Saturday July 23, 2005 10:30 pm

Just got back from dinner. It was me, Scott from Madison and 3 of our Chinese Co-Workers - Carol, Yuan and Ian. They took us to a restaurant that I went to my first visit here. And interesting mix of food.

We had some fish and duck to start. They they just started bringing out all kinds of things. Different things that I hadn't had here before - there was a corn dish that was very interesting It looked like a corn pizza - kernels of corn held together by something (I never figured that part out) but it had a bit of a sweet taste to it and was slightly crispy. It was pretty good.

We also had turtle - I tried a little piece and it was ok - but it seemed like there was a lot of shell in the dish so it was hard to tell what to eat and what not to. Otherwise there was some soup with whitefish in it that was pretty good - a little spicy with lots of dried red peppers on top. A sweet squash or potato soup - they couldn't think of the word for it - but it had the consistency of a cream of wheat. There wasn't anything that really stood out as being very good - but nothing that was too strange to eat either.

Tomorrow they have arranged for Scott and I to go on a bus tour around Wuxi. It is a long trip - something like 9 hours and it is free but you just have to pay different entrance fees to the places you stop at. I am excited to go - will take the good camera with me and hope to get some good pictures out of it. I know we will go to Tai Hu Lake and to some gardens. There is also a stop at a place that they described where they shoot a lot of Chinese movies. So - it will be interesting. It will also be interesting since the tour is in chinese and once you get past Hello/How are you and Thank you I am lost.

After dinner they took us to a CD/DVD store. There is a song that Carol keeps singing at work that is very pretty and I wanted to pick it up. They have a lot of CD's & DVD's of American movies that are pirated and really cheap. They were selling Mr & Mrs Smith (which just came out in the theater a couple weeks ago) for about $2. pretty amazing. Scott picked up a 6 CD set of the Alias TV show for his daughter for $5. He figured he would try it out and see if it plays and if it does consider getting some more things.

Well, it sounds like we will have a long day ahead of us tomorrow so I am going to get some sleep.

looking forward to posting lots of pics when I get back tomorrow night.

Tina