Day Fourty-One

Sorry for not blogging the last couple of days but I have been unable to reach a computer. The first day that I missed my blog was because I hadn't planned the day out far enough in advance to get to the business center before it closed. On that day we slept in and switched rooms at our hotel, the reason being that we decided late in the trip that we were going to stay in Shanghai for the entire 7 days we had left in China.

After we got resituated Jeff and I walked south to the Chenghuang Miao area, ( near the Yu Yuan Gardens and tea house). In Chenghuang Miao we had a small lunch and walked around the souvenir bazaar. When we finished in Chenhuang we headed over to the Pudong district to visit a very special museum.

The museum we visited was called the Chinese Sex Culture Museum. It exhibited the history of sexual differences dating as far back as 1000 B.C. We hung out at the museum for about an hour before coming back to the hotel to relax before dinner.

For dinner I took Jeff to a Hot Pot restaurant. I can't remember if I mentioned my hot pot experience in Chengdu but I'll give you guys a run down of how it works. During a hot pot meal the customers pick out the "flavor" of hot pot that they want. The flavors are what constitute the stew in which you cook your food. In our case we ordered a double flavor, a boiling pot that was split down the middle, one side was spicy the other not spicy. Once the hot pot gets back to boiling, as it sits on a stove in the middle of the table, the customer orders different raw meats and vegetables. There you have it, Hot Pot!

After dinner we came back home to get to sleep. The next day we had planned out was going to take a lot of energy and we knew it.

Day Seventeen

Last night one of the Sichaun University students, Salem, invited the USC guys to come over in the morning an play basketball before morning classes. Salem brought along his friends Rex and Deng, who together thoroughly kicked our ass in a game of three on three. After our game I picked up the laundry I had dropped off at the university a couple days before.

We came back to the hotel and jumped in the pool to cool down and then went to Pizza Hut for lunch, (my fourth time since I've been in China!). After lunch we met up with our professor to go to a Chengdu hospital where a man named Gregory Yingnien Tsang gave a lecture on smoking cessation to hospital staff. Before we left the hospital we were given a brief tour of the tobacco cessation department at the hospital.

To end the day we debriefed at the hotel and then went to a traditional Hot Pot dinner. Hot pot is a dining experience in which there is a boiling pot of oil in the middle of the table and various dishes are brought with foods to cook in the oil. It really isn't called hot pot for nothing, in fact it was probably the spiciest food I've eaten in my life. By the end of the meal I was sweating up a storm from all the hot peppers and oil. It's been a long day, night!