China Revisited -- 2013 [30]

Nearing The End

We did not see everyone we had hoped to see on our trip to China.  We did not see Tra, who is Vietnamese and had hoped to travel up from Hanoi.  Nor did we see Frances, who lives in southern China but was unable to travel down to Guangzhou while we were there due to a rare snowstorm that brought transportation to a halt.

But we did see Candy and Vicky, who were home on holiday break from their universities in the States.

Candy is one of our two year home-stay daughters. She is studying at Baruch College in New York City. We met her and her parents for dinner at a gorgeous restaurant near Splendid China in Shenzhen. This photograph is essentially a fish tank built into a wall beneath the restaurant's signature tiles, which are a traditional local feature.

Sadly, I do not have a close-up picture of her for this account, due to the memory card incident that I keep mentioning. Suffice it to say, she has become a beautiful, accomplished young woman. We had met her mother while Candy was an Academy student, but not her father.

Our time with Candy was too short.  The most memorable food item at this restaurant was not actually something served to us.  As we were leaving the eating area and looking both for rest rooms and a setting for group pictures, we were stopped in our tracks by a parade of  uniformed food servers filing out of the kitchen and heading down the hall toward banquet rooms where wedding celebrations were under way.

Each server carried a tray with a whole pig with flashing pink eyes.  The line of servers with pigs kept coming. I estimate at least three dozen of these little porkers flashed past!

Apparently the pig itself is not eaten in this form. What we saw was essentially the outer pig, the skin from snout to corkscrew tail, which I gather is sampled as an appetizer.

One server stopped for Candy to take a picture, as its roasted compatriots processed, flashing and shining, down the hall toward the banquet rooms.

There are no easy transitions from pigs with flashing eyes.  It is a little like speaking after someone who has brought the house down.

On our last night in Shenzhen we had dinner with Vicky and her mother in a restaurant in the community where Edward lives. She was delayed traveling to Edward's house.  The 30 minute drive took two hours due to traffic.

To pass the time Donna and I started playing ping-pong. The sound of the ball on the table must have carried upstairs because soon the younger maid came down to watch. As soon as she appeared, I gave her my paddle. Clearly she was delighted.  She and Donna played with great spirit and much laughter for about 15 minutes before Vicky came.

Among other problems resulting from the drops my camera suffered was the loss of the flash.

Vicky was an Academy classmate of Edward and Yujia.  She lived two doors down from us at the Woodards'. Like them, she is also attending Syracuse University.

This dinner, like the dinner with Candy, was geared toward foreign tastes, so we ate more western style.
Despite that disclaimer, I made note of several gourmet items on the menu: Buddha-jump-over-the-wall soup, which features sea squirt and chicken feet; Braised shredded snake meat with abalone soup, which speaks for itself; Braised wild boar belly in brown sauce; and wok-fried oysters and chicken testicles, an item that wants no comment from me.

During our conversation with Vicky, as we discussed our eating experiences, she informed us, "I do not eat organs."

To our American ears, she seemed to be saying, it's OK to be selective.