No, I did not eat too much Chinese food while I was here! .. the photo is a reflection from a polished work of art at the airport.
My flight has been delayed by 6 hours, but that’s OK. It is so nice to be able to go home for a week. Wednesday night, we stayed at the upmarket Marriott Hong Kong Sky City hotel, close to the airport last night.
My colleagues, carnivorous Americans that they are, couldn’t wait to sink their teeth into a cheeseburger in the hotel’s restaurant. They talked about it with some of our Chinese colleagues already as we were leaving Daya Bay. The conversation went as follows : ‘You should not kill animals and eat them, you should eat vegetables’. Response : ‘Oh, we kill the animals to save the vegetables!’. Oh boy : ).
I had plans of my own : grabbed a sandwich in the hotel lobby and went out to explore the city with the help of the MTR subway system. I will post a few night-time pictures of Hong Kong when I get home. Night time there offers spectacular cityscapes. At one point the train went through an out-worldly forest of 50 story-high apartment buildings. The airport is out on Lantau island west of Hong Kong island, and it takes a while to get to Kowloon or Hong Kong and so it was already 10pm by the time I got there, and most of the stores were closing. I should be able to come back to Hong Kong several times, though.
Hey, Tuesday is one day closer to Thursday. By now the bus ride in to work offers few surprises, but I still see many more ‘out of place things’ than perhaps I would see in the USA on the way to work : a kid that seems way too young to be bicycling on his own on the busy road; an electrical control panel door left open on the side of a building, a driver doing a risky move.
Here’s a red bean milkshake that I had at the Silver Dragon restaurant in Hong Kong on Saturday (very nice !).
We had dinner last night at a new (for us) little restaurant close to our apartments, and the food was excellent: pork on a bone with Szechuan spices (I’m still careful to bite too big into food with these), eggplant strips with garlic, noodles in a broth (got to have those!) and TsingTao beer. The tab? A scant 43 yuan ($6) each. I’m told the cleaning lady for our apartment gets $6 for two hours’ work.
On a Saturday morning we can walk down towards the beach and buy a delicious omelet-like breakfast on the sidewalk by the beach for 50 American cents. The radiant heater-fan combination in our apartment was all of $12 at Walmart. Of course, a cheap currency helps exports (as my dad told us many times at the dinner table when we were kids!), but it also makes the money in the Great Piggy Bank of China (by some estimates it was $4.3 trillion in 2009) worth a lot less.
The birthday cake for a team member was very nice! A very light cake with frosting and lots of fruit.
By the way : dessert for a Chinese meal is usually a fruit platter with melon and cantaloupe and the like, in lieu of ice cream, pie or pastries.
Let’s see: orange, strawberry, starfruit (carambola) on top, and the white fruit with the pink skin and the little black seeds in, is dragon fruit (pitaya).
We walked down to the beach where the area’s McDonalds is. (There is also a KFC but no Starbucks).
My McDonalds breakfast consisted of orange juice, hash browns and a spicy grilled chicken McMuffin.
The Dameisha area has some very nice beaches, but it’s quiet at the moment since it’s winter and not tourist season.
Some of the buildings are really run-down or even deserted, others are brand new. One gets the impression everywhere that construction happens in spasms and not always well-planned.
Well – what can I say? I was Alice, and Walmart was a wonderland of Chinese culture and department store marketing of food, houseware, electronics and clothing. There we were, 15 of us dropped off with a little bus, looking for household items and food for our apartments in Dameisha. And did we load up that bus!
Walmart being what it is, the choices were cheap and enormous – and of course, they had Kraft branded food products and Coke & Pepsi, but there were still some surprises. Dinner plates were hard to find. Chinese food is served up in bowls. T-shirts were not plentiful at all.
The food was the most fascinating, from the ‘wet area’ where one could catch one’s own super-fresh seafood (yes, right there in the store, the way the staff did at the restaurant the other night), to teas of all kinds, milk tea, a limited selection of good coffee, candy, but relatively few chocolate products, noodles of all kinds, root vegetables, fresh ginger, eggplant and durian.
Entrance to the Walmart Supercenter at 2001 Xiangmei Road in the Futian District in Shenzhen. The Chinese characters say Wò’ērmǎ (‘Walmart’) Shopping Plaza 沃尔玛购物广场 Wò’ērmǎ gòuwù guǎngchǎng.Hazeline shampoo for lovely luscious black hair. The Chinese characters at the bottom says something like ‘Say goodbye to tangled hair’.Dragon flies on this vest. I could not tell if the fabric is silk; I assume it is.Cutie-pie characters are built into these humidifiers. That’s a tiger on the far left, since 2010 is the Year of the Tiger.The signage on the aisles offer a little language lesson for both English and Chinese speakers. Instant noodles 方便面 (say Fāng biàn miàn) and Chinese noodles 中式面条 (say Zhōng shì miàn tiáo).Coffee 咖啡 (say Kā fēi) and tea , which has its standalone character 茶 (say Chá).Alright. The tagline translation is cute ‘The Respectable of Choice’, and that is why I took the picture of this organic boxed milk. But later on I looked Guiyi online. Guiyi is a town further up along the coast from Shenzhen in Guangdong province, and until recently at least, Guiyu was best known in the global environmentalist community for its reception of all kinds of electronic waste, resulting in terrible pollution levels in its surrounding air, water and soil. So is it possible to produce pure and organic dairy products there?The little guy on the lid is licking his lips for this product, which I suspect is hot or spicey. The characters at the bottom say ‘Famous brand foods from Sichuan province’ 四川省名牌食品 (say Sìchuān shěng míng pái shí pǐn). Sichuan province in southwestern China is famous for Sichuan peppercorns with their tingling, numbing effect on the tongue.Ah, fruity chew candy from my childhood in South Africa (sugus), and chewing gums from Wrigley company, where I had done work for all of 2005 in Chicago. All of this in a traditional bowl held by two happy little tigers that represent the Year of the Tiger.Two whole chickens (completely all of the chicken, that is), for ¥ 9 which is the equivalent of US$ 1.37.These are freshwater eels, I believe.These are durian, in some Asian countries called the “king of fruits“. The durian grows on trees and is distinctive for its large size, strong odor, and thorn-covered skin. The strong odor has prompted authorities in Singapore to ban eating durian in many outdoor spaces throughout Singapore and to prohibit it on public transport.
The team went to a nice restaurant and boy! did we have a sampling of diverse dishes. The picture shows our dinner (fish, jumbo shrimp) being ‘caught’ in the wet area which has many, many more seafood items than just lobster, to choose from, for one’s dinner plate. Project manager Jeff was given the honor of eating the eye of the fish. He was completely game! LOL
The fishy stuff aside, the signature dish of the restaurant is pigeon (a nice gamey taste, a little like duck). They also had lamb ribs, which I suspect might be hard to find in Chinese restaurants. Other items were green beans, spicy cucumber, soup, a warm corn ‘smoothie’ (nice), oolong tea and Tsingtao beer (a standard pale lager, very nice).
Chicken with bok choy (Chinese cabbage), and green beans with red chili peppers.
That’s rice bread in the bowl with a dash of soy sauce, and the white grape juice has bits of grape in it.
I wanted to take a picture of the pig’s ear strips on the plate of the guy sitting next to me, but did not. That would have been rude.
I’m just back from the cafeteria where we had our first lunch, and what an experience! I ended up with (clockwise on the photo) steamed rice, beef and beans, spicy chicken and green peppers, bean sprouts-corn-red chili peppers (do not bite!), orange juice drink. All were delicious. No forks or spoons to (ch)eat with. I will have to learn to use chopsticks.
