Eating someone's best friend

Yesterday morning I was interrupted from my beauty sleep by a phone call at around 8:00. You will understand that I was very surprised when I tell you that not too many people have my telephone nr, and those that have it would still have been sleeping. But, it rang and I felt the need to answer it. It turned out to be a lady from the politics department that I met a couple of days ago at a staff meeting/conference. She wanted to know if I wanted to join her and her daughter to do some shopping. Not having anything planned I agreed to join. A couple of minutes later I was picked up by “Shirley”, and her 8year old daughter “Bright”. She is the cutest little Chinese girl. I tried to communicate with her with my non-existent Mandarin, but realized I need lots more work.

We first went to a shopping mall to do some window shopping. Mostly clothes were in these shops and we had a good time just walking around and talking about brands. Shirley pointing out some known brands, that ended up not being too famous in my eyes. She rated the popularity of clothes by all the languages that appeared on the labels of the clothes. Mmm… I ended up nullifying her theory.
We then headed to all the food products where she wanted to buy some food for the festival that was lying ahead. These shops were as busy as you have never seen before. Food is a big culture in China and the New Years festival is a time and place where Chinese show how much they can eat. This is a time of family and friends. It is almost like the family getting together in the Western world for Christmas.

After collecting all that she wanted for the festival we headed to the food corner for something to eat. It was already 12:00 in the afternoon and my stomach made it known that it needed some food. While walking around and looking at the different food they offered, we got to this one stall where they had a couple of different kinds of meat. “This is dog” Shirley pointed to some strips of cold meat. Well, how could I not. We got a whole plate of dog meat. At first it took my mind some working on!! Eating dog is not a bad idea, but your mind could be the only thing actually coming between your mouth and the meat. But, how can I put it… I had a couple of bites of someone’s best friend. I am not a dog person, but more of a cat person. I have to admit that the meat is quite salty. Shirley admitted unashamedly that she eats dog quite often, while I was eating and keeping the voice in my head quiet. Will I eat dog again I got asked by a friend. Well, yes but this time I want to eat it warm with some nice spicy sauce.

After the food we went to this big fish pond full of “koi” (colorful carp "fish"). Here, for a fee you can feed the koi with a bottle full of a liquid fish food. Bright and I ended up feeding the koi with this bottled food mixture. Bright loves fish and her fish recently died, so we headed to the fish market where her mom purchased her a couple of fish for her tank at home. After returning from the shops we headed towards the ping-pong (table tennis) club where I got my ass kicked by a high-school girl!! This sport is what they do for a living!!

(Linyi City, Shandong Province, China)