: First everyone gets a half glass of beer, then my glass is topped up. Then as I drink, my glass is continuously topped up. Maybe they were trying to get me drunk. But I swear that Peter's face slowly turning red was the only indication that there was any alcohol in this beer. Real beer would flatline these people easy I think.
So as we leave the restaurant, Peter was very red in the face. He laughed when he saw his reflection in the mirror, I think he was a little embarrassed. Anyways, he got to the subway ok, he said he was sober enough for that... he better have been sober enough, he only had about half a bottle. Lu Ye walked us the rest of the way to the Hotel, he seemed to be handling the booze much better than Peter.
After a quick stop at the Hotel, and an attempt to find George (he told us he would take us visiting places, but he bailed) Autumn and I decided to go to the Bund. Now I no longer feel bad about not finding the Bund. To be honest, there's not much to find. About 3/4 of the Bund is under construction. We walked along the last quarter of it while being harassed with salesman and their "bagwatch". There a couple new things to add to the list now "laser" and "jazz mean" aka. jasmine. I now have a new hatred of beggars. The Chinese beggars are quite different than their North American counterparts. They don't speak English for one, they don't even try. At least the vendors learn the word for what they're trying to sell. These beggars could learn "Please help" or something like that, instead they make gestures like they want to eat something and then shake a bowl or cup at you. The first beggar walked up to Autumn and I then started making these gestures. I thought she wanted to sell us food because we had been harassed by vendors already. I told her no thanks, there's no way I wanted food that touched this old lady anyways. Clearly "no thanks" was not an acceptable response because she stayed there, shaking her coin bowl at me. I didn't even know it was a coin bowl yet, I still thought she wanted to sell me food, maybe candy from her bowl. So I just turned around and ignored her. She tapped my arm a couple times and then left.
Some more hate for the beggars. Many of them will actually try to stop you from walking by them. And if you do make it past them they will follow you as far as they can, for as long as they can keep up with you. And the whole time they will push against your arm with their cup of change. It's only once you've passed the cup that they will leave you be. It's probably the first time I was happy that someone had difficulty walking and couldn't keep up with me. One guy was sitting on a board with wheels, some sort of wheelchair type thing, and he almost tripped us when he tried to cut us off to get money. I mean sure, feel free to beg, but don't go trying to bully people out of their money. I felt like punching some of them. There was quite a selection to pick from.
Anyways, the beggars didn't really ruin the evening, we had lots of fun walking around and seeing the sights. But I was happy to get back to my hotel so I could shower and sleep. It's crazy hot, so I end up taking two showers a day, just to keep cool. No wake up call this morning, so that was good!
I did have a breakfast date with Xu ZiPing, she's a really nice girl. She showed me the street vendor that made breakfast for Kevin and Emily. A really nice couple, and they seemed pretty skilled at making the breakfast. A couple of things to note when buying street food:
1) If you're picky about cleanliness, give up now, go to a restaurant
2) If you're not with a local, you will end up getting the LauWei discount, things cost %50 more when you're a foreigner
3) Eggs are brown, they have a dark yellow yolk, and the shells should be throw at your feet in the street
4) If you drop your utensil that you use to flip food, scramble eggs and do whatever else needs done, simply pick it up from the street, bang it on the side of the cart a couple of times and you're good to go, it's as good as new
5) Always use a lot of oil! Oil is good for you!
6) You don't need napkins, just eat your food out of the tiny plastic bag they gave you, be careful not to burn yourself, that stuff is hot
7) Enjoy your tiny piece of Chinese heritage, it's more authentic than anything served in the fancy restaurants
So breakfast cost 3 RMB normally it's 2 RMB but an extra egg is 1 RMB. It's a rice dough pancake with eggs and green onion cooked into it with some brown sauce. The sauce is something I've had before, it's sweet and kinda like gelatin consistency. I can't remember what it is. Anyways, it's delicious.
Then I went to work... I had to do a phone interview with someone in the US... what the hell?! Anyways, I did the interview, the connection sucked, it was a pain. But it's done. Then lunch... Autumn, Ed (he's Chinese but from the US office), Cheng Hua, DongBing and I went to a fancy restaurant. Autumn's been there before.
The first thing I noticed on the menu was that something really strange was shown on the cover. So I ask "What's that", nobody knew what it was in English, but DongBing noticed that the menu was written in English and Chinese. So he finds the dish in the menu... Sea Cucumber!!! So I tell him that I have to try it. He tells me it's 118 RMB per person... ok... that's like $18 or whatever. Done, I want it for lunch. Then he tells me it's very small. Still not caring, must have. So then he says ok, we'll only order for one person. Why they have the price per person is still beyond me. It's one whole sea cucumber, the price should be per sea cucumber. For those of you who don't know, a sea cucumber is actually an animal, it's not a veggie. We also ordered a meat platter that turned out looking like a butterfly when they served it. We got some veggies, some chicken, some smoked fish, some noodles, and some pork. The pork said "pork ribs" in the menu, and the picture made them look small, but you ordered per piece. I was expecting chicken wing sized pieces, as was DongBing. To our surprise it was pork hauks! And we ordered 5... one each! Oops! In the pictures, the butterfly is made of sliced cured meat and the gross looking thing in the orange sauce is very delicious and tender sea cucumber. It's kinda like jello in texture and uh... nothing else tastes like this, you'll just have to try it... or not.
There we have it folks, Sea Cucumber has made it off the to-eat list! And I found a friend to eat dog with!!! Chu WenJiang will take me to a Korean place where they serve dog.
Also to note, George bought us some train tickets to Hangzhou, we leave Friday evening and get back Sunday. Sounds like a blast to me. I should still be able to blog from there, if I have time.
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