Day 16: Food at the Office

So every morning James, Evan and I meet at 8 am in the lobby of our hotel to walk to work. We live about a mile away, and it usually takes us between 15-20 minutes to get there. This is often a pretty quite walk. I get the feeling that James and Evan are not really morning people. Anyways, we get to the office and we head to the breakfast room to get one of the breakfast foods they provide. These are usually pretty gross, so I’m not really sure why we do this to ourselves, but we do. Their favorite pastry to give us is really bizarre. Picture a croissant (or really any kind of flaky-ish pastry) and then add a little pocket down one side filled with a small amount of dried orange something. I think it’s pork, but I usually pick it out. Then add a layer of ham on top of the pastry. Then add 5 or 6 pineapple chunks, covered in some strange herb. Then add drizzled mayonnaise over the top and you’ve got the China Universal Supreme. See why I’m confused we continue to do this to ourselves?
At about 11:30 (ok, let’s be honest, immediately at 11:30) James and Evan announce that we are going to lunch and they book it to the elevator. As you know from previous posts, these two walk fast and I’m pretty sure they walk faster when they’re hungry. So we go to the basement of the building (we have to take two elevators, some kind of architectural oversight) and head to the cafeteria. We pay 15 quai to the little cashier man and then go get in line. By this point, I’m usually 30-50 feet behind James and Evan, and have given up keeping up with them and am taking my time. We then get to choose one item from the “drink closet”, two from the meat section, one vegetable and one rice. This actually turns out to be a lot of food and I’ve had some pretty tasty things at the cafeteria. They usually make some really delicious scrambled egg thing and you can always count on the rice being good. So we eat and then have to rush back upstairs (I kid you not when I say I have never seen these two walk slowly) and we’re usually back in our room at 12:01. I’ve been tracking it, and it is always 12:01. And usually James is unsatisfied with lunch and has to go down to the convenience store and get something American. Literally, this happens at the same time every day. Pretty comical.
So after work today James and I met some of the other Shanghai interns for dinner at a Tepanyaki place. The food was pretty good, way better than at Tepanyaki places in the US, but mostly there was just a lot of drinking going on which of course is not my favorite thing. (Oh and I ate sushi for the first time, I thought it was pretty good, but I think it actually made me a little sick later, but the actual act of eating it wasn’t as revolting as I thought it was going to be.) Then I headed back to our hotel, tried to take the metro which ended up being closed, then had to flag a taxi and communicate with the Chinese-speaking driver. But I got home eventually and managed to survive the evening.