My Trip to WUHAN!!!: Steamboat Dinner & another day in town

Nothing much today. Just liked to highlight that we had a hot pot lunch. It was quite interesting as I rarely eat hot pot meals. Basically, during a hot pot meal, there is a cast iron pot full of a certain soup of your choice and you can cook your ingredients like meat or vegetables in the pot as there is an electric heater below the pot which boils the soup to a temperature that is able to cook the meat and the vegetables. We ordered a few dishes of various prices such as meat, dumpling, potatoes, mushrooms, rice cakes, bak choy and noodles. The interesting bit was when the server served us our disposable utensils. At first glance, I was very perplexed as to what she gave us, thinking it was my own personal steamboat contraption but then I realized that we couldn’t possibly cook our food in a plastic container and then unwrapped it to find out that it was actually our utensils. Then our cast iron pot came with the soup and we then started so-called cooking our food. Over lunch, we discussed that the people in the steamboat business are actually very relaxed as they don’t have to cook anything and at most cooking that they need to do is the stock or soup and the preparing of the ingredients. It was quite a hearty lunch but we had to rush back for class and realized that we should actually come for steamboat when we have no classes to rush to. Later in the evening after forensic science lecture, we headed to town a second time with Mr. Lee since he just came to Wuhan and we decided to show him around. Since most of us had only been into town once, we were not sure as to where to stop the bus. According to Nicholas, as soon as we saw the Lamborghini sales market, we should get down. So we all got off the bus as we saw the Lamborghini sign but apparently it was a few stops too early. Nooooo. We ended up walking at least 500 meters before we reached the shopping mall square. That’s not it’s actual name but I like to call it that cause it is a square and it has many shopping mall around it. Our first stop was to a book store and I swear I’ve never seen a bigger bookstore in my life. It was HUGE!!! We tried looking for English storybooks and when we couldn’t find them since every book in there was in Chinese, we asked one of the helpers about where the English books were situated and they pointed us to a direction and when we followed her directions we found out that the only kind of English books this country has are self-teach English language book and children’s fairytales in English like Cinderella and Snow White. So we left. We spilt up some of us when to look around for authentic Chinese souvenirs while the rest of them went to look for international brands such as H&M. On the way I bought Dairy Queen, the outlet famous for its concoctions that won’t fall out of the cups even when you turn them upside down. It has been a really long time since I last had Dairy Queen and the price here is much cheaper than what we have to pay back home in Singapore. It’s about S$ 2-3 cheaper here. On the second floor while walking around, I realized that there was a building next to the one we were in and if you saw it, you would never think you’re in China. If I’m not mistaken, one of my peers told me that it was called Spain Street. The entire street is designed to make it look and feel like you’re in Spain. Later, we headed over to the Carrefour, the supermarket, and did a little grocery shopping. This one product in particular, PeeJoy, it is a snack with a certain filling within a hollow biscuit. They have bizarre flavours like Matcha, tiramisu, cheesecake and even wine flavoured!!! The snacks here have really interesting flavour like for example, Lays potato chips they have flavours like cucumber, braised pork and Mexican tacos. We never see such weird flavours back at home. To satisfy our craving for meat, we had dinner at McDonald’s. I had a McChicken burger set meal. I realized that the burgers here are much smaller in size and the patties are much thinner. On our way home, something really funny happened. So when the bus stopped at our stop, we were all getting off the bus but me, Nicholas and Hui Qi couldn’t get off as we had to wait for Nazhifah to get out of her seat as it was really difficult for her to come out and note that everyone including Mr. Lee has got off the bus except the four of us. Now the bus driver actually thought that no one else was getting off the bus so he closed the door and we so calmly (Okay maybe not that calm) asked him to open the door for us. The funny thing was that Mr. Lee, in a fit of panic just started waving his arms randomly at the bus door at the back and the funny thing is that as much as he waves, the driver can’t possibly see him but the bus driver eventually opened the door cause those of us who were still inside told him we wanted to get off. It was a new experience for us.

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