I Almost Farted Myself Out of Shanghai

I had a business trip to Shanghai area last week. As always, business trips suck, and this one wasn't any different.

One of my biggest problem of traveling to the Mainland is I do not like their food. China is vast so maybe it was the region that I visited that was the problem. Food over there (in Shanghai-Kunshan-Suzhou) are generally greasy and on the sweet side. Every night after I return to my hotel room after a full dinner, my stomach wants to kill me.

The first night, we met up with our customer and we went to a hot pot place. The soup base used a dark boned chicken (don't know the technical term), and local spices. It was very greasy and salty. Since we didn't sit down until almost 9PM and had no food in between since our lunch airplane food, we were famished! We ordered some extra hot dishes and stir fries, they all turned out extra greasy and spicy.

Our client, a female local, was basically laughing at our wussy stomachs for not being able to handle the food. She watched us in amazement trying to filter out the oil from the pot, and asked the waitress to add boiled water to dilute the very salty soup. According to her, she has never seen anyone do that eating hot pot. In Taiwan, we do it ALL THE TIME. One dish was literally, pork slices in a plate of oil. According to the client, the more oil the better.

I asked her if she'll tell her friends that she just had a strange hot pot experience with weak stomached Taiwanese. She quietly nodded, and said "no wonder Taiwanese people live longer". I do not know if that's true but it makes sense. If I eat like they do for a month, you can probably harvest diamonds from my organs.

One other rant, Shanghai airport sucks. More specifically, the restaurant there sucks. We couldn't get the more convenient flight to the domestic airport HongQiao, so we had to land at Pudong which supposed to be Shanghai's international airport.

My colleagues and I went to this ramen noodle place. It took them 45 minutes and at least 7 tries to get the four bowls of ramen noodles we ordered correctly. We also ordered side dishes which never came. The waitress gave us two plates of tofu which we never ordered. After we told her we ordered something else, she just put those two plates of tofu onto the dividers between tables and left us alone!

After 30 minutes of hurrying telling and asking them for our dishes, the manager came over to see what's going on. When we told her that our side dishes were still missing, without saying a word, she took the two plates of tofu that was sitting on the divider for the past 30 minutes, and put it on our table.

Back in Taiwan we probably can see the news editorials bash our own airport for being shoddy cuz of construction, for poor services, or for unreasonable meal prices. One of the most common rhetoric we hear all the time is that the airport is the front door of a nation, and this is the first & last impression we are leaving our visitors. Judging from my experience from Shanghai, we have nothing to worry about! I like the educated people in China, they are generally very easy going and approachable. Now if only they can improve on the service industries of their urban cities, I actually wouldn't mind working or living there. IF!