Day 26 The 4.5-Hour Lunch Break

This morning I woke up with a wicked sore throat and a pounding headache. This is excellent because being sick in China is an experience I couldn’t stand to miss out on. Incidentally, Chinese grocery stores (even the mega-Western “City Shop”) do not sell medicine like stores in the U.S. do, which is lame but unsurprising. I should have seen this coming, though--my diet here has basically a negative amount of vitamins, so my immune system is particularly vulnerable, and then I went and spent 18 hours on Saturday at a hot, humid place with 500,000 other people: Basically, a germ fest.

So I managed to pull myself out of bed and get myself to work this morning where Evan, James and I were reminded that we had a lunch date with a one Mr. Williams, a board member of China Universal and a Harvard alum. This majorly clashed with my plans of holding still all day, not saying a word more than I had to, and making Evan and James periodically replenish my tissues. But alas, we don’t get to eat lunch at the Shangri La Hotel restaurant every day, so I pulled it together and headed out to meet Mr. Williams. The food at the restaurant was really very good, and I was able to satisfy my recent craving for Chicken Tikka Masala (it was a buffet with various ethnic cuisine) and then try to conceal my pain as an invisible boa constrictor preyed on my head. We ended up staying at the restaurant for over three hours talking with Mr. Williams about the Chinese government, economy, culture, and other various topics. Overall the discussion was interesting, and it was fascinating to hear the experiences of a man who has lived in China over the past thirty years, a period during which so much has changed. Finally, after what seemed like ages, we headed back to our office where Mr. Williams wanted to see what we’ve done on our projects so far this summer and look at the kind of research we’ve been able to do. He ended up staying for another hour (which might have been a little over-generous of him). Anyway, he finally left and I managed to make it home (though I might add that this was not a good day for Evan and James to bust out the speed walking).