February 8th: China Day 4

Day 23, Sometime after 11AM: I confess, I slept in very late again today. In fact, probably until almost 11:30AM. As you’ll see later, I fixed this problem of sleeping in on my Thailand trip, but that’s another story.

We started out by going to a mall and ate at a Western restaurant which had really bad service, cost too much, and didn’t taste that good. Then we went to another mall and ended up getting lost inside it because it was so big. We also explored the street vendors and eventually went to a bookstore to meet CS and Wai Zin. We ended up spending 2.5 hours in the bookstore while waiting until it was time to leave for our dinner reservations, which was incredibly long. I ended up reading parts of several books and found one book on the feasibility of the gadgets in James Bond movies! So, I ended up buying that book and then read several interesting conspiracy theories in another book about things ranging from JFK, to the Titanic (I hadn’t heard that one before), to the moon landings.

After that we walked a long ways to the Dim Sum place for dinner, where again I didn’t find much food I liked and primarily ate rice. Once we got back to the hotel I went over to the other guy’s room and I had my first experience watching American Idol. Yes, I have never seen the show before and my first time seeing it was in China. It was actually decently interesting to watch and there was a guy who wrote a song that was very catchy, but he couldn’t sing that well and was too over the top. In fact, that song will probably become a huge hit (if any of you watch the show it was the song about brothers forever or something like that).

Next, we went down to rent a Mahjong table in the hotel and it was amazing - the table was automatic!! When the game was over you pushed a button and the center of the table would rise up, you shove all the tiles into it, then it closes and a new set of tiles automatically rises up in front of each person perfectly stacked. I wasn’t actually playing and still don’t know the rules, but that was such a cool table! Oh, and today, everyone stared at me again.

This is me at the Dim Sum restaraunt