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5/31/2005: Sterilized muffin, anyone?

In the morning we took bus together with students and faculty from the University of Western Ontario Canada to go and visit Dalian Commodity Exchange in Xinhai Square. This was one of the three such exchanges in China with the other two being in Shanghai and Zhenzhou. They traded different goods. In Dalian, Soybeans and Soymilk were traded. The trade was done electronically so we did not see the frenzy of CBOT or NYME. There were 198 traders in the room and the war room was really quiet but really warm. The person who received us was a guy who had an MBA from UNC-Charlotte. He returned to China in 1998 and worked in Beijing before moving to Dalian. He did a very good job explaining what they did and where they planed to be in the future. During the Q&A session, our students, especially Tyler, seemed more engaged asking questions than their Canadian counterparts. I asked why they kept the trading room so warm and his reply was related to the popularity of internet trading. Does internet trading makes a trading room warm, I wondered loudly?

During the class break I asked Rose whether she retrieved her bag. She said she found it in a different room from what we searched next morning.

Hillary, Dick’s daughter, arrived from Taipei. She graduated from Amherst and decided to take one year off to find herself. She teaches English to businessmen in Czech Republic. Today was her birthday. Since both Dick and Karin were in China, so they flew her to Dalian to celebrate the occasion. She flew to Taipei to meet her friend Joanne before coming to Dalian and Joanne would join her tomorrow. She is a very attractive girl with quite impressive international travel and working experience.

Dick treated all of us at a pancake restaurant strongly recommended by Dr. Yao Hong. They also invited Vivian to come along. I was really thankful that she agreed to go because she could tell the cab drivers (we needed 4 cars) where to go and what to order in the restaurant. After the meal, we decided to go to a local bar to have some drinks. Dick, Karin and Vivian left rather early because Vivian had to return to her dorm by 11:00pm. Hillary, Joanne and I left just before things were turning wild.

Before heading to the restaurant, Matt pulled me aside and asked me with mild panicking in his voice whether if it was OK to eat something cooked in a dishwasher. I had a hard time understanding what he was saying. We had no dishwashers in our rooms. Finally I kind of got the picture as to what happened. He put a slice of pizza in a machine he thought was a microwave and a few moments later a strange odor came out from it. He went ahead and ate the pizza nevertheless. Now he wondered if he could live. I still did not know which machine he was speaking of. We went to his room and he pointed it out to me. It was a machine above washing sink, which I had thought was a toast oven. I told Dick how to operate it on the first day when we arrived. Now after reading the instructions carefully I found out how wrong I was. It was a sterilizer. So I ensured Matt that he would survive because the food he had was sterilized no matter how bad it might have tasted. When we shared the stories at the pancake dinner table, Dick said that had been cooking English muffins in it. Sterilized muffin, anyone?

posted by Unknown @ 6:09 PM