Scott and Ryan Pay China a Visit

  Qing Xi, China
Friday, July 18, 2008

On Friday July 18th my manager (Scott) and our materials scientist (Ryan) arrived into Qing Xi around 4 PM.

Scott and Ryan arrive

This was Ryan's first trip to China and we were very anxious to share our China experiences with someone who has never seen this strange land. They came in two days early so they could enjoy some of the different parts of the culture. As soon as they arrived I met them at their hotel, since they didn't want to stay at the fancy Hotel California...I knew I had to keep them moving, since they hadn't slept much on the plane and they would be getting tired shortly. We walked down to my hotel and had a couple of beers while we waited for Mike to meet us. The 18th is Xiao Li's birthday and we had a full night of events already planned. We decided that the best way to break Ryan into the Chinese food would be to take him to a place that had a room full of live snakes, turtles, chickens, rabbits, fish and pigeons. The main reason for picking this restaurant was because of their specialty in snake. On our way to the restaurant we saw an overloaded truck.

Truck FULL of styrafoam

Upon arriving to the restaurant we enterd a garage type building that had a huge cage in it and many other smaller cages that housed all of the other lives animals that we would be choosing to eat.

At the snake restaurant

After some talking with the people at the restaurant, we decided that we would have two snakes, two turtles, a fish and some other smaller dishes. After that the process of catching the snake and preparing it for eating started. A man with an extremely crossed eye got into a cage that was about 6' x 6' x 6' that had a large number of snakes in it. He pulled a snake that was about 7 feet long out of the cage and quickly moved it over to the cutting board where he removed the head. After that he grabbed a glass of some high octane liquor that he drained the snakes blood into.

Draining blood into our liquor

How long one of snakes were

The head continued to move after it was cut off and Tommy grabbed it to go and scare everyone that was keeping a large amount of distance between them and the action.

Tommy with the head

Close up of the head

Next the guy removed the scales and the guts of the snake. Of course the guts had to be removed before cooking the snake, but the main purpose of this was to get the gallblatter out. The only natural thing to do with what is inside of the snakes gallblatter is to pour that bright green matter into another shot glass so we could drink that too. We also watched them prepare the turtles for our meal and then we moved into the restaurant portion of the building. Most of what I just described can be seen in this YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHE_pS2-iwo just copy and paste the link
The restaurant was actually quite nice and we moved on to picking out the snake liquor we wanted to drink with dinner. This is similar to the other snake liquor we had, but this time it contained hundreds of snake penises. Did you know that each male snake has TWO penises? We are learning so much important information over here.

Snake Penis Liquor

Various sorts of snake liquor

We all went into our room and sat down then immediately had to drink a shot of the blood and then a shot of the gallblatter. Both were extremely terrible tasting, but are apparently good for you.

Shot of snake blood

The snake and turtle were both very good and we all got very full. This was Ryan's first taste of food in China and he thought it was pretty good, but also very interesting. He has an allergy to green peppers, so we really had to watch that, since almost every dish here has them in it. After dinner, some of us had our fair share of snake penis liquor and we headed to pick up the cake that we ordered earlier in the day for Xiao Li. Everyone else went to the big room that we had rented out at karaoke. The rest of the night consisted of everyone singing karaoke, glow sticks being cut open and flung all around the room and multiple dance parties.

Tommy and us at the party

The party is just getting started

Here is Xiao Li and our buddy Susan dancing on the back of the couch, with glow sticks in the front of her pants.

Xiao Li and Suzanne dancing

We almost forgot about eating the cake, but we are happy that we finally had it, because it was delicious. Liz did a good job of picking out the cake.

The cake that we picked up

The flower was supposed to open up

The next day Scott and Ryan woke up quite early, because they were still on US time. We met up at Time Coffee for breakfast and then came back to our hotel for Ryans first Chinese Foot massage. The girls were asking a lot of questions about why Scott and Ryan have bellies and I don't, among many other questions. Ryan said the massage helped his hangover and then we went to a place for lunch near their hotel. We met up with Mike and headed back to his house to watch another earthquake DVD that Jimmy got from his government buddies back in Sichuan. This one was much more in depth and showed a lot more detail of what happened during the repair stages of the earthquake. We made plans to go to one of the more fancy hotels in the area that has a pool that takes two hours to walk around the perimeter. Our karaoke room overlooked a stage and performing area that Liz said looked like Disney World. Liz made two new girlfriends at karaoke and got a bag of lavender potpourri and a bouquet of flowers from them. This was the first time that the karaoke girls realized that if they made friends with Liz they wouldn't be forced to drink too much. We got a ride back to Qing Xi from one of our buddies named Liu You Hong. Liz made the suggestion that we go get some street BBQ food. Scott and I jumped at the oppurtunity and we proceeded to drop Ryan off at the hotel and then went to have the spiciest BBQ we have had to date.

The next day Ryan wasn't exactly on top of his game. So we decided to go have some Taiwanese food with some beers. He couldn't believe that he was even smelling beer, let alone drinking it. Next we went to Liu You Hungs new house so Scott could see it. As soon as the foreigners arrived at his house, approximately 6 people arrived to see/talk to us. With Ryan's current state, we thought that a full body massage might help him a little bit, so we went and got a 90 minute one. After that we went back to our hotels to get cleaned up for a dinner "up on the mountain"...the place that we have been to before with the "lake" and the outdoor dining. We knew that when we signed up to go to dinner with these guys it would turn into a drinking event. We all stepped up to the plate and we feel that we beat them at their own game.

The next two days we travelled to two different manufacturing facilities and then they went down into Hong Kong for the end of their trip. One day we did have stretch noodles for lunch and Ryan really struggled with the chopstick thing. It is understandable that you would struggle eating noodles with two sticks, but the way he went about it was unprecidented. He would stick one into the stack of noodles then clamp the noodles with the other stick, hold them with his fist and then twirl the noodles around them and suck them off.

The main reason for these guys coming in early was so we could possibly travel somewhere that Scott hasn't been to yet, unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate and we were stuck in Qing Xi with getting massages and going out at night. I think that it was a good first trip for Ryan and he may even come back. He definitely has some stories to share when he gets back.