rss feedA blog request to write about a company I don’t know, plus a wok and bowls
Years ago, a friend and I were traveling through China and stopped in Xining in the highlands of Qinghai province.
My friend had just taken a long, bumpy ride in a vintage-era Jiefang truck from the mountainous areas of neighboring Sichuan province. It was a brutally-cold winter.
The driver had loaded the truck’s open cargo area with dead yaks – their skins were headed to market. I never asked whether this was permissible. The goal, especially for my friend, was to stay warm.
And, as my friend recalled, a ride in a vehicle out of the mountains was so coveted that people sat on top of the dead yaks for a ride to Xining.
After we met up, my friend and I went to a market when a Tibetan trader looked at my REI Novara waterproof jacket – it was the type that bicyclists wore, red and similar to this one - felt the material and realized its strength.
Through a translator, he asked whether I wanted to swap – my waterproof REI jacket for his long, fur-lined coat.
I respectfully declined. As I recall, his jacket had yak blood on it – and I probably didn’t want to tackle that at that moment. But at least, he suggested a trade of one jacket for another.
That wasn’t really the case when I received an email on Tuesday from a U.S.-based food supply company to write a blog post about its Web site and its section devoted to supplies for an Asian restaurant.
