why we're hungry

I haven't been posting much food on here so let me give you a run down of our breakfast. We eat at the hotels daily breakfast buffet which is not very good to begin with and after the first week we were already sick of it. Its been 6 weeks now.  Anyways, they have an assortment of typical greasy Chinese food (noodles, vegetables, mantou ), except all of it is mixed with chili peppers which really limits down what I can personally stand. They usually have watermelon but we don't have much time in the morning and its not always out. The drink machine only 3 types of drinks, watery coffee, really sweet powdered milk, and orange aide all of which are both gross and hot (orange aide is especially nasty when hot). Most of the food is pretty greasy as well. I've gotten used to just eating a little bowl of veggies and drinking a lot of water to fill my stomach.

mmmmmm................

ugh

We get next week off from work because apparently it's "hot week vacation", and I can see why if its going to be as bad as this week.

pandas pandas pandas

This weekend we made the trip out to Cheng Du to visit the famous Panda Base, which is a breeding and conservation park for Giant Pandas and Red Pandas. We had to take a high speed rail for 2 hours to Cheng Du then the subway and bus to the base so it took about 4 hours in total.  Unfortunately was pouring so all of the Giant panda's stayed in doors, but we did get to see red pandas outside (I think they're cuter anyways). The base looked like a large bamboo forest and had a lake with black swans and tons of koi. Apparently if you pay some money you can take pictures with baby pandas but we didn't find it (I think they don't have any pandas of  holding age right now). I just wanted to steal a red panda its so cute!

Bagnut?

While y'all cry over Cronuts in New York (they do look delicious), Hillary was feeling deprived of American sweets and wanted a simple doughnut (all the cake here is a kind of sponge cake, so we really miss the richer American sweets). So we went to the local bread store and picked up what was labeled a "vanilla doughnut".





But alas, similar to this whole trip so far, things were not as they seemed as the donut was not a donut, but instead a bagel cut in half with some kind of vanilla flavored cream spread between.

It wasn't that bad tasting. but when you were expecting a doughnut it was kind of gross. We really aren't sure what was in between the bagel slices but we do know now to be a little most skeptical with our pastries (as with all other things here).









UPDATE: We went to a doughnut shop called Bapple to try again but didn't have much luck. Chinese doughnuts look pretty but the actual pasty itself is rather dry and stale. It was better tasting than the weird bagel thing though.

Blame it on the Alcohol

So the other day to my dismay I dropped my adorable Hello Kitty pressed compact powder that I got in Taiwan. Many Google searches later I was directed by the wise internet to mix rubbing alcohol into the makeup to remold the compact, as the alcohol evaporates quickly leaving you with one solid piece.

We tried searching for rubbing alcohol at the super market and cosmetic store but found none, so we figured we might as use real alcohol instead (it probably has rubbing alcohol anyways). We bought this 100 ml bottle for 5.8 RMB ($0.95 USD), way to cheap to be safe to drink. It smelled soooo bad something like sake so I guess its made of rice? I was afraid it wouldn't work any my make up would end up smelling gross but thankfully it did the trick.

Things Emil Says

Emil is an Italian engineer that we're pretty sure came here from Dearborn, but he said he's also worked in Germany and Japan. Either way he's finding us things to do but we mostly like him because he says the funniest things. He has an Italian accent but when he speaks Chinese it's pretty good...or at least we think so.


"He put his hands in my pocket, and I put my hand on his throat"
- talking about pickpocketers in China

"I say 'Wo yao xi gua' and the guy starts telling me his life story in Chinese! I think he's talking to me about his girlfriend, but I just want my damn watermelon! And I'm thinking, do I look like I can speak more Chinese?"

"You have to get the little fat one with the glasses, I'm telling you he's real good"
- telling us which IT guy to ask for help (he's not really fat his head's just a little round)

"There is NOTHING to do around here NOTHING"

"When someone asks me to fill in for them I say of course its easy! The first day you spend learning about the project, the second day I look over it and I say 'I'll think about it, the third day I ask for help with the project, and the fourth day the guy comes back. I do it perfectly."
- talking about filling in for a guy on a 4 day vacation

"The people around here, they do nothing...all day"

Pizza Exotica

There's a Pizza Hut that we've eaten at a few times but not too frequently because its more expensive and we are broke. Pizza Hut here isn't really fast food because they've made it into a sit down menu ordering kind of place, and at the rate they serve you its really not fast at all. 

We thought ordering here would be relatively easy because the menu is full of pictures and you can just point at what you want to order. But NOOOO one incredibly rude waiter managed to prove that wrong on our first day. The first time we came here we pointed to a plate of spaghetti and a pizza that we were going to split. I guess this waiter thought it was too little to eat so he told us the pizza was too small. So I was like fine, we will get one size up. Then he still complained it was too little to eat. So then I said something to English to Hillary and this dude FREAKS OUT at us and is like USE ENGLISH AMERICAN YOU MUST NOT UNDERSTAND CHINESE ????????!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!??!!. He then freaks out as us more in Chinese, and despite the fact that we respond to him in Chinese, he just keeps freaking out. Finally he drags over a different waiter who can speak a little English. She asks us what we want to order, we literally point at the same two things, and she just takes our order and leaves. Was that really so hard?

As if this didn't sufficiently embarrass and annoy us, the second time we came back and were served by a different waiter, but then this same dude comes back and goes "Did you order- OH I REMEMBER YOU AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN'T SPEAK CHINESE". When we told him IN CHINESE that we already ordered he runs and goes to double check because I guess he think's we aren't capable of ordering, and when he realizes that we did order he just laughs at us and says more things about how we can't use Chinese, and warns the other waitress despite the fact we already ordered from her using Chinese. We get really angry just thinking about how incredibly rude he was. I just have to remind myself that he works at Pizza Hut so his life sucks more than ours right now.

The third time we went that waiter was thankfully not there to make our meal awkward for us. We ordered a stuffed crust pizza - mmmmmmmmmm.

Great taste in English decor

mmmmmmmmm stuffed crust

Trying to pay. There are bills and coins for EVERYTHING.

Our blog name

In case you're not Chinese and don't understand the title of our blog,

听不懂  means "Don't understand", and it is probably the most frequent phrase we have said our entire trip. Like I said we cannot understand a word of the local dialect here (and our Chinese isn't that great to begin with), so it summarizes pretty much all our issues we've had staying here.

There are a lot of international engineers from Dearborn working at Ford in China, and when we were introduced to them one of the first things they told us was to tell people "ting bu dong, mei guo" (Don't understand, America) if someone came up to us speaking too much Chinese, which we found pretty funny. At least we aren't the only ones lost here.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Taiwan anymore

Rewind 2 weeks. Hillary and I (Michelle) boarded a flight from Taipei to Chongqing (重庆) China for our 7 week internship at Ford. We just finished our freshman year of college (Berkely and UPenn), and had spent the past month in Taiwan interning at two other start-ups.

Things we had been warned about China:

• Don't walk alone, you will get kidnapped
• Don't speak out loud, you will get kidnapped
• You are a girl, you will get kidnapped
• You will probably get kidnapped
• Guard your passport; people will try to marry you (wtf?) for your US Citizenship
• People can tell your American just by looking at you
• Don't eat street food, you will die.
• Don't drink the water, you will die.
• Check in with your parents every day or they will think you are dead/kidnapped.

Things we had not been warned about before going to China:

• The dialect here is INCOMPREHENSIBLE
• No one will understand the Chinese you speak and will attempt to speak the dialect when you clearly just spoke using Mandarin
• No one can tell your American until you start speaking English
• When you do speak English they think you are stupid
• People here are kind of rude...and pushy
• Ford will make you take a health test at the shoddiest hospital where you might contact AIDS from the questionable needle used to draw your blood
• There are coins and bills for 5 cents and 1 cent
• EVERYTHING HAS CHILI PEPPERS IN THEM

To put in kinder words, we had a bit of "culture shock" when we arrived in China. Our biggest challenge has been finding food to eat (menus are hard to read and everything is really spicy or unclean), and we quickly determined the quality of our days is determined by the quality of the food we could find. So enjoy watching our "amusing" food log and  our attempt at trying to survive and enjoy our time here, among other interesting experiences we've had so far in the past two weeks.


DISCLAIMER: As salty as we sound we are not trying to insult anyone or anyone's culture, we are just two hungry interns trying to navigate our way through China. Our families come from Taiwan and this is our first time in China so we are simply adjusting to a bigger culture shock than we expected. We are not extrapolating our experiences here upon China or Chinese people in general, just recording our amusing predicaments. We promise we're trying our best to enjoy China.