China - 2019

We spent 4 days in China, a new supplier this time but still in Huizhou where I've been on most of my visits.  Before we get to the travel-blog section, I have a few random quotes from my notes about the food: 

"Today I ate loofah. Yeah, like the shower thing. Apparently if you harvest them before they become desiccated and stringy you can have a tender zucchini-like vegetable. Slimy, but unobjectionable."

"Anne explained the rules about eating dog on our walk tonight. A stray dog 'belongs' to everyone, therefor anyone is allowed to eat it. However, since it belongs to everyone, whoever cooks the dog has to share with anyone who asks. Even if the dog does belong to someone, if it bites you you are allowed to eat it. I love that, sort of a karmic justice to it..."

"There was a fad around 60 years ago of injecting chicken-blood. It was said to get you "High" - which in Chinese means stronger, more aggressive, motivated to dive into tasks or fights..."

"I'd never had Foi Gras before, but if there is a food so good it's worth torturing animals over I'm definitely going to try it. The taste was unobjectionable, but the texture was, as expected, quite gross."

"The shrimp, prawns, and oysters were great, and then we had cervical vertebrae from chickens. As you would imagine, there isn't much to a vertebra, meaning that they had to kill at least 10 chickens to fill the skewers they brought to the table. I don't recommend it. They roast them long enough to soften them, but you're still just crunching through cartilage and bones while pretending to like it."

Our last day in china was (finally) not at a factory!

I have no idea who she is, but her photo turned out great!

We woke up early to have breakfast with Anne before her flight, and then our hosts picked us up for a trip to the mountains. It was brutally hot - I tried to buy a fan, but they only accepted WeChat (Chinese messenger app) payments... Luckily our hosts were quick to jump in and cover the costs. I was the only man with a fan there, but if there's one thing I've learned from the Chinese it's a lack of shame in social situations. They are much less inhibited... the girls are (adorably) happy to wear overalls, flounce their skirts, skip, or hold hands with one another.  The men are loud, quick to joke, and not shy to lift their shirts in the heat, regardless of the size of their stomach. So I fanned myself with impunity and told myself all the kids were staring at me because I was the only white person on the mountain, not because of my fan.

Instead of hiking up the mountain, we took a cable car! Not actually, we were told it was a cable car, but it was actually a ski-lift. The longest ski lift in Asia! Not that you can ski there, as it never snows. Even a thousand miles north in Suzhou where Anne lives, snowfall that accumulates is a once-a-decade experience. We criss-crossed over a rivulet cascading down the mountain, took in the views, and enjoyed the 10 minute ride to the top. I constantly expected to see dinosaurs or something crashing through the forests below us, but there were only park employees, presumably searching for a dropped cellphone...


At the top we set off up the hiking trail. It was quite hot. Quite ridiculously hot. And I'm out of shape and hiking in my dress shoes. Not that that's anything new - we'd been doing about 7 miles most days - but it does wear on your calves. Note to self: Stop being lazy and take the huge suitcase next time.  About halfway up the trail, we took a wrong turn. There was a staircase that quickly crumbled into disrepair and the trail broke up. We turned around to take the trail, but our host asked if we wanted to take the vanishing trail. I was of course down for it, but the ladies thought we were crazy. So we broke the first rule of horror movies: we split up. The guys took the ever-worsening trail while the ladies took the official footpath. The trail was a washed out streambed in some places, a sketchy mule-trail in others. It was great. It topped out at the service entrance of a restaurant, which we cut through to rejoin the main trail near the peak. After several more staircases we finally made it to the top! 

It always feels great to summit a peak, even when machines do 90% of the work for you. But there were more peaks! I, acting "high", sarcastically suggested we go for the next peak, a mere 3km away (and straight uphill the whole way). They surprisingly agreed to it, so I had to start backtracking. Even though I was up for it, I could tell the rest of them really didn't want to. Going back and forth with my coworker we politely deescalated and chose to put it off until our next trip, and turned off down a side trail back to the lift. Going down offered even better views of the valley, and a bit of excitement when the lift suddenly stopped before a peal of thunder echoed across the mountains.  I was figuring out my odds if I had to escape (~80% chance of crippling myself) when the lift restarted and we were carried back down. The coming storm and approaching sunset cooled off the temperature appreciably though.

After we left the park, we went to a historical village. We drove through a half-vacant town past a number of modern abandoned villages, and eventually made it to the historical village. This village is also mostly abandoned, and right up my alley. This was an 18th century village, or maybe a recreation of an 8th century village. It had old halls and small canals, and I darted ahead like an excited puppy, pausing at corners to make sure the group was headed my direction and wouldn't worry about me too much. I walked brazenly into dark stone rooms, searching for interesting architecture to photograph. Unfortunately, with the fading light almost nothing turned out, so all my work framing courtyards and sunsets through ancient doors was for naught. Oh well, still had a blast taking the photos!

As it was now dark, we headed to dinner, and back to the hotel, exhausted. Time for an early night to sneak in 4 hours of sleep before we start heading home!