Crunch, ouch, what did I just bite?

I had my first day at work, which means I had my first day at the cafeteria. One thing I noticed before eating my food, is that nearly all of the employees where I am temporarily stationed are pretty young. Overwhelmingly under 30 years old. With a new industry, there aren't older experienced employees in the population.

Now, the food at the cafeteria - I had what looked like bourbon chicken - a favorite of mine. The flavor wasn't quite the same and the texture; well how do you describe the texture when every bite is full of chicken bone? Yes you read that correctly - the smaller than a chicken nugget sized chunks were full of bone. I started looking around and everyone is spitting out small pieces of bone onto their trays.

So I was looking forward to dinner this evening.

Oh, did I mention that I forgot my belt? I wore some track-suit pants on the plane to be comfortable, and it totally passed my mind that I needed to pack a belt. I wear a belt something like 98% of the time. I feel naked without one on. After work the manager of the department I'm working in (a former boss of mine) gave me a ride home - well actually his driver did. Then we went for a short walk where I checked out the belts at a local department store $70 and up (no thanks) and then ended up buying a Calvin Klein knockoff from a street vendor for about 6$ (40 RMB)! It's a pretty good belt for 6$.

After going back to the hotel and skype-ing Rachel and the kids (I'm using Skype on my laptop to make nearly free calls to home) I went out in search of some dinner.

Here's some of the scenery nearby the hotel at night (it gets nearly full-dark at about 5:45 pm here).

My hotel is the Intercontinental with the lit-up triangle thing at the top of the tower. I'm on the 17th floor.

Here's what my view looks like in the morning.

For restaurants, in the area there are tons of places that look like they are serving what I had for lunch; as well as a 24 hour McDonald's, a Pizza Hut and a PapaJohn's. I didn't want to repeat lunch, and I didn't want to resort to McDonald's on my first full evening, so I ended up finding a bakery and getting a glorified 'pig in a blanket' for dinner. I supplemented it with some genuine Sino-Chinese snack food. See below:

Notice the flavor of the Potato Chips: Mexican Tomato Chicken Flavor. It sounds worse than it tastes. The Nestea 'Ice Rush' tastes like it has some menthol flavoring in it - would be good on a hot day, and the Oreos are peanut butter and chocolate filling.

Here's where I bought that stuff - a typical small market. I can't even begin to describe some of what was being sold pre-packaged in there, but let's just say that if you've never seen chicken bones vacuum packed as snack food, I know a place or two where you can see and buy those here in Shanghai.

I can hardly keep my eyes open, so I'm not going to. ZZZZZzzzzzzz.