Tania in China

Thurs, Oct 12: Work and Food - What else is there?

I end up having a good night's sleep, and am hoping that the extra sleep will stop my bobbing problem, but no - as I head down to breakfast the bobbing starts again. Darn! After breakfast I put together my first batch of laundry to send off - I have never actually had a hotel do my laundry before. I fill out the appropriate forms and call the service, and they send a girl up to the room to pick it up. According to the form I should have it by by 5pm today, so we will see...

Work is as normal - we have spent most of the work trying to get everything setup so that we can start the actual install we are supposed to be doing. The show networks have been effecting all of my tasks - it ends up taking over 12 hours to get one 10gb file we need from Australia to Shanghai. The office is still really hot, but at least today I am wearing short sleeves.

For lunch I go with a co-worker to a local Thai restaurant. Since there are so many foreigners in the hotel and office building I am at, there is a small group of restaurants around the building that cater to that clientele - this restaurant is one of them. All of the items have English descriptions on their menus, so I am not so intimidated when ordering. They do have Pad Thai and Chicken with Cashews on the menu, but I try a new dish - beef with pepper and green onion. Again the meal does not come with rice - it is just so different than the Asian restaurants in the United States. The food is good and not spicy at all, but would have been better mixed with rice. We are the only people in the restaurant when we get there, and only one other group of Ex-Pats enter while we are there. It makes you wonder how these restaurants can stay in business.

After work I head to my room to get ready for dinner, and find my laundry there waiting for me. The shirts and pants are hung-up in the closet, and the other items are nicely folded in a wicker basket on the dry-bar. It all looks really spiffy, but boy is laundry expensive at a hotel! It is over $60 for about 4 days worth of clothes.

I go to dinner with a group of Ford employees - 4 Australians, a German, and a Chinese, and we head to an area of Nanjing know as "1912". This is an upscale area of restaurants, bars, and coffee houses that would have been at home in any major metropolitan city around the world. We go to restaurant called "Bellagio" which, despite it's name, serves Taiwanese food. Again I leave the ordering to others, and we end up with about a dozen dishes. We start with cold roll-ups made with slices of pork and vegetables, pork served Peking-style, marinated beef strips served with cooked greens and thin pancakes, deep-fried spring rolls served with lettuce leaves and vinegar, baked chicken, a noodle soup with coconut milk and peanuts, shrimp with pineapple in a creamy sauce, and even frog legs! I did try a little bit - the marinade was much more prominent than the meat, and the rounds of meat all seemed to contain tiny little bones. Again, it was far too much food for me! I think that I have tasted more dishes over the past 5 days that I have during the previous month in the US! We all have a beer, and the meal comes to around $9.50 each. Sorry to keep bringing up the prices, but they still amaze me!

After dinner we walk around a bit, and head in to a bar for a drink. There is a trio playing American classics - as we enter they are playing "My Way". They have an extensive list of cocktails, and I end up with a White Russian. I never thought I would be having a White Russian during my time in China! And at about $4.50, it is around the same price I would pay in the US. I really don't understand the whole going out to the bar thing - the reason you are going out is to spend time with your friends, but the music is always so loud that you can barely hear the person next to you! I guess I am just getting too old... Anyway, with my whole "room bobbing" problem, I find that I can't tell whether I am being affected by the alcohol or not, so I have to be careful!

Walking back to the car we pass by both another Starbucks as well as a Coffee Beanery - US culture is definitely invading everywhere! It takes about 15 minutes to drive back to the hotel, and I am finally realizing how big a city Nanjing is. I look on the map when I get back to my room, and we were barely even in the middle of town! Nanjing may be a lot smaller than Shanghai, but a city of 5 million people is still REALLY large! I think about finally doing a bit of reading before turning out the light, but decide against it and go straight to sleep.

posted by Tania @ 10:39 AM