An American’s thoughts on China while dealing with jetlag
November 18th, 2006
Its Saturday morning, and I’m up before 7 AM. And not because I have something to do today, no its because I’m dealing with jetlag from my trip back from China. I just spent two weeks in China working with several IONA employees and it was quite an experience…
On hospitality: The IONA team treated me great, took me out to eat, set up accomodations, took me to the great wall, and much more! Many many thanks to Bo who arranged the trip and made everything completely worry free.
On new foods: I tried jelly fish, donkey, cow throat, and BBQ’d goat ribs (yummm). I was not too much of a fan of the texture of both jelly fish and cow throat. Both were an odd mixture of chewy and crunch. Also, the Chinese seem to like eating their raw fat - for instance, pig’s fat in BBQ sauce. While it tasted good, the American in me was not comfortable with this, I kept thinking “but this is so bad for you…” Things I did not try: chicken feet and pig’s tail.
Yep, its communism. The Beijing Summit was going on the first week while I was there. They stopped letting people on the highway one night to make traffic better for an African president who was being carted some where one day. Supposedly they’re going to prevent people from driving on the streets at the olympics as well.
There are an interesting set of bars that the expat community seems to visit just off of Sanlitun’s main street. The main street itself seemed kind of sketchy though. I liked the Hidden Tree as it provided a wide variety of Belgian beers, which was a welcome change after to weeks of Tsing Tsao and Yan Jing.
On jet lag: I pulled an all nighter right before I left, staying awake until 8:30 AM when my flight took off. The idea being that it helps me pre adjust to the time change. I woke up on my second plane at 7 AM Michigan time, giving me about 7 hours of sleep, and was able to stay awake to 10:30 PM Michigan time last night. I’m wide awake this morning now, so it seems to have done the trick. The true test will be later tonight though.
On the Internet: Both my hotel and connection at the IONA office were rather dodgy. Often times my connection would be reset to any number of servers. This was highly annoying and made me thankful for my wonderful Cable connection at home and the life changing Verizon wireless card I carry.
On touring: I toured a bit with Oisin and Adrian and saw the Great Wall, Summer Palace, Tienneman square, and the Forbidden City. My legs got real tired. Pictures are here. (Yes, I finally got a Flickr Pro account. Woo!)