Huizhou 2016: Panoramas and Food

When I titled this blog years ago I assumed "back" meant "back home" - but it turns out I'm fated to return to the same places over and over again. And honestly, its working out pretty well so far.

Typhoon! You can see the KTV Hotel, the lake / gardens / market behind that, and the mountain with the temple behind the lake!

I left China wondering how I was going to find my way back there, and 8 months later a coworker asked me about adapting last year's test equipment for his project.  And just like that, I had my in. Even better, I was traveling along with a team this time, which meant I had less to worry about. Not that that stopped me from dreaming about test fixtures every night my first week.

What was work? Some of this,

Some of this, 

And a lot of this.

Pretty much every day turned into: work, eat a huge lunch, work, eat a huge dinner.  Then, in the evening, either sleeping, sending email to the now-awake coworkers, or hanging out with colleagues at the hotel bar chatting with the lounge singer. (Mariana was an accountant from the Philippines who emigrated to become a back-up dancer, waitress, and masseuse before becoming a multi-lingual and multi-accented singer).

So, what did we eat too much of? Everything! Here's a list of animals.

Normal Animals:
Pork
Steak
Chicken
Fish
Goose
Duck
Octopus
Caviar, scallops (Pizza)

Weird animals:
Squid (whole), adult and fetal
Shrimp (whole, unshelled)
Snails (still terrible)
Pig Brain (absolute worst thing I've ever ate)
Porcupine (good, just your standard meat. More like beef than pork despite its name)
Snake (Great! Like really good chicken with fishbones)
Snake Skin (Not edible, but other than than not bad)
Snake Bile. (Not great. Disgusting or "kinda bad" depending who you ask)

Animals?:
Silk worm larvae (Bad, worse aftertaste. One of the local DeWalt guys told us all about raising silk worms afterwards though!)
Bamboo caterpillar. (Better, not good though. Not much to them once you fry them.)
100 year old egg (not bad, but I might just be immune at this point).
Sparrow eggs (like regular, small eggs).






Chinese restaurants tend to be more fun than ours.  The "Animal Restaurant" invited us to pet our snake before they slaughtered/butchered/barbecued it.  There is also "Hot Pot" where they boil a spicy soup base in the center of the table and you order raw food (or not food ((brains)) ) to cook in it, similar to fondue.  Even more fun was the Korean grillhouse where they embedded a bucket of coals in your table, and you grill your meat to your liking (and fend off attempted theft of that almost-perfectly-done-but-not-quite morsel you've had your eyes on that your friend is eyeballing.  I was grateful for the training that growing up with brothers provided,)


On Friday night after dinner we went out to see a karaoke bar. They are very different from those in the USA. You're given a private room with your group, and then you're given "female companionship".  I think if they spoke English they might have been fun, but as it was it was basically a bored armcandy girlfriend pouring beer for you and checking their facebook. Luckily, it didn't matter. Half of our group spent the entire night singing, the other half spent all their time playing "Dice" - basically Liar's Poker - and analyzing the statistics / strategy of it. Exactly what you'd expect from engineers. Interesting night, especially from a people-watching point of view.

Pingu Lake!

On the weekend we hiked out to see the sights.  Saturday I set off solo to wander around the lake (bridges were closed due to typhoon debris), saw the market (with all the same snakes turtles and eels that I remember. Hopefully not the exact same ones, but you never know), and got trapped in a garden while it rained. A very relaxing way to spend a day, actually. Sunday the whole group of us hiked up Gaobangshan mountain to see a local temple!  It was exhausting, especially for a group of guys that aren't college aged like they think they are.  But the views were worth it, and the temple itself and the surrounding views made up for it.  It was surprising how abruptly the city becomes jungle, without the sprawling suburbs endemic to the US.  It was also a huge city, littered with tower cranes everywhere I looked.

Inside the temple we had our locals translate for us...  Interestingly, they would occasionally come to a character and just say "I don't know. This is probably a name but I have no idea who it is." Very weird to think about, since all my alphabets are phonetic and I can attempt a pronunciation on anything, even if I butcher it.

Not a pano! Don't tell anyone. Also should have been HDR'd. Next time?

After a successful build we headed back to Hong Kong! I've always loved Hong Kong, it has a foreign-future cyber-punk mystique in my head. Unfortunately, we had no time to take in the sights as we had an 10am flight to catch. 11am flight to catch? Ok, so maybe 12.... we ended up spending six hours in the plane on the tarmac as they repaired the guidance system and then attempted to relocate our layover to keep the crew from maxing out their hours. Then we spent even more time in line, getting our bags back, re-immigrating to Hong Kong, and getting rescheduled. Eventually, they comped me a hotel for the night, and I set off across Hong Kong! Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the Special Administrative Region beyond a the most organized taxi system (colorcoded and multilingually labelled), the fastest hotel check in (sub-45-second), and the best cityscape I've ever witnessed - which means the Fragrant Harbor retains her mystery.

Hong Kong at Dawn