I want to be a Chinese acrobat.

July 15, 2010
First full day in China! I’d decided yesterday to meet up and go swimming in the pool before we had to be ready for our business visit. It was AWESOME. The pool/gym here rocks. It is big, deep, and super nice. Not too chloriney either. We hottubbed it up as well. I wanted to work out in the gym and go running or lifting, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the treadmill. There was a video screen showing TV, but no buttons on the entire thing! I gave up after 5 or 10 minutes and just went swimming.
Breakfast was another wonderful event as well. They have a buffet breakfast serving a lot of types of food, and its all gourmet. Phenomenal. They have this great French toast, maple syrup, pancakes, sushi, Japanese and Chinese food, lots of great fruit, breads, omelets or fried eggs, toast, and fresh juices (including watermelon juice.) Nice. It was great.
We had our morning classes and then we got on the metro and went to the station we thought was the right one. Well, it was the right one, but three people (including the police/military man) told us to go the wrong way. Then, it started raining. Hard. I’m not talking about a cute little drizzle that makes the garden look happy outside. I’m talking about torrential downpour to the point that you think you possibly have soiled your pants. Okay, maybe not that hard…but definitely somewhere in between. We walked around for about 30 minutes trying to figure out where to go (and almost got hit by a number of taxi’s because they DON’T STOP for pedestrians…and by don’t stop, I mean…don’t stop.), then we tried to take a taxi to the business visit but they had never heard of the Marriott Hotel. (Ironic, because it was about 3 blocks away). Anyway, we finally found the place about 45 minutes late, and then were missing about 3 people from our group (They had taken a different turn than the rest of the group and made it to the hotel while we waited down the street for them. Haha.)
The business visit with the JW Marriott (high end) hotel was great. We even got to have a tour of the premises, see how the staff got around behind the scenes, and saw the inside of the “Presidential Suite”, which Hillary Clinton stayed in a few months before. Presidential is mild for how awesome that room is. W.O.O.W (That stands for wow..ooo….oooooah…wow. So elaborate, I know.)
We saw the lobby of the Ritz too. The Regent, which is where we were was better ;-)
At night, we went to an official Chinese Acrobats Show. Holy crap, I sat through the entire show with my mouth open just thinking…W.O.O.W. Okay, it was more like, “Holy crap, I want to do that,” or, “Holy crap…HOW do they do that,” but more often than not, it was “HOLY CRAP…HOW THE CRAP ARE THEY DOING THAT?” (Please forgive my “dirty” uses of words. But to be authentic, that is what I was thinking.)
No words can really describe how awesome it was. The body is amazing, and the Chinese take it to a whole new level. So, I’m going to start working on getting down a handstand again. And being able to do a bunch of pushups. (which is ironic that I say this right before I tell you about dinner.)
So, we went to McDonalds for dinner ☺ Theres nothing like a good ‘ole cheeseburger and hot fudge sundae. We realized we were just down the street from a cool market, so after dinner we went to explore the area (found gelato, but I decided to keep my “ice cream to a minimum for the day…I’d already had a hot fudge sundae and an ice cream cone). The market was really cool. There was great food to eat (squid, octopus, starfish, seahorse, bugs, insects, and of course, scorpion. See the video below. :-D Look very closely.
We found these really awesome lasers, which some say are illegal. Who knows. So, we bought some. Stephen bargained the price way down, and we got three. Happy day! (The funny thing is, we got a better one at a lower price the next day. Go figure. Haha)
We had a blast playing with our new toys and I’m sure that will continue for a long time. I love China ☺