A Night Out In Suzhou

It was Saturday yesterday but we had a meeting with potential business partners in China which involved a 90 minute drive out to the Yangtse River. I’ve figured out that there are better ways to spend a weekend than this, but it’s best to fit as much stuff in as you can while you’re here. Anyway, during the meeting they served us these “moon cakes” which are eaten to celebrate the mid-Autumn festival, when the moon is at its largest. They’re made out of lotus seeds, apparently, and let me tell you that there’s a reason that it’s chocolate and not lotus seeds that we typically associate with “treats” and “celebration”. Half the seeds were still intact, making consumption a bit like chewing ball bearings in putty. I subsequently considered that it might have been this that ripped out my arse later in the day.

If it seems like this trip consists mainly of bouts of the trots interrupted by occasional work then that’s probably not far from the truth. Unfortunately I have almost no control over what I eat here, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s some weird shit on offer. We were entertained for lunch at what appeared to be the only restaurant within thirty miles, and every time a dish would appear on the table my host would spoon some onto my plate in a gesture of hospitality and respect. In the spirit of reciprocating I refrained from pointing out that the latest arrival looked like someone had already eaten it once and that I’d rather pass, thank you. This whole process means that you’re essentially entering the food lottery – you couldn’t name any of the major constituents of most of the dishes on the table and, when some “helpful” git keeps piling unidentifiable shit on your plate it’s hard to politely just leave the stuff you don’t want. Plus, if you leave all the stuff that doesn’t look appetizing you’re going to starve to death in about a week.

So we ended up going out as a group last night and, sure enough, during dinner the lunch blazed a trail through my digestive system, reappearing as arse gravy. The plan was to go out for karaoke afterwards and I half-considered knocking it on the head and returning to the hotel where I had both Immodium and a guaranteed real toilet, but what the hell? Karaoke places have toilets too, right? Wrong. When I went for a piss I noticed that their toilets were of the “hole in the ground” variety, meaning that unless I fancied crop-spraying my own ankles I was out of luck. Oh well, probably not an issue since I’d apparently shat out my entire large intestine and several internal organs in the restaurant earlier.

So we drank and sang (badly) with our delectable rented female companions. The song list is always the same so I did my fabulously talentless versions of All The Small Things (Blink 182) and Centerfold (J.Geils Band) before moving on to torture the shit out of Take On Me, a couple of Blondie songs and numerous old standards that we all sang. Kenny was playing drinking games with his girl and succeeded in getting her completely arseholed in about an hour, after which point she lost the ability to walk without collapsing. She slept on the seat for a while but woke up and, holding her sleek black hair behind her head, puked into a wastepaper bin in the room. Then we finished the whisky and sang some more. All in all, a good night was had.

So today I’m back in Shanghai, in arse-recuperation mode. The plan is to go for spicy Szechuan food tonight but it’s hard to imagine anything more likely to fuck me up. I normally like Chinese food but, as you may have noticed, I’m getting a bit down on the whole thing this time around. Today I just wanted a burger and fries, so that’s what we had when we got to Shanghai. It arrived on my own plate, with ketchup, and no-one spooned any unidentified crap on top of it. Now if the Immodium does its job I should be ready to shit again by about, say, Thursday, which is just fine by me. If they gave “frequent flier” miles for toilets I think I’d be platinum status just from this trip alone. Now there’s a nice thought…


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison