So it all starts with Vegas... Ahhh Vegas. The TRUE city of Sin. My
KindaTown. Driving over that last Hill, seeing the city all lit up at night... It's positively unreal. I did all the sights; The Volcano at the Mirage, the water Opera at the Bellagio, the Quest for Atlantis Show at Ceasers, The Pirate Battle at Treasure Island. Lots O' Fun.
    There is a store there that is nothing but M&M stuff. 4 floors of
M&Ms. They have M&Ms in every color under the rainbow. They also have a 3d Movie and tour (I lost my "M" in Las Vegas, very funny, worth the 3$)
    Other Highlights... "The Star Trek Experience"... Hands down, The
coolest. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. A really neat Museum, followed by an Unbelievable Motion Simulator-type ride. Fantastic.
    The Hard Rock Cafe! The Hard Rock Casino! Fun Fun!
    My Hotel had an Excellent view of Paris... The Eiffel Tower, Ahhh.
Oh Yeah... And I left town up a few hundred Ducks... even after toys
and expenses.
    Overall, a VERY good time. Anybody going who wants some company, I'm There. I am SO there.

    On the way Home, I saw the worlds tallest thermometer, at the gateway of Death Valley. It was neat.

    Los Angeles followed for a week, but that wasn't much fun at all. I
got to Work for Disney for 3 days, but didn't get to go to Disneyland... and it's all the fault of my Boss. No Joke.

    Saturday... LONG flight to Shanghai. Got there Sunday Afternoon at 3pm.
    Check in to the Crown Plaza Shanghai... very swanky, only $60usd a
night... soon to be my sanctuary.

    Odd note, they provide 2 big bottles of water a day, free. They come with a note that reads "The Tap Water is Not Suitable for Drinking" Yow. I Am NOT in Kansas Anymore. You Can drink the Water In Kansas.

    Sunday Night, BAD food. Nothing too Strange, but not good either.
    Monday spent the day Realizing this trip would be HELL. Ate lunch... ugh.
    We went to the Cholera Cafe, ordered a big plate of Dysentery delight with E-Coli sauce. I was introduced to Shrimp, complete with Legs, full Shell, Face, etc.  Y'know that little vein of Crap shrimp have when they haven't been cleaned properly? Mmmmm. How do you eat such a thing? Hold it by it's face with chopsticks, place whole shrimp in mouth, Remove face with front teeth, spit. Chew off legs, Spit. Remove shell and tail, Spit. Enjoy that tiny morsel of meat. You can't really use your fingers, because you have no Napkins, and no soap to wash your hands before meals...

Hard Rock Shanghai!
Late Monday, right through Tuesday ... VIOLENTLY ILL. Remember that Ice in your drink? Remember the Note from the Hotel?
2 + 2 = BLURGHMPH! You get a Day Off! Tijuana Holiday!

    Wednesday ... Hell. A very Queasy Hell. The people at the factory were So understanding... They made me fried eggs for lunch. It's pretty hard to fuck up fried eggs. They were delicious.

    Ok, so here's your Dilemma... Steamed rice is the only thing you can really trust or Stomach... It comes in a big block-Very sticky,
because you need to eat it with Chop sticks, right? Your Block has a Bug on it. So you pick the bug off, Swallow your pride, and go for a big clump...and you spot another bug. Upon further inspection, there are lots of bugs.
You can...
 a) Not eat it. And Starve for 2 weeks.
 b) Pick the rice apart and find all 72 of the bugs... this will take
 forever, and you won't be eating much of the rice.
 c) Eat the rice, no charge for the extra protein.
       There is No Correct answer. Trust Me.
 Savages.

    Thursday
More of the same... really bad food, buggy rice, and oh Yeah, we have
to walk through the kitchen to get to the eating area... IN CHINA, YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE THE KITCHEN WHERE YOUR FOOD IS BEING COOKED. DEAR GOD, YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE IT!!!! (nuff said)

    Toilet Addendum. In China, a toilet is pretty much a hole in the
floor, or if you're lucky, a urinal laying down in the floor. There is no seat,and no handles to hold yourself up. This is a heck of a balancing act for us chubby folk.
The factory I was at also had: no door on the toilet stall,
No Soap or Towels, and (Ready for the kicker? Here Comes!) No Toilet Paper. Filthy Savages.

    I begin eating dinner in the Hotel... "Charlies" - a poor ripoff of a
stereotypical American bar... complete with Large plastic American
flags hanging everywhere. They have a really good Philipino band playing covers every night. And they make a reasonable facsimile of a Pizza. Good Nuff Fer Me!

    Traffic... it was taking my life into my own hands just stepping out
the door of the hotel, and then getting into the taxis! Almost No one here owns a car, unless it's a taxi. On the horn every 20 seconds, weaving, passing on corners, running down pedestrians. And Nobody gets out the way of ambulances here. Sirens blaring, lights flashing, people dying, and nobody gets out of the way. Filthy Godless Savages.

    FRIDAY!!! Fly to Japan. Woo. Raw fish for dinner. And you can drink the water here. I Stocked up.
    Everyone else who comes to Nagoya gets put up in the Hilton, which is across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe. Me? I get The Hotel Trusty Nagoya, where I am the one Anglo, and nobody speaks even the slightest bit of engish. The room is the size of my kitchen, about 6 by 10, all told. A tiny (smaller than twin) Bed, with a 1 foot walkway next to it.

    Saturday Night, I am introduced to a Japanese tradition, sort of. A
little background, It's 95 degrees outside, and we've been sweating like
Nike's Vietnamese Factory workers all freakin day.
    So we walk to this place, seems pretty fancy, but when you walk
in, it's just as hot as it was outside. "Weird", I thought. We walk in,
and the girl showing us our table shouts something in Japanese to the
cooks... and they shout it back. This will continue all night, people shouting the same thing over and over, sometimes right in your ear. Turns out they are screaming "Thank you for coming!!" back and forth. Kind of like that "Wasabi" commercial. It's worse than Applebees during a birthday. All you want is a nice, quiet, sit-down meal, and you get shouting.
       So you're seated at this table, and it's pretty hot, you are
 sweating. And then you notice the instrument of the torture to come... a Hot Burner in the middle of your table.
     You order some food, and they bring out a pot of water ( we had 6
people, so we got 2 pots, JOY!)... it is placed on the burner, and set to High. The temperature, which you Thought was uncomfortable before, instantly leaps to Unbearable.
       Then they bring out a big plate of thinly sliced steak and some
raw vegetables, a couple of special spoons, and a vat to put the fat in
 (you'll be using the spoons to skim the scum off the water) You will
spend the next 2 HOURS slaving over a hot stove to cook your own meal. And we will drop roughly $100.00 EACH for this privilege. For boiled dinner we cooked ourselves.
       PT Barnum once, said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
       And Most of them, it seems, are born in Japan.
     They carried me home just after I passed out from the heat. Now don't get me wrong... This would be a heck of a lot of fun, say, In
 December. But JULY?

    The walls of my room are made of rice paper, and the people next door don't get the hint when you pound on the wall. They were up yakking, laughing, partying until about 1:30am, when I finally gave up pounding and called the desk. Thank goodness for the Japanese Phrasebook I bought before going here... the front desk took care of it. I got a few hours of sleep.

Lunch Sunday was pretty good, one of those sushi places where the sushi rolls by you on a conveyor belt, and you can take what you like. I get some decent nourishment.

    Sunday Night, The Hard Rock Nagoya! It was Air conditioned. Damn good thing. By this time, I was so irritable, I could of killed somebody.

    Overall impression of Japan? Very Clean, very polite, but unbelievably gullible. If Madison Avenue told the Japanese that the "Latest thing" was to walk around with a pencil stuck in your ear, They'd line up for miles to buy them.... "Dixon Ticonderoga? #2? They're Imported! Just $79.95... Cheap!"

    Monday, Flight back to China, They gave me a lovely parting gift... I think it's a business card holder... it's got a gold plated airplane
on it, with  imitation (I presume) diamonds in the jets. Everybody got
one, Better than those cheap plastic wings, anyway.

    Tuesday, more of the same, Queasy, ichy, nastiness.
    Tuesday night, we meet up with some fellow gerber employees, one from Toronto, one from Australia, and a bunch from other parts of China. We end up going out to a fancy shmancy joint a few blocks down the road from the Hotel. We walk in, and there are tanks full of big fish near the entrance... but some of the fish are serious floaters... I'll discover later that these are fish to be served. Yikes.
    Halfway through dinner, they bring out a big pot of soup... the
Chinese seem to love soup.... MMMM dirty water soup! So I pull out the ladle, and, No Joke, There is a six inch long Chicken foot on it. I
put the ladle back, passed it on to the next guy and turned just a little
 greener. (Strains of "Lighter shade of Pale" float through my mind...)

    I might have tried the soup, but I had just read an article in the China Star (Nationalist Chinese Newspaper translated into English) about how they've been having serious sanitation issues with imported chicken feet... From the USA!!!! And you thought we just threw 'em away! Mmmmmm, Good Eatin'! Filthy Fucking Godless Savages.
    So after the Chicken Foot incident, Our host asks us if we Eat
 Snake. I said "Sure, I'll try it".... heh heh heh. So 10 minutes
later, our waiter returns with a Mesh Bag... and a Very Large Snake, still kicking (or slithering, as it were...) Funny thing, the Big Aussie has a Major fear of snakes... and he starts freaking out. So they take the snake to the kitchen, our Aussie friend calms down... heh heh heh.
    10 Minutes later they return with 2 bowls... one is full of
Snake Blood and the other is Alcohol and the poor thing's Gall Bladder. And then they set up Shot glasses! Mmmmm. I did the shot of Blood, but the Gall Bladder didn't seems too Kosher (Like drinking Blood is?) so I passed on it. The rest of the week I offended my Hosts by eating at Charlies. It was the right thing to do.

    Cut to the last day.
My whole 2 weeks worth of work went Horribly wrong, because of the
 Laziness and Incompetence of my co workers there... and they were
Begging me to stay. It's a good thing I left. The machine was still broken when I left, and it will be a few weeks before it can be repaired... and I would have been roped into staying the whole time. So I flew home...

    Imagine for a moment, seeing the sun rise, and set, twice on the same day. Yup... it can be done. I did it. Very Cool. I Seized a VERY Long day.

Since I've been Home...
I took the week after off... I had 78 hours of overtime for those 3
weeks... I needed the time off.
    That weekend I took my Motorcycle course... I passed the written exam with flying colors, and passed the riding portion- it wasn't pretty, but I passed it. I got my actual license a few weeks later.
    Remember the thrill when you got your driver's license? Same thing, big time. Woo Hoo.

And that brings me to right Now.
I'm really quite tired.
Good Night!

 Mike