Out with Mr. Hong

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone! Adam and I didn't celebrate Thanksgiving here, partly because we were in two different cities and partly because even if they did sell turkeys at the grocery store (which they don't), we don't have an oven to cook a turkey in anyways. But I did learn that the word for turkey is "huoji" which literally means "fire chicken".


Tonight we went out with Mr. Hong, the project manager for the BMW localization, and Michael, a laboratory manager from the UK who is just here for a couple of weeks. Mr. Hong is the same age as Adam and he's very nice and funny. He wanted to take us to have REAL Huainan food but he told us not to tell the company because they would be mad at him for not taking us to a nicer place. Adam had told him we really liked the beef soup we had at this one place back in July, so Mr. Hong said he would take us to the place with the best beef soup in Huainan. Adam tried to get him to bring his girlfriend but Mr. Hong said she would be too shy. But apparently he's trying to marry this one. :)


Anyways, the "restaurant" was this little hole in the wall place. There are a ton of these places and without a Chinese guide, I would definitely have passed this one up thinking it was scary. But the beef soup was very good. I think the bread at the other place was better, though. After that we started walking to where Mr. Hong told us we needed to try some "milk tea". Tea with milk in it??? I wasn't excited about that but I'm all for walking around. When we got there, he ordered us chocolate flavored ones which I figured would taste the most normal. It wasn't bad, but there were these little gummy things floating around in the bottom called "glue balls". That's probably not a very good translation. They were flavorless but I didn't like them being in there so I tried to avoid them. Here's a picture:

I wish they had been chocolate chips

While we were there, Mr. Hong's girlfriend called and said she was going to meet us there. Surprise surprise! He's a short guy and so he said he was nervous that she might be taller than him. It was at this point that he confessed that this was the first time he was going to see her in person. We were like "What?! You haven't met her yet?" And then he told us how he "met" her. His phone has an app on it where you shake the phone, and then it tells you who else is shaking their phone at the same time as you. This girl whom he was claiming was his girlfriend, was just some random girl who happened to be shaking her phone at the same time as him and they had been conversing for a couple of days. Crazy. So I said to Adam "I thought you said he was trying to marry this girl." And he was like, "He is! Mr. Hong told me in China, you don't move out of your parents' house until you're married. So his parents are bugging him to get out!" Haha. So we got to be a small part of Mr. Hong's first date tonight (they are the same height). But we quickly decided to go home and leave them alone. Hope it went well!

That's all for now! To make up for the lack of exciting pictures from tonight's adventure, here's an extremely adorable picture of Smudgie:

Our little fire chicken