Adventarrrr!!!

Dru and I decided to get a bit adventurous and go to a restaurant by ourselves. See... a foreigner can survive eating street vendor food by pointing and saying "dao shwaw chyen" [not pinyin, I know] and at worst just handing over five RMB and expecting change back. In the street you can look and point out the meat and veggies you want on the kabob or see the single offering being served. Restaurants are more expensive but it's harder communicating. I hadn't been yet without Brian, our boss, going with us. Like I said, we were feeling adventurous.

We stopped first in the BuyNow to look for headphones on the fourth floor hamfest-ish market. I quickly got beat in the haggling game buying a smaller pair of earphones... I pointed out some cool metallic looking units and I was told 80 quai, outrageously high for China but they looked quality and had a brand name on them. I quickly retorted by grabbing at the calculator and punching in 60. She quickly agreed. Damn. I couldn't negotiate down now. I probably could have had them for 15 yuan, but ey...

We walk out and head to a resteraunt where we knew there were pictures we could point to on the menu. We sat, ordered cokes, and browsed through the menu. Dru quickly found the symbol for beef on the back of the menu. I found a picture of what looked like green beans with onion. We both agreed the lamb ribs were an easy bet... fatty, but good with no surprises. The waitress came to take our order (as a funny side note, she wore a t-shirt yesterday proclaiming that she was "kinky stripper," though her command of English was lower than my command of Chinese).

I felt an urge of randomness inside of me and as Dru finished pointing everything out, I randomly flipped to the back of the menu and pointed to a random item. It was a 9 quai dish, a little more than a dollar, and felt it a good gamble. Maybe we'd stumple into something delicious.

Our first dish arrived. It was the green beans dish. Well... green, yes... but they weren't beans. They were tentacles from our fair cephalapod friends of the deep. With onions, of course. Buy the ticket, take the ride, right? I ate them. One or two out of a giant bowl, but I ate them nonetheless. Then the mystery dish came. Shrimp with scapploped potatoes (maybe?). Dru's dish came next. He won. Awesome sweet beef in an orange sauce with tomatoes and peppers.

We go for Mexican tonight... talk about sketch, huh? A Mexican resteraunt in a dirty industrial town. I'm graving a margarita though. I'll write later about the awesome raggae bar filled with internationals last night we found last night.

Quick Notes:
- I superglued earbuds to my ear
- The Chinese don't mind wearing the same clothes days on end
- Dru found a raggae bar by the University with other internationals. The only other non-Chinese I've seen so far are with our company and the French bigwig manager at Carrefour.