Chengdu Trip #5: Tuesday

Today was more of the same. All the TV channels and radio stations are talking about the earthquake. We found out that our accountant's husband went to the mountains last Monday and was "missing" for two days. It turned out he was okay but for a few days, she thought he was dead. Crazy! She said he also helped several people escape the disaster area. One person kept fainting and he fed them Coca-Cola to keep them going; must be all the sugar and caffeine. For lunch, we went to a local restaurant and ate on the sidewalk. Again, due to the fear of earthquakes/aftershocks, all the restaurants put their tables outside under tents; no one wants to even have lunch inside.


Sign outside restaurant where we had lunch. Their specialty is something that looks like an eel-like fish they cook in a clay pot. Leon and I passed so we got a large bowl with catfish fillets and mustard greens. Like everything here, it was salty and greasy. They gave us a plate of peanuts as an appetizer; you can actually see the MSG crystals on the plate. Yum!

In the afternoon, we went to the high-tech development zone office to talk about changes to our factory building plan. Initially we thought we only needed 1000kVa of electrical power to run our equipment but after refining our forecast with our primary vendor, it looks like we need to start Phase II of construction and another 1000kVa of power. It's been a struggle with the local government in arranging the necessary electrical power and now, we need to build another small building to house our step-down transformers. Their office was really nice but we noticed they also had cracks inside their building from the earthquake.


Nice office building

We made another stop at the new factory in the afternoon. This time, there was a stray dog on a homemade rope/leash. It didn't bark at us at all so it's probably not good as a guard dog.


Stray dog... not dead, just resting


Homemade (?) ladder. There's no way that thing would support me.

I had hurt my ankle before the trip, er... playing ping pong. After all the walking today and walking to/from dinner, my ankle was swollen even more. Once again, I got back to the apartment and crashed again, earthquake or not.