A Late Dinner

Last night was an interesting night. What made the night interesting was our late night stop for food. We would have "dinner" or "breakfast", which ever one you prefer, at 1:30 am at a local Chinese restaurant. This adventure would be a continuation of my localization process.

Our trip to dinner began with breaking one of the unwritten rules a foreigner should never do. We would take a "illegal" taxi to our dinner destination. This taxi does not have a meter and the fair should usually be negotiated before you get into the taxi. When I visited our assembly plant in Beijing, I have had to take many of these "illegal" taxis. The town where the facility is located is very small and it costs 10 RMB ($1.46 US) to get to any destination in town. Our local friends negotiated and payed or taxi fair.

We arrived at a local hot pot restaurant 新招鲜. Hot pot is kind of like create your own meal. You choose from many things on the menu and dump them in the pot wait until they are cooked and eat up. The menu was completely in Chinese and our friends ordered all the food we would eat for our late dinner.

We had chicken. When people in the states think about chicken we usually think about the chicken wings, chicken breasts, thighs and legs. Well, at this restaurant, the chicken was chopped up and included the feet, the head, the liver, and the heart. Well, it included the whole chicken. Not a single piece of this animal would go to waste. We also had three different types of green vegetables, potatoes, lotus root, and probably pork intestines. The most interesting part of this dinner was.......

Yes, it is the brain. I have no idea of what animal this brain comes from, but it definitely was too big to be a chicken. Well, all this food went into the pot and cooked to perfection to be eaten. Everything would become a nice mixture of flavor. Many of you are probably asking yourselves if I was able to eat the brain. I have to say everything was very tasty except for one green vegetable which tasted very bad. I have to say the little bit of brain I did eat was much better than the green vegetable.

Tasting the brain was a must do activity. First of all, one never knows if they would actually like the food unless they taste it. Secondly, as part of my localization process, I have to not only experience everyday activities, but also try more local food.

The brain looks much better cooked, but probably too hard for some to eat. As far as my thoughts on localization and getting into the cultural experience, I had to try it.

Many companies talk about localization, but fall way short in their aggressiveness to localize. Their concept of localization is using international companies to supply parts to them which they can buy locally in China or dealing with international companies to buy their products. This concept is like eating KFC in China and saying you have eaten local food. The real cost savings and money to made will come from buying parts from Chinese suppliers or selling parts to Chinese companies. It is extremely risky, but if you don't try it you will never know the true concept of localization.