Swan Lake

Last night my host family took me to an extraordinarily fancy restaurant called Swan Lake.  We were seated in a private room (with a TV) where three business colleagues of my host father's joined us.  To illustrate the luxuriousness of this entire dinner: the ceiling was the clear bottom of an aquarium, out the window lay a lake filled with swans, the dishes were served on a rotating crystal platter, and the bathrooms had toilet paper.  The main dish: a tray with a lobster (may or may not have been alive), a small ice sculpture, and a mini liquid nitrogen volcano.  Other dishes were Beijing roast duck, filet mignon....  The weirdest thing I drank: corn juice, although this sauce that was like wasabi but 100 times worse (and my host sister let me put a huge amount in my mouth) was a close second.  It might as well have been moonshine by how well it cleared out my sinuses.  The importance of the guests can be determined based on who controls the Lazy Susan on which all the dishes are placed during meals whether formal or informal.  If you are the guest of honor, you can spin it for whichever dish you like.  Everyone else waits for their desired dish to land in front of them.  The only abominable part was that all of the men were smoking, and the regular Chinese table etiquette was mostly withstanding (burping, chewing with one's mouth open, etc., ugh).  Every couple of minutes someone would stand up, make a toast, and drink their shot of sake.  At one point they all stood up and looked at me.  Lily whispered that I was supposed to wish them something, so I subsequently drew a blank on all my Chinese except for 祝你生日快乐, "wish you a happy birthday".  Eventually I managed something about peace (but most people put more effort into birthdays anyway).  Afterwards my host sister and I played golf on the attached country club's driving range.

I learned that for women to marry in China they have to be 20 years old and men have to be 22!

Weirdest thing I ate today: chicken feet.  They were just as scrumptious as they sound.  Additionally, we had dessert for the very first time, not counting the abundance of nightly watermelon.  The dish tasted like an extremely watery jello with rice-pudding-like chunks and not at all sweet.  I brought good old artificial American jello to make my host family later, but it will probably end up being sweet enough in comparison to scar their taste buds.

Dragon fruit, not as sweet as the dark color insinuates.