Thursday

This is turning into a food blog, eh?! Hahahha.  So it goes.

Awake at 4am, up arond 5am.  I had a nice phone call with my Darling husband, and I read for a bit.  Nothing useful like yoga or working out today.  But really, reading a nice book in a comfy bed at 5am is sort of luxurious.  I enjoyed it.  And the bed is really really comfy.  I like the pillows - and the duvet is lovely and fluffy.

Breaky:  I did go out to try the street meats!  Fun!!!  I had a chi-fan.  Like you can buy at T&T.  It is a rice roll wrapped around boiled egg, shredded pork and mustard greens, and chinese doughnut - you know.  Very tasty.  4RMB!  I also walked around the plaza a bit, got a starbucks, and bought some more water from the Lawson.  You'll notice breakfast was 4 RMB ($0.60) for the food, and 21 RMB ($3.24) for the western-style coffe - hahahha!  It totally always seems to be like that - which is probably good - you want 1 bln people to be able to feed themselves, but 1 bln people do not need to be able to have a Starbuck's every morning.

Lunch:
We were at the same place as yesterday.  It was good - I had a bowl of noodles in soup.  They put a tremendous amount of noodles in one bowl - like, way more noodles than one person should eat.  These are the sort-of equivalent to spaghetti - but far, far too much to eat at once!  hahah - so obvi I did (when in Rome!), I am having a sluggish afternoon maybe due to that!

Dinner:
Last night we went to the 'thumbs plaza' which is a hip neighbourhood on this side of the river (PuDong side).  My favourite part was killing some time in a grocery store (Carre-four) before the rest of our colleagues showed up.  Awesome!  It was like a big loblaws, where they don't just sell you food but also stuff.  And THIS is where regular people shop, not the crazy expensive malls with seriously overpriced western good.  I had to be torn out of the grocery store.  This is my advice, always try to hit up a grocery store in a foreign country - they are so interesting!  I couldn't resist buying some 'cute things' - little packets of napkins and things.  I am hoping to spend some time saturday in a grocery store, hopefully without boys that think it is lame, ahahha.

Dinner was japanese - um... not really very distinguishing.   Fine, but not outstanding. It was nice eating with those colleagues (the main team I have been training all week), but I would say TO has better Japanese food, based on this one experience.  There was a large group of VERY drunk and loud Japanese men, that provided amusement for the rest of us!  (It seems like this isn't ok behaviour for the Chinese guys - they seemed slightly shocked and embarrased by the Japanese guys - maybe that was just because we are in a business setting though?)