Medicinal Wine

On a recent trip to Dongguan (southern China) we had lunch with a factory.  The food itself was excellent, so much better than the style of food in Shanghai.  For those of you not very familiar with Chinese food it is very regional in style and taste.  Some areas are very spicy, some more fish, some hot pot, some sweet/slimy (Shanghai), some rice, some noodles.  You get the idea.  Well this place was good...until...

We were leaving and they showed me some special bottles of wine that are very expensive and typically used for medicinal purposes.  I couldn't take photo of them all as a couple just looked normal.  For instance there was a bottle filled with ants and another one with bees in it.  Those just looked like a pile of something at the bottom of the bottle.

Then there was this...

It's a little tough to tell but the image above is a bottle filled with scorpions! 

And then the absolute kicker and one that nearly made me lose my lunch right there...

Yes folks that is probably what you think it is.  Those are mice fetus!  Who in their right mind drinks that and why???

Rainbow dog

I was walking around Shanghai the other day and saw this dog (yes it is a very real dog) in the window of some shop.  I couldn't resist the chance to take a photo. 

Now I know many people love their dogs but has anyone thought about if their dog would really appreciate being painted like this?

March 2011

Well I just realized it is March now.  This is cool for a lot of reasons...spring is on the way (fingers crossed that it comes sooner than last year), my birthday is coming (the 14th if you want to send gifts or money), St Paddys Day (although not the biggest social event in China), etc.

But the other thing that makes it pretty cool is that I have now officially lived here for one year.  While I started this job in December of 2009, I didn't move to Shanghai until the end of Feb 2010.  So I've now been in this apartment one year, have extended for the next and so on.

Looking back it was a good year filled with plenty of challenges and lots of laughs along with some fun.  As I said before let's bring on the next year!

It's been too long since my last update

Sorry all, it's been too long since my last update.  A tremendous amount has happened in the past month and I have a lot of updates to get onto here.  I will get to them as best I can over the coming days...

But for some recent humor I thought I would include these couple of photos first.  The first one is from a flight last week.  Not sure why he had his shoes off in the first place given it was a short flight and all, but if you knew your socks were worn down to nothing do you really think everyone wanted to see?

 And this one was from a factory visit.  I just appreciated the irony of the situation.  You have a huge conference table with these nice US/China flags all down the way, a no smoking sign prominently displayed and then the ash tray right behind it.  Unfortunately there was no way to get a photo with the other 6 or so ash trays all down the table.

More to come, check back soon.