Snake bile and singing "Cottenfields"

Went for a boozy lunch with some of A Wu's work partners/mafia friends. Afterwards, Ailun went to see A Wu's work, while Anzhe and I went for a wander round for a bit. We went on the electric bike down to the river and drove as far out of Pingguo as you would dare with not much battery left and two English blokes causing the back wheel to sink into the road - about 500 yards. But it got us a nice glimpse of what there really is to see when you don't have someone shepherding you all the time. It was ferociously hot, though, and even the locals looked at us with a stronger than usual stare as if to say "does the sun make you whiter?".

Once again fatigue should have made for a nice siesta, but was beaten into submission by the deafening decibels of the music emanating from the mobile phone shops opposite our flat. I think they introduced a new song so we now have five to drive us mad. It is getting really torturous now

However, we were looking forward to the evening meal as we were to have snake! It was a men's affair of course. We bought some fruit with A Wu to take to our host's place. We got there at 5pm and it was the cleanest house I'd ever walked into in Pingguo. The host's job was a tutor to chefs, and his wife was a doctor (hence the cleanliness). The meal was a sight to behold - but we were mostly taken by the ritual of the bile. As I've experienced before, they extract the bile duct from the snake and use a couple of toothpicks to stab it into submission when it finally bursts out the darkest green substance known to man. This inky liquid is then mixed with a very strong alcohol that has been used to pickle various other snakes for the previous few years. Apparently such a meal in a restaurant would have set us back 300 quid each.

In fact the snake meat wasn't that amazing but the ceremony made it memorable - also apparently the snake bile is very good for a man's "manliness".

The hosts' daughter came back during the meal - a slightly demure, pretty creature in her early 20s, having recently finished university. Of course, Ailun fell in love with her and spent the next 2 hours with her on the computer showing her pics from his camera. It ended up with him creating his own QQ account (a Chinese Instant Messaging application that everyone has here) so he would be able to contact her and others when back in the USA.

What a snake's bile duct looks like

What drinking a snake's bile duct mixed with alcohol looks like

Somehow we ended up at a karaoke bar in the evening. Well it was Anzhe's last night in Pingguo so we wanted to do something for him. So we ended up singing "Cottenfields" by the Beach Boys among other assortments from the 60s and 70s that had randomly found their way into the Chinese jukebox.