DINNER IN SHANGHAI

Wednesday evening was my scheduled dinner with the office manager.  All week Dave from San Diego had been trying to get me to go to this "underground" shopping area where deals were to be had by those who would have them.  He had visited a clothier there on Sunday and purchased a bunch of shirts and a jacket that would all be properly altered by Wednesday, and invited me along to pick them up.

I was intrigued, and indeed wanted to both see and experience this place, since the way Dave described it made me think of black markets I'd seen on TV.  “It’s not knock-offs, but brand name stuff, only with the brand logos removed,” he’d say.  “Sounds legit,” says I.  Hearing my undertone of sarcasm he says, “no, really, this is all just stuff that came out the back door.”  Yep.  Legit.

I needed a spare kidney anyway...

So to get to this super-secret place you go to the metro and get off at the stop for the science museum.  That’s it.  You’re still underground, having done the metro, and you’re there amidst shops.  Now, not all of the shopping areas are equal.  The stuff surrounding the train station is pretty normal looking – it’s like being in a mall.  But enter the deeper corridors of this underground shopping center and you soon find yourself in a maze of booths and shops where you can’t walk more than 10 paces without someone noticing that you don’t have a watch and likely are in need of one.

“Watch?  WATCH?!?!?  Why you not want watch!??!”

Had I possessed the funds and desire, I could have walked out of there with 2,000 watches.

Dinner was at a location chosen by the office manager after consulting with me as to what I’d like to have.  “Meat” I say.  And meat we got!  He ordered for the table and then one by one came dishes of chicken, pork, duck, a fish served China-style with its last frozen look of horror that it was able to muster before dying a most likely horrible death, and what I think may have been fried dinosaur.

All of the food is shiny.  We do not ask why.

The stuff in the bowl toward the center is pork, only this pork is about 10% meat and 90% fat.  And I mean thick, jiggly, translucent pork fat.  I was told that the proper way to eat this did not include cutting the fat off the meat, unlike what common sense and 40 years of "fat = bad" training would lead one to believe.  The mere prospect of sticking what would amount to be a cubic inch of pure fat into my mouth with each morsel made me queasy.  I did not want to be the guy who asked for meat and failed to eat it, though, so I took a deep breath, steeled myself for imminent gagging, and popped a chunk into my pie hole.

It is hard to describe the sensation.  Shame.  Guilt.  Feeling soiled and dirty.  All that combined with joy, happiness, lust for more and a general feeling of “holy jiggling fat cells, that stuff is GREAT!”

I cannot imagine that I ate anything less than about 9000 calories just out of that bowl.

The fish was really good, too – here are before and after shots.

Try not to think of something a whale might have burped up.

Who's a good little fishie???