Yet another day at the factory.....

October 14 – Yet another day at the factory, although we worked only until early afternoon, at which time I went back to the hotel. I went for a much longer walk around the downtown area here. The city is named Nan Chow (not sure of the spelling) and it is much larger than I had first thought. It reminds me in many ways of Indonesian cities but it is a little cleaner and appears more civilized. The roads are full of not only autos but also bicycles and motor bikes and pedestrians. Their method of navigating around one another appears as utter chaos to the outsider. In some of the main streets they have small lanes devoted exclusively to bicycles and motor bikes.

I found a large bookstore but unfortunately they had no books exclusively in English. I have finished two of the three novels that I brought with me so I am desperate for more reading. Seventy TV channels of Chinese programs and the absurdly biased CNN foreign edition (the CNN domestic version is bad enough) just don’t make it for me. Still no mugs for my wife’s cousin.

I went into one of the neighborhood massage centers, anticipating it would be something like we had found in Singapore years ago, something our Australian friend there liked to call a f—k shop. What a surprise, I had a full 40 minute session, fully clothed both parties, from a young male masseur, all in the presence of other male and female customers within the same room. There are three or four of these centers placed strategically around the larger hotels here, each one having the business name spelled out clearly in English, unlike most of the other local businesses, whose signs are exclusively Chinese. So needless to say it was not what I had in mind, but the experience was interesting if not thoroughly enjoyable.
Before dinner I found a small, almost empty pub and went in to hoist one for “Alvin”, my late father in law. I found myself playing pool with one of the locals and carrying on some semblance of a conversation with the bartender and barmaid, neither of whom spoke more than a word or two of English. They were both quite pleasant but I couldn’t tell if their interest in this western stranger was genuine or if they had some scam that they were cooking up. So after two beers on an empty stomach I was not feeling too spry so I went back to the hotel and went to bed very early. Because I am still not totally accustomed to the time change, it does not really seem all that early each nite. It gets dark quite early here, this location must be on the far eastern end of this particular time zone.