Day 5 - Saturday

Well, I didn't feel that good this morning; not really sure what it was. I ended up staying at the hotel until lunch time and then we met up with Paul Watts, our main engineering contact, and his wife (Anna) and 15month old son (Jack). We went out for a hot pot lunch in Suzhou, including his/our driver, Jerry. Hot pot is kind of like fondue in that there is a large heated pot at the table to cook the food in. With this hot pot, we had two sides; one spicy, one more mild. We ordered a lot of different food; potatoes, cauliflower, thin sliced pork, egg, fish balls, duck blood, pig brain, ... Overall it was really good; the pig brain and duck blood were pretty bad. The brain was very mushy and literally disinegrated when you ate it. The duck blood looked like liver and was also kind of mushy.

After lunch, we walked around Suzhou for a few hours until Jerry picked us back up. Suzhou is a very densely populated area with a lot of little store fronts. Areas are greatly varied from nice newer buildings to rundown, dirty stores. We found a pagoda that we stopped in at (25RMB) that had a surrounding garden. We climbed the top which had a very nice 360 degree view of the city. We stopped back at the hotel to drop-off our stuff and then headed out to the grocery store. It is about a 20minute walk to the mall/grocery store. We each got a few snacks and I bought some laundry detergent. We got back to the hotel about 6:30 and touched base with Mike Oudyn, my manager, who just got into China today. We met up with everyone else and headed to the Rainbow Walk area for dinner at a German restaurant. I had pork sausage which was good. We were all pretty tired from all the walking and sun today, so we called it a night early. I'm doing a load of laundry and doing this blog....might do a little bit of work tonight, but that may wait until tomorrow morning before we head back to Suzhou.

I thought this was kind of a cute/funny picture.