Long days and weird food

One of my friends here said that the last time he talked to his mom, she admonished him not to waste his time here by drinking all the time. If my mom has similar concerns, my adventures yesterday should put them to rest.

We have some minor problems with our apartment, so in the morning Dan stayed to wait for the repair guys while I went out grocery shopping. I also wanted to buy some hair conditioner. Now, the supermarket we go to is massively overstaffed. There's a department store above the supermarket section, and if you so much as glance at a towel, a woman will race over to unfold it for you, then follow you around for the next five minutes suggesting additional towels and telling you in Mandarin how great they are. Downstairs, they're usually more relaxed. But since I can't read the Chinese characters for "conditioner" it took me too long to find what I wanted, and a clerk swooped in. I pointed at one of the few (expensive) bottles that actually said conditioner in English and used my favorite Chinese word, "this." Then I just stood back and watched her show me multiple bottles, all over 30 RMB, and let her point at various characters on the back that I couldn't even begin to read.

Eventually I grabbed the cheapest bottle with English writing on it and left the aisle. But she chased me down with a bottle of shampoo! I started breaking out all the Chinese I know, which is nothing but: "I have this." (pointing at shampoo)
"I don't have this." (pointing at conditioner)
and wishing I remembered the word for need. Then I started to mime washing my hair, at which point she got really confused and dragged me to the sushi counter to find someone who spoke better English. Luckily, a random customer who spoke English intervened and helped me pick an appropriate conditioner at 1/3 the price. It's even made by an American company, so I'm sure to like it.

In the afternoon, Dan and I had a cooking lesson with a friend who owns a baking school. Her chef friend taught us how to make kung pao chicken, deep fried peppers, and a pickled cucumber salad. In the US I think kung pao chicken is disgusting but this was amazing. It was the platonic ideal form of kung pao chicken. We're swapping Chinese cooking lessons for American cooking lessons, so we taught them how to make hamburgers. That's what they wanted to learn, and they took a lot of photographs.

To celebrate, we went to a dive bar! This is exciting because most bars in China are either outdoors (upside: watching the hookers run from the cops) or nightclubs (upside: drinking a bottle of whiskey mixed with green tea while playing rock-paper-scissors). We found a bar with a Coors Light sign in the window and played liar's dice with our friend Luke. We made friends with/were told various stuff we didn't understand by the Chinese guys sitting behind us, and when we tried to ask them what the name of the bar food they ordered was, we ended up eating a plate of snails. They're spicy but a real pain to eat, because they're tiny (about the size of periwinkles).

The night ended at Luke's friend Dongdong's house, where she served us the very famous bird's nest soup. I felt a little guilty about eating bird's nests, but I figured I might never get the chance again. It was actually delicious - very sweet, and the nest itself was like really thin noodles. Plus, it was awesome when someone leaned over to me with a pocket translator to tell me what I was eating, and the translation came up "edible bird's nest." Definitely the strangest thing I've eaten so far.