Friday, November 7, 2014

Friday, November 7, 2014

<>

After a decent nights sleep, made it into work via the taxi w/o incident.

At lunch, we had a long walk on a sunny crisp day to a small dumpling restaurant near the center of three different universities.  Inside, there were only about 10 small tables and was populated with a young crowd.  As we waited for our dumplings, we could watch them prepare them thru glass to the kitchen.  Within 5-10 minutes, our order was brought to us - 8 dumplings with a side shrimp dumpling soup.  They were extremely hot and tasted like meatball with some sauce inside.  Very difficult to eat with chopsticks as you have to hold them carefully by the top and tilt them away from you as you bite them else the hot juice inside will burn your mouth. The restaurant became full during our time there and when we went outside, the takeout line was long.  Total cost – 38 Yuan – About $6.  A very delicious lunch that would not intimidate any visitor, other than the chopstick skills required.

After work, we walked south east and dined at a small sushi restaurant.  There we had a variety of sushi and sushi-mi along with a sushi roll of some sort.  It was decent, but not quite as good as Meiji in Waukesha.  Additionally, we ordered a lightly grilled whole mackerel as well as another large sardine.  Both extremely tasty – never had anything like that yet in China.  Had to be very careful of the bones in the large sardine.

After dinner, we fought the growing crowd and eventually got on bus 901 for the 10 minute crowded ride to a massage place.  This was a different one that I went to on my last trip, but had faith in Winson.  It started like my last one, with a 15 minute hot foot soak in some sort of hot colored water.  That, of course, felt excellent, but things began to deteriorate after that.  The foot message started off OK, but the strong man that did my massage almost managed to push his knuckles clean through the bottom of my feet – or so it seemed.  Some parts were pleasant, but generally a painful experience.  He then moved up to my legs, which was actually very nice, except for some reason, I could not stand him to massage near my kneecaps – so I had to tell Winson to instruct him to skip that particular area.  Now, about an hour in, the real pain began…  He had me roll onto my stomach so he could work my back and shoulders.  I had hinted about just a foot massage earlier to Winson, but now wish I had been a bit more forceful as the second hour of the message was almost straight torture (think Jack Bauer type torture).  Just way too much force for me.  So, while I loved the foot message, I am not a huge fan of anything above the knees.  At 9:00pm, we grabbed a taxi so Winson could take me back to the hotel. 

Returning to my room, I immediately took an Aleve and hoped for the best...