Saturday and another dinner

April 28, 2007 Saturday.

It has been decided that a car will drive us to Nanjing and that we can return to Hefei on a bus. I think that they are worried that we will disappear into the bowels of Nanjing, never to be found, if they send us off unattended. The return trip (maybe they figure that Nanjing will be too worried to put us on a bus and will provide something?) can be by bus because once we get to Hefei, they know that we can get home to the campus.

I went exploring outside of the gate in a new direction. We had been talking about the fact that in China there is only 1 police person for every 1000 people (I don’t know about these figures but say it is true. I don’t think that they counted the guards at every gate of the campus and every apartment complex, the guards at every building on campus, and the crossing guards at the major intersections) My apartment has 3 locked metal doors between me and the outside. While walking along, I noticed the wall around the campus has glass on top and there was a security camera mounted just above it. (4 flight)

Chuck is going to give a talk in Nanjing, so he is getting it together. He already has a PowerPoint presentation that has most of what he wants to say. I will have to get the pictures and create the pages for what he wants to add. (If I have any problems, I might be sending out some PP questions. Is anyone an expert? Please let me know.) (4 flights)

Dinner with Feng Zhao and Jinmeng Liu (aka Dream because his name means golden dream) These were the only ones who chose a restaurant that was not on the list that Jian created. It was pretty brave of them, because they chose the most special restaurant in Hefei, which turned out to be the one that we went to with Nu. For lots of pictures of this restaurant look at: Nov 8, 2006 A Dining Experience. Dream’s roommate had told him about it and they decided to go for it. Choosing the dishes was hard for them. There were sooooooo many and they were hoping that we would do the choosing. We tried to leave it to them, but we hopped in with suggestions every once in awhile.

We ended up with very spicy noodles, stuffed pickled cucumbers, chicken (that’s what they said – but the bones didn’t look right) with peppers, beef wrapped around mushrooms and then fried, pork with eyeballs (really a kind of fruit that was semi translucent with a large pit in the center) and seafood with bok choy. There were 3 choices of beer: original, green (with some veggie matter) and dark brown (they said with coffee in it.) We went with original although green was tempting me.

For dessert we had a large round marshmallow that was painted a little to make it look like a peach and of course, watermelon. They also put little tomatoes on the fruit plate, since tomatoes are really a fruit.

(4 flights) (12 today)