Strange Food and Sales

I have escaped jet lag!  Last night I was able to sleep for a full night and woke up at a normal morning time.  My coworker J picked me up for work at 8 and gave me a tour of the my company's office.  I have my own cubicle now.  The walls of cubicles are proportional to the height of the average worker - short.  My face rises about the wall of the cube while I can barely see the tops of the heads of my coworkers.  I had a few meetings in the morning, meeting a lot of the engineers I would be working with in the coming weeks.

For lunch J and I went to a stir-fry place where I had soup (with chicken and chicken bones), chicken & tofu, beef and noodles, shrimp (with head, feet, tail, and shell), pork, and asparagus leaves.  The shrimp I ate did not sit well.

After lunch J took me to the Gomz and Suning department stores to see my company's products on display and the products of the competitors.  There weren't many competitors products on display and the ones that were were not in showroom condition (chipped paint, product faces falling off, etc).  What I thought was interesting is that my company rents out space in the store and staffs it with sales people.  At Gomz J inquired as to where a particular product was at and the sales people led us out of the store and across the street to competitor Suning's store to see the products.  You would never see a Best Buy employee taking a customer across the street to Circuit City (if any still existed?) to see a product.

I was under the impression that Shanghai would be very hot.  Everyone told me to pack my shorts and short sleeve shirts but I'm actually freezing.  It could be because I have an air conditioner blowing directly on me but my goodness, it's cold inside!  Outside is pleasantly warm, a nice temperature.  I would have been better packing the clothes I would normally wear in Milwaukee summers to work than the warm weather clothes I packed.

For dinner, J and I went to an individual hot pot place.  Each person gets a bowl with broth, little meat, and some veggies (onion and carrot in my case).  Then you select from many different thin slices of raw meet (beef or lamb or mutton or shrimp) which you dunk in the pot of boiling broth till it's cooked to your satisfaction.  It was actually pretty fun dunking the food in the pot and pulling it out.  That was my first chopsticks only meal (the previous places I ate at gave me a fork).