CHINA: Day 13

Tuesday May 29, 2012

Today we had another meeting with a company, but it wasn’t until 3:00 so we decided to fill our morning with our favorite thing: shopping! A bunch of us were wanting to find the cheap DVDs, so Joe asked around and found out where we could get them.  When we got to the subway stop that they had told him, we found a huge shopping district.  Only it wasn’t the cheap, fake, touristy shopping that we were looking for.  It was mostly big, fancy malls with lots of name-brand stores.  Not really the ideal place for finding illegal DVDs.  We only had about 45 minutes there so we ran all around the area trying to find where the DVD store would be.  We were completely unsuccessful.  Luckily, at the next shopping area where we were supposed to meet the rest of the group, we had a little more success.

This shopping area was an underground thing that you walked right into when you got off the subway.  It went on forever in every direction just full of little stores with all kinds of cheap things.  This is the shopping that we love.  While Kenz and I were looking at purses, Sharlet came and found us to tell us that they had found the DVDs! We followed her down the hall until we came to a store that appeared to be full of socks and underwear.  We were a little confused until we walked into the store and saw a bunch of our people sitting on the floor in the corner surrounded by DVDs.  Obviously you had to know where to look.  We spent a long time sitting in there looking through movies and continually being handed more by the guys working at the store.  When we had loaded up on all the ones that we wanted, we fought about the price for a while and eventually walked out of there with tons of new movies for about 1 or 2 US dollars each.  So cool!

After shopping, we went back to the hotel where Roger Bird had arranged for a bus to take us from there to his company, Abbott.  That was super nice of him.  Abbott was definitely my favorite company that we visited (not just because they had M&Ms and Diet Coke for us).  I love Roger and his whole presentation was absolutely fascinating to listen to.  He talked to us for about 2 hours and I just hung on his every word.  We learned a lot about his company and his life in China, but we also learned a lot about the Chinese culture and what it’s like to run a business in China.  So interesting! If you want to be successful in business, China is the place to go. 

After our meeting, we had about an hour to kill so Roger directed us to another shopping area about a block away.  We found lots more DVDs and other fun stuff there that we were quite excited about.  After we had all spent some more money, we went back to Abbott where Roger was waiting to take us to dinner.  The restaurant that he took us to was a very upscale Tibetan restaurant.  I could already tell that I would like dinner tonight when I had just stepped in the door.  The rest of the Bird family met us there and we were led upstairs to a long table. 

Once we were all seated and had our drinks ordered, Paige Bird told us that we should go check out the bathrooms.  She also told us that we should take both genders with us.  We were a little confused but figured we better listen.  When we walked into the bathrooms, they were super fancy and we were quite impressed by them.  Then we glanced over to the mirrors above the sinks and rather than seeing our reflections, we saw the boys!   That definitely made us jump.  The bathrooms were just normal, fancy bathrooms except for that there were giant holes in the walls above the sinks where the mirrors should have gone.  We all got a kick out of that and spent some time taking pictures and messing around in the bathrooms.  So funny!

We definitely had too much fun in these bathrooms!

Roger ordered dinner for us and it was DELICIOUS!  Hands-down the best meal we have had here.  The courses just kept coming and while sometimes I didn’t know what I was eating, I didn’t really care.  It was soooo good!  I loved the Birds even more after this meal.

After dinner, Roger’s bus took us back to the hotel and at 9 we headed over to the boys’ room where Linda (the tailor) was coming to do suit fittings for them.  That was pretty entertaining.  Linda is this adorable, 4’5” 20-year-old who is just hilarious! She was so quick and just gave the boys the hardest time!  We absolutely love Linda.  The boys all tried on their new suits (Can you believe they got measured for them on Saturday and now they are already done on Tuesday???) and then did a little catwalk modeling for us.  That was good for a laugh. 

All in all it was a really fun day (probably because we finally had a really good meal!).