I had to take a picture of what our seats look like in business class on the plane, the seat lays all the way back and the TV has a bunch of movies, TV shows and music on it... I usually watch about 4 movies, read and sleep a little.. there is a lot of time to burn on a 15 flight! I did have to use the manual pump in the bathroom and that thing works really well, I wish I would have bought it sooner for travelling.. it's so light and small compared to the electrical pump and works really well, I feel like you can get more milk faster because you control the "suck" length, so you can just make it pull a bunch of milk out at one time... highly recommend one.. even if you just go somewhere for the weekend.
I got in Saturday night, so it was really nice to have Sunday to sleep in, work out and just relax... the Hyatt we stay at has a really nice pool (with a pretty awesome water slide that we went down a few times) so we tried to lay out but were in the pool most of the time because it was so hot.... of course I had to take the typical foot shot with the water in the background.
Who knew you could buy cold beers at Walmart... only in China (this is my director Rich and one of our PD counterparts Phyllis)! We actually went into Walmart because I needed to get deodorant (I know, random), because I was afraid my all natural deodorant (I know, big surprise, I have natural deodorant) wouldn't cut it in the terrible heat + humidity.
We (our Topeka PD group) ate dinner Sunday night at this pub called 'One for the Road' that a guy from England opened in China... it was pretty crazy how many things they had on the menu.. I got vegetarian pot pie.. I haven't even seen that on a menu in the States, so it was exciting to see it there. It didn't have as good of flavor as chicken pot pie that I remember loving, but it wasn't bad.
Phyllis and I at the Haifong dinner... Haifong is one of our core factories and a lot of the shoes I work on are made there. We sat at a huge round table and it was a 10 course meal, 9 of which were meat or seafood.. they tried really hard to get me veggie dishes once they realized I was vegetarian, they are always so accommodating. Phyllis did teach me how to say I am a vegetarian in Mandarin.. "Wo chi su", bad thing was, I kept forgetting how to say it and mixing up the order of the words, so it didn't help me much. Phyllis also gave me two adorable traditional Chinese outfits for Iz, it was so sweet and made me teary, she's the best. I can't wait to get Iz in them!
We went to textile supplier on Wednesday and it was pretty incredible to watch the knit materials be woven by all of these different spools of thread.
These are the biggest spools of thread I have ever seen... you can see how many different strands are being wound onto the spools... a ton.
Here is a picture of the huge spools weaving material, pretty crazy.
Stitching room... the industrial sewing machines are pretty incredible, they are super fast.
This is one of my boots on the production line... pretty amazing that everything is done by hand, there are people standing down the whole line putting the shoes together.. no machine.
Look what showed up on our table at dinner the last night... eeek.
We bought t-shirts at 'One for the Road' because we thought they were super cute, the back says, 'if found, please return to the pub', so we thought we would wear them to the office the last day.
'Senior picture' in the biggest shoe ever.
I got this pic from Jacob the day I left and it said, 'double chin' and just made me laugh.. missed her so much.
Isabelle stayed at Papa and Gigi's Sunday night and loved playing with that toy blender (hence the blurry flailing arms).. she has this funny thing for the blender, whenever I make smoothies, she starts laughing and gets so excited when she hears the blender going. I love the second picture, the way she is sitting with her feet out, her arms looking so rolly and how she is looking up at dad with a smile... love.
I asked Jacob for some videos and he sent me these two which just made my day and helped me get through the trip..
clap.
distracted by the dog.
It was so good to see Isabelle when I got home, I was originally going to see her Friday night, but we got out of Hong Kong three hours late, first it was weather, then there was a crazy man on the plane that they had to get off and find his bags to get them off (scary), and then our flight attendant fell down the stairs (pretty sure her heals were way too high for duties), cut her leg open and had to be taken to the hospital... it was a little crazy, I was like, are we not supposed to be taking off? We would be cleared for take off and then something else would happen and they would disarm the doors. Anyway, so I saw Isabelle Saturday morning and she had the biggest smile when she saw me, gave me the biggest squeeze and was doing her excited dance of kicking her legs and flailing her arms... it was the best thing ever. Any time I left the room she seemed to get a little fussy and then would be fine when I walked back in, like she was afraid I was going to leave again... it made me never want to leave her again and I'm going to have to soon :(. My milk supply was almost gone when I got home, but I just fed Iz as much as I could in the morning and at night to build it back up for those two feedings. Glad to be home!
