Wednesday, March 28

On Wednesday, another of the teams I work with took me out to lunch to a nearby restaurant. It is a newer style way to cook fish. They fry it, then bake it, then put it in a hot-pot type pan. It was a standard large fish (about a foot long), served completely whole, draped in vegetables and spices in a pan of boiling broth. The fish was light and really nicely cooked, and flaked apart well. One does has to be careful when eating over here, as the fish are whole, and therefore full of bones. This fish, however, had larger ones, and I actually avoided all of them. It is also a little tricky pulling the bits of fish off the serving plate in the center of the table with your chopsticks, you don't want to mash it around too much, as everyone is eating from the same fish.
After work, I headed back to the hotel via taxi with a coworker who came in from Cleveland. The ride back was, I believe, the most harrowing taxi ride yet in all of my trips to Dalian. IT was, of course, very busy, but this guy was driving as fast as his car would go, and weaved throughout traffic the whole way back. As my coworker and I tried to have conversation on the ride back, we continuously had jsut just freeze what we were saying out of fear of imminent death. About a half-hour later we were back at our hotel. Since he isn't an adventurous eater, we ate at a Japanese restaurant in the hotel - it was actually very nice, complete with classic Japanese dressed attendants in pink robes and slippers. The service was fine, and I enjoyed a combination plate (similar to the combo plates I would get an an excellent Japanese restaurant that was very near our former office building in Dalian). It had a couple of soups, eel, sashimi, a seafood pudding that I know I didn't like from past experience, some picked vegetable of some sort, and misc. other dishes that I simply don't recall. Being in the hotel, it was a bit more expensive - I think 250 RMB ($30), but of decent quality. Strange thing is, my coke was 35 RMB, but a side cucumber roll of sushi was only 10RMB. Returning to my room, it was 8:00pm, where I had a conference call, finished up some work, and went to sleep at 11:15pm.