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Some final thoughts about China.
Dec. 14th, 2006 10:36 amI'm back in Memphis after 24 hours on planes and nearly 12 sleeping, or trying to. Still a little loopy from the jet lag, but I wanted to write a few final thoughts on the trip to China.
- The night we stayed in Wuxi we went out to a night club/dance club, where the subcontactor bought companions for us for the evening. Mine was either bored, mortified, distracted, or some combination of those--the card she wore around her neck said her name was "Cleo,"and she dances on the sand but she couldn't tell me that herself, so I ended up making what conversation I could with others at the table. Later that evening, another of the girls asked me how much I weighed.
- Our last day in China, one of our guys (the 62-year-old) got the idea that he wanted Pizza Hut for lunch, and demanded that we go there. Pizza Hut pan pizza is every bit as nasty in China as it is here, although there there's a twenty-minute wait for a table. Riding the chartered bus/van from the electrical panel shop, the 62-year-old suddenly got it into his head to sing "Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong" to himself for ten minutes.
- We went shopping the final day in Beijing, where I bought some jasmine tea, hit the tiniest liquor store where they had quite a number of bottles with snakes in 'em, and the pharmacy where they had some sort of dried, pressed reptile on a stick for sale. When we got back to the bus, our hosts had bought tánghúlú (candied Chinese hawthorn on a stick--thanks, Wikipedia) for us.
- Wikipedia (and plenty of other sites) aren't available in China, so I had to look up the hawthorn thing after I got back. The impact of this hit home when we made out trip to Tiananmen Square, and one of our group (the generally obtuse one, with graduate degrees from MIT) asked our host's tranlator if she could tell him anything about the what had happened there in 1989, and she very assertively denied that anything had occurred. "There was never a tank here after the 1950s," she said, "unless you're talking about a military parade."
- The night we stayed in Wuxi we went out to a night club/dance club, where the subcontactor bought companions for us for the evening. Mine was either bored, mortified, distracted, or some combination of those--the card she wore around her neck said her name was "Cleo,"
- Our last day in China, one of our guys (the 62-year-old) got the idea that he wanted Pizza Hut for lunch, and demanded that we go there. Pizza Hut pan pizza is every bit as nasty in China as it is here, although there there's a twenty-minute wait for a table. Riding the chartered bus/van from the electrical panel shop, the 62-year-old suddenly got it into his head to sing "Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong Ching Chong" to himself for ten minutes.
- We went shopping the final day in Beijing, where I bought some jasmine tea, hit the tiniest liquor store where they had quite a number of bottles with snakes in 'em, and the pharmacy where they had some sort of dried, pressed reptile on a stick for sale. When we got back to the bus, our hosts had bought tánghúlú (candied Chinese hawthorn on a stick--thanks, Wikipedia) for us.
- Wikipedia (and plenty of other sites) aren't available in China, so I had to look up the hawthorn thing after I got back. The impact of this hit home when we made out trip to Tiananmen Square, and one of our group (the generally obtuse one, with graduate degrees from MIT) asked our host's tranlator if she could tell him anything about the what had happened there in 1989, and she very assertively denied that anything had occurred. "There was never a tank here after the 1950s," she said, "unless you're talking about a military parade."
