Fish head soup

I only have two days left in my trip, and then it is back to the US of A!  This has been a tremendous experience, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.  Tonight we will head to Tiananmen Square and possibly the Olympic Village if possible, which would be pretty awesome.  Then on Friday, that will be my opportunity to do some shopping and buy cool stuff for you people back home.  Apparently it is very common for people to negotiate prices at the place we are going to on Friday, which by the way I learned from Amy Daml, another American over here in Beijing.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but Mao Zedong is on every single currency bill that they have.  You buy everything with Blue Mao or Green Mao or Red Mao…and people in China really, really like him too.  He is regarded very highly by the Chinese.

So what has been my favorite food so far?  I would say it is a tie between Beijing Duck and Sheep Kidney.  Yes, sheep kidney is very, very tasty, though maybe it was just the way it was prepared that I really enjoyed.  It was very tender and covered in a crispy and slightly spicy breading…fantastic.  But yeah, duck is great too.  Beijing duck is different from how they prepare duck in other parts of the country, but however they do it here is pretty darn tasty.

Sheep kidney is one of the crazy foods I have had here, but I don’t think anything will be as crazy as what I will refer to as “surprise fish head soup”.  I have pictures too!  See, this is the bowl of soup that was ordered, and we were told that it was fish soup:

However, as we continued consuming this soup, this eventually surfaced:

If you thought a fly in your soup was bad, wait until you find a whole fish head in there.  Gross!  I still can’t believe I ate any of that.

If you were wondering how my digestive system is doing, let’s just say that when you go from a diet of grilled chicken breasts to a diet of fried sheep kidneys, the body goes through a bit of shock.  I am already imagining the wonderfully bland food that I plan on eating when I return back home.  Luckily the breakfast is all western food, and I have resorted to simply having a bowl of corn flakes and some watermelon in the morning.  But the food here has been very tasty, and the entire eating experience has been very cool.

To briefly talk about work…Dave and I finished our audit on Tuesday and summarized our findings to the factory on Wednesday, so our objective is complete.  Now there are a lot of other random projects and topics that we wanted to cover, which we will do for the next two days.  But ultimately it is “mission accomplished” at this point, and it feels good.

The weather here is very humid and hot, and I am glad I decided not to bring any undershirts and have been going single-layer all week.  I haven’t seen the sky in several days, and I don’t know if that is just thick fog or if it is just very smoggy and polluted here.  I kind of think it’s the latter.  Speaking of weather, I heard Minnesota got pounded with some terrible storm a few days ago, eh?  Like 3 inches of rain in an hour?  Crazy!  Some of the Chinese have heard that Minnesota’s government is shut down, and I think they have the impression that the entire state is in total chaos right now.  I suppose depending on your perspective, it might be?

One final picture from my camera…my stupid camera battery died before I got to the Great Wall, but luckily my coworker Dave had a fully powered camera and took lots of pictures up there with the group of us in a few of them too.  But here is my one picture of the Great Wall:

Also, that writing on the mountain in the background says “Mao Zedong”.  Seriously, the guy is everywhere.