Customer Appreciation Day

On Wednesday, our Chinese Business Partners held their annual customer appreciation day at a hotel-like venue across town. They invited us to attend as representatives of our ongoing global partnership.

The awards ceremony itself was fairly brief but packed with pageantry. There were the hostesses in their red ball gowns and a sound track that sounded like something from a 1960's Western. Mr G and Mr B gave energetic speeches and introduced a panel of government officials and company leaders. Then they awarded plaques to their honored customers and we moved on to the next stage -- the super banquet next door.


Lots of moving around and celebration during the lunch as guests toasted on another. On the table the usual broad array of dishes. The pigeon was quite tender and tasty (farm raised):


After lunch, we took a brief rest then headed back to the office to continue work on our project.

That evening, our Chinese Business Partners said that we would be on our own for dinner. We asked for a recommendation on a restaurant serving western fare (had hit the wall on Chinese). One of the local guys had a recommendation and volunteered to walk us over, but we didn't want to put him out so we just asked him to write down the name and draw a map.


We failed to remember that there are about 10 restaurants on every block and nothing was matching up to the characters scribbled on the paper.

We were definitely out of "5 Star" China at this point and there were no English speakers to be found, but we showed the name to enough people that we got pointed in the general direction. Finally, we stopped in a police station and the young officers ended up walking us down a back alley to the target place.

Something got lost in the translation at the office as this place had no western fare at all. Our appetites were also diminished at this point after the sites from the alley so we headed back to the hotel to launch plan B.

After speaking to the concierge, we determined that the best hope for western food was at the Hilton a few miles away. We jumped in a cab and headed over.

The Hilton was very nice and we did manage to find some western food on the menu of one of the restaurants. Sitting there we realized that we had not seen one other non Chinese face in this city of nearly 5MM people in the 3 days we had been here ---- definitely a different world.