Family visits

Traveling is exhausting and thus we slept a good 14 hours until lunch-time after we arrived at my inlaw's place.

The parents were well stocked on all things delicious.
Here is a dessert mango that tasted as sweet at it looked ugly :) .

In the afternoon we visited Family and enjoyed the sunshine and blue sky:

Ever since the first time I came to Yucheng I was fascinated by the sheer amount of Bicycles and small motor bikes. This changed over the years and electric Rollers replaced their noisier cousins. However this year I gained the impression that there were more cars than ever and little Trikes like the one below are a dying species.

On our way through the city we passed the new apartment complex where Ran's parents bought their new apartment. The whole site each building is seventeen floors tall and was build in the same time it took to construct our apartment (only 4 buildings with 3 floors + basement)

The view from the grand-parents apartment was quite nice, though Spring has not yet fully arrived.
After some afternoon tea we had dinner at one of my favourite places in town; a BBQ restaurant. It was too cold to actually sit outside we had our own private room on he first floor.
There several differences in table culture; getting your cutlery shrink-wrapped in plastic would seem strange It assures the cleanliness and eliminates the need for cleaning dishes in the restaurant as you can simply sent it back.

Dinner

One of Ran's middle-school friends opened a food delivery service called PangMa Private baking. You simply call and they will deliver it, at home or in our case the restaurant itself. In the beginning I remember that she used off-the-shelf packaging from Tao-bao but recently she branded her food stuffs and seems to be doing quite ok.
She made us a pizza, half meatlover half stinking fruit toppings. According to Ran the Durian topping seemed quite tasty but as I am not a big fan of it I did not dare taste it.

And the highlight of the evening the BBQ which comes pre-roasted to the table where a small metal box contains some coal to keep it warm.

The selection ranges from chicken wings, lamp, squid to small tofu cubes. All of it is heavily spiced which gives it a really savory flavor but makes you thirsty at the same time which makes selling beer a lot easier I guess.

Over-ordering is a common phenomenon in China that shows how deeply the host cares about you, that's why at the end you usually pack all the left-overs up so you can enjoy them later without letting them spoil. Hence every restaurant will happily provide plastic bags to pack everything up.

Now its time to head to bed as tomorrow we will take the train to Qingdao and then the plane to Seoul.