Steve's China Blog

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Some events

The Sunday before last we had our IBM Chengdu Annual Party. It was held at the ShangriLi-La hotel like last year. We had a really good dinner of a bunch of different dishes. My favorite was the shark fin soup with crab meat. We also had a lot of entertainment put on by some of the employees of IBM here in Chengdu. There was singing, dancing, acting, etc... I thought the best was one girl who played a Chinese musical instrument. She was very good at it. Of course, I forgot my camera.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week we had snow flurries. It was very pretty, and luckily the snow did not stick to the roads (or anything else for that matter). The local news shows had pictures of children happily running around enjoying the snow. Some of them had probably never even seen snow before. Who knows.

One evening I went out to dinner and ran into some friends, Dave and Dick, and after dinner they decided they wanted to go to a night club called The Castle. Dave is from the US and was teaching English here, but will be moving to Thailand soon. Dick is a professional bodyguard from Holland and has been living in Chengdu for quite awhile, and is almost always wearing his bulletproof vest. When we got to The Castle it turns out that Dave had a VIP card for the place, and as a VIP the night club had a bodyguard for us.

It was kind of funny to see Dave and I sitting there with a tall Chinese bodyguard on one side of us and a taller European bodyguard on the other side of us. Everyone must have been wondering who we were! Usually I hate going out to Chinese night clubs... they are usually too crowded, and you have to be careful of pickpockets and bothersome hookers. We didn't have any of these problems. No one wanted to get too close to us! We had a couple over-priced warm beers served in small glasses of ice, and then I went home.

On Saturday evening my manager invited all of the people he manages out for dinner. The place we went to is above a Chinese medicine shop, and the dishes are all made from items from the shop. We had two entrees that were large soups. They both had a chicken and a turtle, as well as other things that are considered good for one's health, such as herbs and such. One of them even had a seahorse in it! I don't think we could have eaten the seahorse since it was probably too hard, and I don't think anyone tried.

1 Comments:

  • Hey Steve I just got around to seeing the blog of late. Say hey to Jackie for me, I think the blonde Dorathy was the finest by the way (NOT). Anyway I left you an e-mail, see if you can help.
    We'll talk soon. Hey to Jesse and Phyllis.......

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7:25 AM  

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