just came back from beijing. got to go there on a ford school trip, with a bunch of fordies and some other randoms from public health, law and business mainly. but what am i saying, i am probably in the randoms sections, seeing as i hardly knew most of the peeps on the trip. luckily my roomate was cool, we bonded trying to overcome a combination of jet lag and our other roomate's snoring at 5 am everyday. and then finally got to know most of the people a bit by the end of the trip, they were a bunch of decent humans.
most of the days in beijing were horrifically cold though. i even gave up going to the great wall to go and eat xiao long pau (have no idea how to spell that). and before you organized tour whores castigate me for passing up one of the 7 wonders of the world for food, let me put it all into context. it was cold, snowing even, a rarity in a beijing winter, and having ill timed my packing pre trip, i feared that a lack of warm clothes would be hazardous to my health. i am willing to bet that the great wall will still be there in the years to come, and might even be better to visit in the summer. and that xiao long pao. definately in the top three XLP life experiences, perhaps even the best ever. they had all sorts of varieties , but my personal favorite was the one with crab meat. lovely. din tai fung or something. shanghainese chain restaurant owned by a taiwanese. with the whole tech meets old school set up. you could see the completely white clad makers of dumplings through glass window in the kitchen, working through a fordist chain of dumpling process, steam rising from bamboo baskets side by side with delicate pastry rolling hands.
but take a closer look and you would see why the seeming chaos was in fact very coordinated. the waiters and waitresses were all equipped with earpieces and murmured the orders into the headsets with all the fuss of a secret agent trying not to be noticed. and then all the manufacturing, down to the time, type, origin etc, was controlled by a computer in the kitchen. the computer was hardly noticeable, but of course i had to be kay poh and take a look at the kitchen from every angle imaginable before i was content. all in the eyes of research, right? yeah whatever. it did seem however, very much like the machines used at michelin star restauraunts which controlled to the tenth of a degree the temparature at which the dish was cooked at. so, for all the bruhahah about the harkening back to the old ages manufacturing of dumplings (not that i know anything about that), in fact it was a precisely computer controlled process.
and the result? tasty dumplings nonetheless.
oh yah, so there was all this work that we did there too, tons of meetings, from morning til noon. i have to say, it exceeded my expectations. the meetings were all very well organized and i think as a bunch of students we impressed, with our questions. we were generally well prepared. we worked hard though, there were meetings from morning til afternoon and sometimes even in the evenings for dinner in smaller groups. which all resulted in a lot less going out than i imagined, because people were tired by the time it all ended. there was one good night in xian at a dodgy karaoke place, and a relatively good night in beijing, at mix, a hippity hoppity place in sanlitung. by that time thought i was getting group fever and slighltly losing it. tried my best to spend all my money on alcohol but failed. however, my duty free stash has increased, if things keep on going like this, i might even get to the stage where i shall never have to drink any whiskey that has duty paid on it.
maybe next time i will actually write a bit on the meetings we went to. after more procrastination that is.
