China - Day 39, Saturday

First thing this morning I had to walk to the bank (I need to pay the satellite company cash for the satellite) and City Shop for a few groceries. I may have mentioned this before, but everything takes so long to do here. First I go to the bank. You have to take a number, take a seat and wait for your number to be called. They have to do so much paperwork that every transaction takes a while. After about 15-20 minutes, I am finally finished and can walk around the corner to City Shop.

City Shop has many imported items. It also has a deli (very hard to find in China) and a bakery. I need to pick up some ham for Randy. There is a woman in front of me. She is from Germany. While we wait for her order to be complete, we talk a little. She tells me that she has been here for 1 and 1/2 years, before this they were in Arizona. She complains at how long things take, and I agree with her! I think it took them over 15 minutes to wait on the 2 of us! I only got 10 slices of ham!

I get back to the apartment over an hour later - mind you it is only about a 5 minute walk.

The satellite dish person is there installing the satellite. He arrived at 10. Remember I mentioned in an earlier blog that we ordered the package that had Disney, Fox, ABC, etc. Well when he turned on the satellite, it did not have any of these. He goes and gets another box, but we can't read any of the channels to figure out what it has. We agree to keep the original box for the time being, but we really want Disney, etc. After hooking up the dish and the box, he needs to hook the satellite box to the internet on the computer. He must run a wire from the office (back near the bedrooms) all the way to the living room. He starts nailing the wire into the floor, not along the baseboard which would have made more sense. He is doing an awful job, so Randy tells him to stop and he will do it himself later. Thank God Iris was here to translate! The guy finally left around 1:30pm (3 1/2 hours later!)

After the man left, Iris invited Daniel and Randy to go play badminton with her and Victor (both work for Randy) - very popular here. Daniel had a ball.

While they were gone, Daniel's mattress was delivered. I think he will have a very good night sleep tonight!