Zhuhai - Part 3 - Dad

Dad was, as always, mostly interested in food, and he was especially happy to have me there and even more happy about Joyce, Almen, Ariel and Janice since that offered him the much wanted chance of having loads of different kinds of weird food that his colleagues refuses to eat.

Dad's hotel room was really awesome; a bigger-than-king-size bed, a rather big area with a desk and all sorts of computer connection you can need, including VGA that I think is for the flat 32" (or perhaps a little larger but not much) HD-TV in front of the bed (I didn't manage to get that to work though), a really big bathroom with both shower, a nice bathtub and that I actually use the last day after my workout.

On Saturday when Ariel was there and before we went to pick up Janice at the ferry terminal we went out walking and found a big park where a lot of people flew kites and stuff, I wanted too much of the cake of course so dad bought me a really big kite, I felt like a little child again but I soon discovered that I had swam out to a little too deep for my comfort, the kite was heavier than the regular ones and the kind you steer around, but that also meant that it needed a lot more wind which there of course wasn't enough of, so after a tree crash we gave up and our instructor and sales man asked us to come back in the morning the day after when the wind is heavier to try it for real.

Of course the day after I was too tired, mostly because dad snores like a... well I don't know what to compare to, a yet engine doesn't really cover it, and there are no fully automatic 110mm cannons either so that doesn't work either, let's just say that its loud. So after three nights I had hardly gotten any rest at all but for once I manged to get up for breakfast at least. After that we just stayed in the hotel room for about half the day until the cleaning staff wanted to come in and then I went to the hotel gym and dad went out to find some kind of misshapen floor patterns he had seen and thought was really fun.

The workout was probably the best I've done in months, or even years, I know I've lost weight but still I was surprised how much energy I had despite my cold, that has been rather bad recently. I did a sitting bike for like 20 minutes, I want to say without breaking a sweat because it sounds cool but I sweated like a pig, it's just that I didn't die from it, after that I did an overall workout and it felt really great, the best part that after that my cold was nearly gone. When I got back to the room dad was already there, it was time for lunch and I was extremely hungry but I had set my mind to taking a long bath first, which I did and it was great. I am just a little over 90kg now by the way.

We finally got out for our lunch and for the first time we were without Chinese guide and of course we found a restaurant that didn't have any English speaking staff, we still managed to get some food and even though I didn't really fancy it dad was as happy as always. Time pressed though and I didn't dare letting dad finish it all, we went back to the hotel and I packed up my stuff, the kite had to go with dad, there is not much of a wind in Chengdu anyway. The hotel staff helped me get the taxi to the bus station but of course the taxi took me to the wrong station and after about 20 minutes of trouble I finally got, with the help of Jane on the phone, a woman to help me to the right station, just about 5 minutes walk for there, which was partly what had confused me in the first place, I thought it was basically the same station, but it wasn't.

The bus wouldn't leave yet though, and with that and the three hours bus ride I got to the airport about 60 minutes before departure, this is normally no problem in an airport but in this one where the structure is pretty much non-existent, it was actually hard to find any check-in desk and not any easier to find the right one. And after that it was hard to find the security check because there was no obvious connection between entrance, check-in and security, and add to that that I was pretty much starving so I ran off to a McDonald's and got two double cheeseburgers before I went through the security. Now I was in quite some hurry, the boarding had started before I even got the the security but I still managed to get on the plane. And to my surprise and happiness I found that I had been upgraded to business class! That made the flight home a wonder, it is freakishly much more comfortable to fly business class.

Back in Chengdu I just wanted to get home as fast as possible, I was tired and there were people; taxi drivers both real and fake, everywhere who wanted money to drive me home, I did a stupid mistake and agreed to have this pretty little girl, with a pink phone and that looked totally harmless, hook me up with a driver, that of course was fake and of course had two others in his car. The taxi ride home took little more than an hour and it should have taken about 30 minutes in that traffic, he basically drove around the whole city with the two other guys before getting me home, I came home and crashed! I had survived at least, hehe.