Starty-Upy

Work talk: me and my team (a grand number of 2 right now) are moving down to our own floor in anticipation of a big influx of people I'm currently recruiting for. I went down there today to check out the progress and it was so exciting. I'm really in my element here, working with a blank canvas, and it's thrilling to be able make really big decisions like hiring people or devising a marketing strategy and really small decisions too like where the coffee machine should go (as far away from me as possible). I'm in the best of both-worlds, a new company that has that start-up feeling to it, but with security that comes from being financed by one of the biggest companies in China.

I was in Guangzhou Monday/Tuesday. Went to a seafood restaurant on Monday night with some Chinese colleagues, and it was quite an experience. All the seafood, still alive of course, was over to the side of the restaurant and you walked around with waiter in-tow pointing at buckets, telling them how you'd like it cooked. It seems as if the Chinese will eat bloody anything. There were things there that even turned my Hong-Kong colleagues' stomachs - water beetles, bee lava, a weird shell-fish colloquially called by the Chinese something-penis because it looks like a giant dick protuding from a shell and, most interestingly of all, crocodile. Crocodile tastes fine, a meaty fish, but it's a little bland. It was deliberately presented, I'm sure, to terrify the gweilos in the party by placing the head, mouth wide open, on a plate.