Travels in China

[Samez]

You mentioned that there was drinking involved with your business lunch/dinner - in my experience this can escalate quite heavily as back then they tended to have on gambai with beer (Tsingtao) followed by booze (Baijiu / Maotai) right after, following one round after the other until someone drops out. My boss back than used to say that he doesn't drink alcohol due to religious reasons which was fine with them (but you have to be consequent with this story) and would also have been the better way for me.

As there were some questions regarding squat toilets - you will find below a picture I took some years ago in Myanmar - the concept stays the same the quality varies - and yes the bucket with the brownish water replaces toilet paper

Spoiler toilet picture :

 

[NovaKart]

The clear liquor is bai jiu. Sometimes it’s served in bottles with a snake or lizard in it, and I’ve seen stuff in the bottle that I couldn’t even tell what it was. I hated the smell and almost never drank it when I was there, mostly stuck to beer. And the taste was such that you couldn’t really mix it with anything.

The restaurants in China are so fancy, lots of ones with private rooms and I would think I could never afford to eat in a place like this in America. It was pretty inexpensive.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@Samez there you go! Nice squat toilet picture. Thanks. I didn't see much beer. Hard liquor at dinner was an everyday affair. Many of the women hardly drank or didn't at all. Often, they would substitute water or tea for the many toasts. Our Chinese friends would often walk around the table and fill up any empty cups with the booze.

The clear liquor is bai jiu. Sometimes it’s served in bottles with a snake or lizard in it, and I’ve seen stuff in the bottle that I couldn’t even tell what it was. I hated the smell and almost never drank it when I was there, mostly stuck to beer. And the taste was such that you couldn’t really mix it with anything.

The restaurants in China are so fancy, lots of ones with private rooms and I would think I could never afford to eat in a place like this in America. It was pretty inexpensive.

We ate all our business meals in private dining rooms. I've got some pics of the booze coming up and will point it out. I have no idea what such meals cost, but I expect that by Chinese standards they were expensive. Most places were non smoking, but there was one dinner on my second trip that was small, 6 of us and the four Chinese chain smoked the whole meal. My translator and I were the non smokers.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Going during Chinese New year and when it's not is like night and day for seeing people walking around.

Since I wasn't there on business, most meals didn't have much booze. One of her brothers was a business man, so if anyone brought booze it would be him, otherwise it was maybe a little bit of beer. He was also the one who supplied all the cigarettes, the other brothers, and her sisters' spouses didn't drink or smoke much, just a few times to be polite to the brother who was constantly offering them.
One of the final nights we all stayed at a rented villa and had a barbecue, so then there was lots of booze and beer. Men drank the hard stuff, women drank bud light. The booze was too strong taste for me so I was mixing it with 7up. They thought that was the weirdest thing since they never saw such a thing and teased me about it, but some tried it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Next stop was a weekend in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. We took a fast train to Guangzhou and back. We ahd a fancy dinner in Shenzhen the first night and stayed in an apartment hotel. A 30 story apartment building had some number of apartments used as hotel rooms. We spent two night there. It was our worst accommodations of the trip. The beds did not have mattresses only a thin, not as hard as wood, pad. I guess we westerners are fussy about our beds. I have a video tour of the apartment below. It was my first experience of a shower bathroom combination without any separation. One corner of the bathroom had a shower head on the wall and a drain in the floor.

Street scenes in Shenzhen:

 

[Birdjaguar]

Our Apartment Hotel building and grounds and the apartment video.


Link to video.

 

[Birdjaguar]

We had a fancy waterside dinner our first night in Shenzhen with a Las Vegas style fountain show. This probably should have been in the previous post.

Link to video.

Our train trip to Guangzhou. Three videos show you the more rural countryside. The Last is a picture of the Guangzhou circle building. Home of a plastics exchange group. It is shaped like a Chinese coin, was built in 2013 and is believed to be the largest circular building in the world. We passed it in a car driving from the train station to our meeting destination.
The fast train have a smooth ride.

Link to video.


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[Birdjaguar]

As you can see, the pollution is ubiquitous and pervasive everywhere. The heights of the buildings can be used as marker for how old any particular section of a city is. Shorter is older. You may have noticed in post 45 that the apartments balconies all have floor to ceiling bars and in the newer building the bars are less full coverage. I do not know if the full coverage bars were to stop accidents or suicides. That trend in older apartments seems common everywhere I went.

@Bamspeedy Maybe your wife knows?

 

[Bamspeedy]

Burglars for the first four floors, after that it varies on tenant preference, building design, local ordinances, etc.

One of her siblings has an apartment on I think was the 5th floor with no bars. Didn't want to pay extra cost. Another had them and they were more like thick steel cables. Don't know if there was a quick release mechanism which would be required in the USA for fire safety reasons.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province and has a metro population of about 15 million. In the old days it was known as Canton and its location on the Pearl River (75 miles or so from HK) made it the primary trading port to and from China for many decades.

Two city pics and one of the Pearl River. The city is very old and dates back to 226 AD when it became part of the Han Dynasty. And as you can see from these pics, the old city is being swallowed up by the new high rises. If you look carefully, you can see the soccer filed atop the building in the center of both pictures.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Here is the menu for our lunch at a fish restaurant followed by our very casual outdoor dinner that night. This part of china was warm and nice in March.

 

[Birdjaguar]

From Shenzhen we flew NW to Xi'an for our last two sets of business meetings. One in Xi'an and then several in a city not too far to the west: Baoji. These two stops ended the business portion of my trip and everyone else flew away home. In Baoji we did a bit touristy stuff which was nice.

In Xi'an we met Tao Li the nephew of President Xi's second in command. We had high hopes!

Dinner with Tao Li (he has thumbs up) and his electronic business card (I think). If you contact him there is no need to tell him where you got his information.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Baoji dates back 4000 years and is at a gateway to the west and central Asia. It is on the old Silk Road and Wei River. The urban population is about 2 million. Baoji is about 100 miles west of Xi'an home of the Terra Cotta soldiers. We drove between the two cities.

My swanky hotel room room in Baoji and bread and honey breakfast option and a not so detailed look at the breakfast buffet space.

 

[Samez]

The honey combs look amazing. The black bread in the front reminds me of a story about a co-worker of mine who ate the papier mâché deco bread roll of a Chinese breakfast buffet. When asked about it he usually tends to reply something like: I was told Chinese breakfast is bad, so I was not surprised when the bread roll had no taste.
The staff asked him only the next day not to eat the decoration.

 

[Birdjaguar]

That hotel had a very elaborate breakfast everyday. Fried eggs and hard boiled were available along with noodles and every possible kind of addition to them. There were lots of pastries too, but they were not like you would see in the US or Europe. I didn't think much of them. Lots of fresh fruit and a rice based porridge. The coffee was terrible and there was no real milk.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Baoji was our last business stop. We had several meetings and visited a laboratory and then went touristy and visited a tall pagoda and commemorative park near the History Bronze Museum.

These lab pictures were taken to show my son-in-law the equipment they used since he works in a lab. If you recognize any of the items, it may give you a flavor of the lab. The lab didn't seem busy. The whole building was cold because we hadn't reached the day the government prescribed to turn on the heat. I do not remember what kind of research they did there. Sorry. the Chinese sign below probably tells the story. @Bamspeedy

 

[Birdjaguar]

Here are some videos driving through Baoji on our way to the pagoda. Like all the other cities, no stop signs and almost no traffic lights.

Our destination is on the hill in the background

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Traffic videos


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[Bamspeedy]

I dont have an exact word for word translation of red sign. But I gather it basically says "technicians from x (chinese) company welcomes representatives from x (American) company"

 

[Birdjaguar]

The pagoda was at one end of a huge plaza. Our little group were the only ones there except for one family. No one in my group except me wanted to go to the top.
The last picture should be first as it describes the place.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Video panoramic of Baoji from the top of the pagoda. On a clear day, I'm sure it is pretty spectacular.


Link to video.