Nǐ Hǎo Part 2

Update from China.

Here is a picture of the Canton Fair (the second picture Linley). This is one building and there is 16 of these bad boys. It is so big that there is nothing in the world that I have ever seen that I can compare it to. It blows the new Cowboys stadium out of the water in impressiveness. You gotta love that word. And if you don't believe that it is a word you can see the definitions at the following link: http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=impressiveness. So the food still is a kick in the face. We only have two places that we eat at. 1. Pizza Hut and 2. KFC. McDonalds tastes like poop in a hamburger bun and the ketchup may as well be burnt tomato paste. If you go to Pizza Hut there is only two things that you can order, a cheese pizza and one of the 15 spaghetti meals. If you go to KFC you can order the Zinger Chicken Burger and the Popcorn Chicken and Fries (and the ketchup here must come straight from the ole' Midwest because it tastes like a million bucks). Other than those four things we still only eat peanuts and Oats 'N Honey bars. We are down to about 60 Oats 'N Honey bars and 1.25 containters of peanuts left. My 120x180mm American Flag is still hanging just as proudly as ever over my bed (that is about 4x6 inches for those of you that haven't converted to the metric system yet, I'm falling in love with kilometers, meters, liters, etc.)

Things are going well. We still have been waking up between 5:30-6:30 a.m. The first phase of the fair is over and so now we are touring factories and looking at the different products to see who can produce the quantities we need and what things make sense for us to try and import. Yesterday we spent a day with three native Chinese people. It was crazy. We woke up at 5:37 a.m. and got picked up by Aki and Jillian and Anthony. Aki speaks decent english and so she translated for everyone all day. It was so crazy to just be hanging out with three Chinese people that we didn't know at all. They picked us up and drove us to a factory that is about 3 hours from where we are staying (they said 1.5 hours). It was a very long but pleasant day hanging out with these guys. They are so nice and helpful. I couldn't stop asking questions about the Chinese culture and what their lives were like. From their children's school schedules, to what their feelings are on their government, to their favorite foods, to what they like to do for fun, etc. You name it and we talked about it. It is very fascinating to me to see a culture that is so different from ours. Chile was one thing but there was still a lot of similarities to America e.g. they use essentially the same alphabet as we do. You'll see signs in Chile and although you may not know what things say at first you at least can have an idea of what is going on. Not so in China you see this EVERYWHERE....专门为受过大学教育,懂英文单身人士的高质量婚恋交友网站 (note to the reader: I don't have a clue what this says I just found it by googling chinese symbols so if you speak Chinese and this tells you that I hate Chinese people or that I like to hug little boys or something then know that I didn't know). Also most people in Chile are Catholic (or profess to be Catholic) and here most people don't really know anything about God. Anthony had a bronze cow on the dash of his car and I asked him about it and he told us that this was the thing that brought him good luck/fortune. Just a completely different upbringing and thought process. I like hefers don't get me wrong but if you think for 2 seconds that ole' Bessy will bring me good fortune you have been drinking to much Jack Daniels. It was very interesting to talk to them about their culture. We also listened to Nora Jones. He had 14 songs on this CD but 13 of them were so so so so lame that I kept asking every second or third song if we could listen to Nora Jones again. It was a great day and we lived and laughed and loved with these three new friends. Here are a couple pictures of these people and their factory that we toured. They were again so nice and cool. It was one of those days when you realize that although there is a lot of trash in the world there are still a lot of good good people around the world.

Funny story. So Paul has to go number two this morning (with the dietary fiber in these peanuts and Oats 'N Honey bars we could put Activia out of business, if you ever get plugged up go down and pick up some Oats 'N Honey bars and you are good to go) and he finishes up and clogs our toilet. Granted you could clog this toilet by putting a half a gun wrapper in the toilet. It has the weakest flush in the world (kind of like John and Sheree's old house in Houston). So of course they don't have a plunger in our room so Paul has to call the front desk and tell them that we need a plunger. They send the front desk girl Xi up to take a look at what the problem is because they can't understand what he is trying to tell them. She comes up and takes a look in our bathroom. Paul goes in the bathroom with her to show her the problem. I'm just relaxing in the room watching CNN Global and he goes in the bathroom and opens the nasty poop-filled clogged toilet and points at the toilet and then points out in at me like I clogged the toilet. I'm laughing cause I think it is so embarassing that he has to show this girl his poop and little do I know that the whole time she thought it was me. Paul sure pulled the wool over my eyes. Xi looks at me a little different everytime I see her now and I wish there was a page in our "Chinese for Dummies" book that says "Uncle Paul is the one with the nasty poop that clogged our toilet not me."

Love you all. And it wouldn't kill anyone to post a comment or two on my posts. Just cause we don't have children doesn't mean that we don't have feelings. Peace.