Short Stories
Trip Start
May 15, 2008
1
10
14
Trip End
Aug 15, 2008
Dongguan,
Guangdong,
China
Thursday, June 12, 2008
* For instance, the fact that there is a shortage of diesel fuel over here, and it is very common to see a couple hundred yards of truck backed up at the gas station, because the station is out of gas.
Line of trucks at the gas station
* It had been a while since we got a massage, so we went to get a full body massage after dinner last night. The full body massage consists of a room with three twin sized beds and you lay down on your back and the front of you gets massaged for an hour. This is an intense massage where you almost want to tell them that it hurts, but then you think that they are professionals and they know what they are doing. After that first hour, they ask you to roll onto your stomach and they massage your entire back side. Some may say that it was a little too much pressure, but we thought it was pretty amazing. The cost for this event, per person, was $15 and that included two beers.
Liz getting worked over by a 100 pounder
We were told to just go limp
* It is pretty hot and humid here and we have been talking about wanting to go swimming. Directly across the street from our hotel is an enormous recreation complex. They have three pools, one is an olympic sized lap pool, another is a more shallow family type pool and the other one is the largest swimming pool I have ever seen, even at a tropical resort. I would say it is about 100 yds by 75 yds. It only costs $1.50 to swim all day and we usually go over after I am done with work to swim laps. You can even drink beer there. They also have a driving range, massage and badmitton at this place. Mike and I played badmitton and her dominated me. It is a much harder sport than I was expecting and I need to do a lot more training.
The pool
To help with our swimming, we got a pair of swim goggles. They really let us know just how dirty the pool was
Our new swimming goggles
Professional swimmer
* Almost every day we will see some large amount of food, livestock, styrofoam, propane bottles, water bottles, people, etc... strapped to the back of a motorcycle, three wheel bike/truck or bicycle. Here are some pictures of this type of stuff.
A little top heavy
A normal way to transport anything
Another common transportation method
Mike has seen a bike have so much styrofoam strapped to the top of it that it could not fit under a bridge underpass.
* One night we ate dinner by our hotel and we needed to go grocery shopping afterwards. On our way we had to stop at a neighboring hotel to use the bathroom and we saw these two girls singing at the bar of the hotel. They were wearing some very short skirts and singing English songs. Mike told us they were from the Phillipines and they spoke no Chines. We decided to enjoy their entertainment and had a Guiness and a Corona.
Philipino singers in SHORT skirts
A quick stop at the Grand Howard
* Recently the weather has been beautiful. We decided to have a BBQ one night. So Mike got some chicken legs, wings, potatoes, a whole fish and shrimp and did them all on the grill. It was a charcoal grill and the meal took about 3 hours to prepare, but it was some of the best barbeque I've ever had.
Cooking out on Mikes Roof
View from Mikes rooftop balcony
* On Friday August 13th we woke up to a pretty large rain storm. This is pretty common here and we didn't think anything of it. We never know what the weather is going to be like, because we can't watch the weather on the news and weather.com doesn't know that Qing Xi, China exists. The rain did not stop until about 4 AM on Saturday morning. There was a lot of flooding and it was not possible for us to leave the town of Qing Xi. All of the roads were flooded. We were driving around on Saturday and we saw some areas that were severly damaged. Some people's crops were completely washed away. Our friend Steve lives in a neighboring town and he wasn't able to get back to his wife and 15 month old baby because of the flooded roads. Their apartment building was surrounded by 8 feet of water. Another problem that we quickly realized was that if you can't get out, no one can get in, and that includes fuel trucks. Mikes car was almost empty and we had to go to 3 different stations to find a place that didn't have a huge line or that wasn't out of gas. Everything has gone back to normal now, but Yahoo News reported the 55 people died from the flooding and 1 million were pushed out of there homes.
Flooding in front of our hotel
Unpassable road
* This Tuesday we went out to dinner with Tommy (Jimmy's brother) to a place that Mike says a lot of high up people in the community go to for dinner. We asked the waitress how many foreigners come into the restaurant and she said we were the first three she's ever seen. We drank this snake liquor that was pretty horrible at first.
Snake liquor
The bottle of snake liquor
After dinner we went to get a massage. I asked that we go to the place that is in our hotel and it wound up being a beautiful place. They had a menu that has hamburgers and all kinds of other things on it. They also claim they have an exercise room, but you have to use their bathing facilities before you use it.
Massage at our hotel
Nicest place we have been to for massage
After the massage we went to karaoke to meet up with some of Mike's friends. We played this game called "Drink not Drink" where one person covers their face with a serving dish and someone else points to a pair of people and says drink not drink. It is up to the person who has their face covered to say whether that pair drinks or not.
A game of drink not drink at karaoke
Tommy singing
After we were done at KTV we headed back to our hotel but as we were approaching the hotel it looked awfully dark. The power was out in the entire hotel. Our room is on the tenth floor and we didn't want to deal with all of those stairs to just go to a hot hotel room, so we called Mike and he sent Xiao Li to get us and we slept at his house.
