Day 21

Today was a slow day as I spent the entire day in meetings at Zhejiang University. It is one of the top 10 Universities in China. I really do not think there universities here are nearly as good as ours are in the states. I have seen several now and especially the animal science and agriculture facilities do not compare to those at SDSU or the equivalent state side University. They are however talking about building a 300 sow facilities with the necessary buildings to finish the pigs out. They are going to use it for research and an example of an environmentally friendly facility. I spent the day listening to many Chinese and trying to pick up tid bits when possible. Jason said that this project is giving him gray hairs because he is teaching several civil engineering students about what needs to be in the barns and how they will function. The food here is once again different from what I ate previously on my trip. It is not the spicy food of Beijing or Xi’an, or the sweet of Shanghai. I was once again reminded of how much the presentation of the dish matters here in China as everything came with some sort of green or red on the dish. However, I was not very impressed with much of it but I did eat some more firsts. I had squid, which was served in a stir-fry with bacon. I had several different roots. I had Bamboo root, and Lotus root. I hated the Bamboo root but the Lotus root was somewhat sweet. It was purple in color and the texture was not half bad. I also had pigeon soup. Most of the soups here are a broth that you drink with some sort of meat or veggies in them. The broth tastes like every other broth. I did enjoy the duck we had for supper though. It had a barbecue flavor to it. An  interesting thing that I did learn is that here in the north west people are more business and individually minded compared to the friendly and helpful demeanor of the South west (Xi’an).