return from the orient
Back from our tour of the Far East, courtesy of Epson. We started in Hong Kong, staying at the InterContinental Hotel, spent a day on the Chinese mainland in Shenzhen, then transferred to the Buena Vista in Matsumoto in Japan and ended up in the Park Hyatt in Tokyo.
It was a pretty long outing by press trip standards, a full week — and not just the five days, but seven including about three days travelling. Fortunately everyone on the trip was pretty cool, even those funny foreigners with their crazy accents and weird health systems. The travel was fine, even with all the time spent on coaches. Fortunately I slept through most of that. As for the flying, business class is the only way to travel. You can’t make me go back to cattle class; I won’t I tell you. Even if I have to wear a suit every time I fly.
The food was excellent, of course, although not as Far Eastern as we expected. We ate in an Italian restaurant in Hong Kong and a French restaurant in China and an English pub in Japan (although the latter was hungover laziness). Each of these was more like an attempt at Italian, French and British cuisine by someone who’d never been to Europe, but I’m not complaining: it was all good, and I could have eaten more authenetic food.
Unfortunately the two most indigenous meals coincided with my skipping out on the group to explore Tokyo, although the last meal, a Teppanyaki extravaganza, was bloody brilliant. The griddle was in the middle of the table, where our chef cooked up a storm. He opened by individually cooking each piece of onion. Meticulous.
Anyway, pictures on Flickr, more as I remember it.
UPDATE: Apparently, it was garlic.