Jet and I arrived in Chengdu at lunchtime and took a cab to the local engineer’s office.  We had to wait for the meeting to start because we’d arrived just as the staff were having their after-lunch nap on fold-out mattresses by their desks.  When they woke up, they came to meet us in the board room – bringing their ash-trays with them, to smoke throughout the meeting. 

Jet ran the meeting in Mandarin and translated when I needed to know something.  But it was remarkable how much I could follow just from watching them all pointing at drawings and frowning at each other.

Then we had some meetings with our clients, in English, and went out for dinner with them.  There were 8 of us and everyone except me was wearing glasses – don’t you think that’s strange?  It seems everyone here wears glasses.  The boss ordered all the food without asking anyone what they wanted, then proceeded to serve me – without asking me what I wanted.  He did ask me what dessert I would like and recommended the turtle shell jelly, for its health-giving detoxing properties. It was a dense black bitter jelly, served with a jug of syrup, a lettuce leaf and two bright orange prawn-cracker-type biscuits.  Thankfully, drenched in syrup it was edible. We washed dessert down with chrysanthemum and goji berry tea – good for the eyes, apparently.  Not that good, evidently. 

At the end of dinner the guy next to me said “Next time we’ll have Sichuan spicy hot pot, then you’ll have diarrhea, ha ha ha”.  Maybe not.