“And we only soiled our shirts and not our shorts!”

Chengdu 18-July

Back in Chengdu, we started today with a quick breakfast, then to the presentations of the design solutions we had come up with in Taoping. Our group produced some great material, and I over heard one of the UW students say, “This group produced a lot of material.” At least our work into the night showed and paid off. I have to give a shout to Zhao Nan who rocked the presentation as well. She said after wards she was really nervous, but it didn’t show at all. After the presentations we met back up with one of our original groups, and we are responsible for producing a document of all our research done in Taoping. So we set a time and broke for lunch. Josh and I ended up back at Peter’s Tex-Mex, knowing that we were going to Hot Pot that evening.

Hot Pot, this is something that really has no American equivalent. Well, maybe fondue, but that would be a stretch. The broth of the Sichuan hot pot is full mouth numbing Sichuan peppercorns, hot as hell red chilis, and more Sichuan peppercorns. The premise is you go up to a buffet, grab plates, and then take them back to you table and cook the food in the hot broth. It is pretty tasty, but man you get a pretty good sweat going, and if you are a gringo like me, your face gets all red. I haven’t had any indigestion this whole trip, save that little episode of illness, but this might just do me in. Josh and I went to a great local place with Dia Xinchen, Liang Xaio, and Zhao Nan. Here’s the list of food stuff we got from the buffet line; eel, river fish, bacon, marinated bacon, pork skewers, flank meat, beef tenderloin, chili rubbed beef, duck tongue, duck feet, shrimp, lotus root, potatoes, two types of noodles, lettuce, pumpkin, enoki mushrooms, beef lung, tripe of some unknown ungulate, quail eggs, shrimp dumplings, and one mystery vegetable (it looked like Chinese long bean, but wasn’t) and fried banana and fried sweet potatoes for dessert. The food was good, really hot temperature wise as well. I don’t know if I’ll be back, but it was sure worth doing once in my lifetime.

After that, we headed home, tomorrow is a long day, we will go to a few parks around town, and then our group will meet up to finish up our report. It shouldn’t be a long night, hopefully, but since the reports are due on Monday, who knows.