China

So we arrived in China after over 20 hours sitting on a plane. Mark, of course, slept the entire first flight (13 hours) while Lisa stared, wide awake, at the "TV-less" back of the seat in front of her. It may be cheaper but North West stinks! Even if we could have seen the TV screen you couldn't hear a thing through the headphones anyway - and they wanted $5 for a glass of wine. On a 13 hour flight! We were picked up at the airport by Adam's (our guide) assistant Maggie. We didn't know it then but Maggie becomes our hero very quickly. She muscles through lines, barks at agents and spend most of the time with her phone attached to her ear smoothing the way ahead so that we journey from place to place without a hitch.

Here's Mark, Maggie and Adam



We get a cab to our hotel and then pop out to an Irish bar (?) for a quick drink to see if we can get tired. It's midnight and we are wide awake. Back to the hotel to sleep on our dining room table, sorry I mean bed (it felt like sleeping on the dining room table.) We are able to get internet access which doesn't help much since the Chinese government blocks half off the sites - including Facebook which means Lisa can't answer any of her messages on Facebook.

Mark on our hotel balcony...



In the morning we head off to the bus station to take a local bus on a two hour journey to Shen Zhen to go on our first factory visit. On the bus the driver walks the isles prior to leaving handing out little red plastic bags. We have no idea what these bags are used for so we don't take one. All becomes very clear when we start the journey. The driver believes he is in the Indy 500 and veers all over the highway at 85 miles per hour, blowing his horn every 5 minutes. We figure out soon enough that the horn serves no actual traffic purpose but is used to alert the passengers that they should hold on to something as the driver is about to do something incredibly dangerous. The little red bags? Puke bags. I kid you not. The women in front of us began using hers about 5 minutes in to the trip. The women behind us didn't bother taking one and simply threw up on to the floor under our seats. Lovely.

The little red plastic bags...



We visit two factories on our first day. The first factory takes us to an amazing Canton lunch of huge garlic shrimp, sizzling ribs, sauteed duck, fried goose liver, etc... yum!

Henry the factory manager orders our lunch. Note the chicken feet appetizer in the foreground (needless to say we waited for the entrees)...



Workers hand-painting furniture at Henry's factory...



Back on the bus. Mark's journey is made even more frightening at this point by the fact that his seat isn't quite attached and he spends the ride with the entire seat sliding drastically to the left or right every time the bus makes the slightest turn.

We head to the subway to get back to our hotel and see an old women pulling a crate piled with about 30 puppies and kittens inside. Maggie says people will buy the dogs to eat but she won't eat them as it is unlucky since she was born in the Year of the Dog. Lisa is glad that she was born in the Year of the Dog too!

Maggie and Lisa stop on the way home to get a 70 minute "foot massage" (which actually turns out to be a whole body massage sitting up) for $10 each. Maggie's masseuse chatters away to her in Mandarin the entire time asking Lisa for input on important matters like why the Irish guy she met at the massage parlor hasn't sent her a text back since she texted him 3 days ago - was it because of the time difference?

We go out to dinner at a local dim sum restaurant. Dinner for the 4 of us costs about $20. This ain't no Bahamas!