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'Old people in china don't follow the rules'

our driver's name was 'sam' and he spoke no english at all but he would communicate with us via google translate app on his phone while driving mario andretti style through the ruthless streets of jinan.

after several near death experiances he explained it away with the statement above...the google translate voice was female which made PARKER giggle and the statement became a rolling joke/punchline for the entire trip that we used to explain just about everything.

DAY ONE and TWO sunday 6am est - tuesday 12 30am 'china time' gmt+8

after a late start we land in new jersey and had to sprint for the next plane... a torturous fifteen hour haul over the north pole.
the sky waitresses wake you up every couple of hours to give you 'food' and drinks. beer and wine were free so I promptly got drunk and took a long nap... but something or someone or some baby crying is constantly waking you up. [bring some noise cancelling headphones and smuggle some little booze bottles next time] it's not the most restfull sleep. and we arrived 1pm MONDAY beijing time bleary eyed and half drunk

first you get scanned for fevers, then the id check, the bag claim, the bag check....you stand in line to get into other lines and people are constantly shoving you to cut past you...all you want to do is get to the exit sign and step outside for a smoke

but PARKER lost one of our bags in beijing. someone with an identical bag had picked ours up. so we hung back a couple hours to see if they returned the bag [splitting up, probably not the best idea]

one of the other guys, john was held up in 'train station jail' after boarding the wrong train and sitting in someone else's seat, he was reported to the train station cops who removed him from the train, took him to train jail and then mocked him non stop for a couple hours for being a stupid american.

we should have been in our rooms by 6pm but instead we spent another six and a half hours recovering our team and luggage... I had four hours to sleep so I slammed two double jim beams and passed the *** out

DAY THREE - 6am tuesday - 12am skip lunch = superhero
you are trying to focus on your job but everyone there has their own agenda and they constantly bother you to help them first.
you have to knock out a few easy ones to shut them up or the noise is deafening. I skipped lunch which promptly blew their minds and they began to worship my 'work ethic'...how do you say...you want to help me,... how about go *** off for a while and leave me alone....in chinese Between 12am and 6am I was up for two hours handling a problem in cincinatti... because apparantly when I am gone... nobody can do anything. it probably has something to do with magnets

DAY FOUR 6am wednesday - 2am thursday - Xavier quits
It didn't even register. I was so focused on my own sack of problems that I didn't even notice one of the guys quit.
*** him...it was somewhere around hour sixteen or eighteen on day three or four who the *** knows... ...Sam asked if I needed anything and I had him pick me up some smokes...xavier seized the oppertunity and had sam take him back to the hotel.

DAY FIVE 6am thursday - sometime on friday I think
it kinda goes on and on and on like this for a while....


DAY...WHO THE *** CARES ANYMORE...hope is abandoned we are never going home

what little i saw of beijing and jinan...parts looked like MEGA CITY ONE from Judge Dredd, parts looked like Vietnam in 1967, parts looked like a russian cold war communist ***hole and parts looked like they were from the Han dynasty but nobody had knocked them down yet...it was dirty...there was trash and cigarette butts everywhere..you weren't safe walking on the sidewalks because of all the motorcycles and mopeds and sometimes cars that drove down them...

our hotel, the sheraton in jinan, was lovely, they had an awesome breakfast buffet which was the best part of the trip. more on this later as time warrants

everywhere else there is a good chance the shitter is a hole in the floor, this includes nice looking restaurants, factories, etc.

everyone in china is a pushy, rude, self centered *** so we all felt right at home. they served us budwieser because obviously that's all americans ever drink.... they have a word for 'stupid americans', you hear it all the time. idioms do not translate at all and good luck explaining complex concepts like troubleshooting...

I lived to tell the tale...barely. I hate people anyways and after being herded like a man eating zoo animal for a week my mood was foul and I began screaming at little old ladies that tried to cut in front of me... it was hell....


more later

Shake it.

Captain Murphy has opinions.

happy 150th birthday to frank lollyd wright

One can only assume.

That or he "got lost" in an opium den.

In the meantime at the Mosin family reunion:

So did Nick get mauled by a panda yet ?

It would be a happy Monday if my allergies actually decided to calm the *** down already :(

Just want to bang my head against the wall all week.

Happy Monday, folks.

/dies

Squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle squiggle noodle noodle cantonese squiggle.

[If you cant read in the proper chinese font, you may need to upgrade your language pack and fonts]

can you translate that into chinese for me?

I think I'm going to need it...

It's posts like these that make me wish PARKER was a real person...

PARKER Edit: Dance Party Friday!

If PARKER makes it through the customs interrogation...
/thinks about it

or maybe I should have him teach me how to use my phone camera first...

actually I'm feeling pretty good about our chances. I broke everything down into smaller units, made copies and spread it out over four cases. The advance crew made it in unscathed carrying one set of almost everything...the lithium batteries and all the cables.

but then again I just filled one of those little travel sized plastic bottles with highly flammable electronic parts cleaner and I'm going to try to pass it off as nail polish remover... >.>

I just hope the bottle maintains it's integrity...

I'm confident in myself...I know that I can get through all the official *** without cracking a sweat... I'll be wearing my "well dressed man" disguise and the face of a businessman who has been delayed long enough already but it also sympathetic to the customs worker who has had a difficult day as well.

PARKER...not so much. He'll probably snap when they ask him what city he was born in and yell out THE KINGDOM OF NI! LONG LIVE THE GOD KING MESHI!... then he'll break into Psalm 72 and they'll hit him with the tasers...or billy-clubs or those giant metal flashlights with four D cells...and then he'll spew all sorts of random babbling about... usurpers to the throne...the destruction of subligaria....

I usually wait in the bar for him....

smog on the river shitzhe

don't forget the suicide nets to try and catch people leaping off evil industries.

try to get pictures of shithole industrial china for me!

thank you and I will try... I doubt that they let you have internet access to the ffxiah NI pages at the reeducation camp... but maybe I'll get to meet chaosx if I go there...I think that's where they are keeping him...

unless he's already buried on Shallow Grave Road, Outskirts of Belgrade, Serbia...after becoming the victim of the old "wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing" vicious serbian gypsy prostitute jack roll..... the second time...

some people learn the hard way PARKER... and some people never learn at all.

you travel safe, you crazy old ***.

the advance team is already on the ground and has already been sending me strange coded messages... the pollution is savage and it appears that china lifted the "one child" restriction and so... brace yourself PARKER because... every woman of child bearing age in china... is pregnant... and they're all crazy for american chocolate... and baby formula... >.>

PARKER's case has already has about fifty pounds of contraband...
/thinks about it

so...I should probably tape chocolate bars all over PARKER's body in case things get heated in the customs line I can rip his shirt off and kick him to the ground and start a riot...

maybe bags of M&Ms....they'll probably hold up pretty well...

I'm packing my tool kits for china and singing the new "smuggle all the things" song... that just kinda... develped organically... >.>

shut up PARKER...you know that you just can't find things like wd-40, evil machine oil, high temperature wheel bearing grease, lithium batteries over there... and they sure as hell ain't going to let me bring it in with me if they know I'm carrying it...yeah...duh...that's why they don't have any over there dumbass!!

would you like to find out how hard it is to ship things ground to china!?...

oh quit worrying they probably serve chinese food in chinese prison... it'll be fine... I'll break you out on my way back through beijing so that you can smuggle some stuff back home for me

Rest assured that wherever he was, if it wasn't damp there before he got there, it sure as hell is now!

/damp towel

Memento Infectum!

It's a dangerous way to play, that's for sure. But they know that. Only gets harder from here.

Honestly with all the injuries -- I mean, Jesus, we're missing a Norris-caliber defensemen for the whole run -- I was happy to make it to the second round. That we're in the Final now, let alone leading it 2-0, is just freaking awesome.