Shenzhen

This week my company sent me to Shenzhen. I would equate Shenzhen to the Wild West. It was designated as a Special Economic Zone by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. It is right next to Hong Kong so it is kind of tropical. There are green hills and red flowers everywhere. Somehow though, with 10 million in the city and maybe another 7 million in surrounding areas, it has become a dirty concrete jungle. With companies from all over the world setting up shop here it has become a full on gold rush. Apparently it is loaded with criminals. The first thing people told me was to keep a tight grip on my wallet as pickpockets are rampant. People from the country come to Shenzhen with high hopes only to be disappointed and thus turn to crime. Some guy told me that they just increased the penalty for chopping off people's arms to get at their purses or bags. Luckily I was in good company and traveling in places that were fairly tame.

In Shenzhen, I trained people as to the best way to replace me. After I got done training my replacements, the sales guys took me to dinner. We went to a cool little place nearby the office. They told that the big reader board in front of the restaurant says "No Japanese". Wow. It was some kind of cave/tropical/pirate them. Our servers all had penned on mustaches. They were cool though as we clearly were not Japanese. The food was great and loaded with peppers.

People seem to be uniformly amazed that I like spicy food and that I can use chopsticks. I still have servers dropping off forks for me. At first I found it insulting, but now I think it is nice of them to be thoughtful like that. I never use the forks though.

After dinner at the Pirate Cave, we went to a bar where we met some other sales people. They told me it was time for a drinking game. I have not played drinking games since I was in college and I asked them if they were serious. They were. It is a dice game. It is like liars poker but I won’t go into details as to how to play other than to say it is like most drinking games in that you end up drinking. After getting over my shock that full grown adults wanted to play a drinking game I looked around and realized that almost everyone in the bar was shaking these dice. Luckily the beer is low alcohol and you just have to take a sip or two if you lose. It was actually kind of slow and a good way to socialize with new people.

The bar food was popcorn and duck tongues. The girl sitting next to me kept telling me what we were eating in Chinese and pointing at her tongue. I thought she was either picking up on me or telling me pronunciation sucked. It turns out she was telling me I was eating the tongue of a duck. It was actually really good bar food. It was kind of spicy but not too filling.

After playing dice for a while, we took a cab to the Chinese equivalent of a Taco Bell. We sat outdoors as the weather in Shenzhen is quite nice in January. After some tea and noodles, I needed to use the restroom. Through a chain of translation, they told me I should use the trash pile in the alley. The alley was filled with rats. A rat scurried out of the TV I was relieving myself on but returned to his home after I was done. Shenzhen is the Wild West.