Wednesday , July 27, 2005 9:30 PM

A long day today but I am glad to be back in my regular hotel.

We went to the supplier this morning. It was pretty good although I guess from the way that some of the people at work were talking I was not as impressed as I thought I would be. It is definately a machine shop kind of place. We got some good work done though so I was glad about that.

For lunch we went to a coffee shop restaurant. It was very fun looking - lots of little cosy sitting areas with couches and good chairs. There was one room that had swings in it! The chairs were suspended from the ceiling and the room had a lot of ivy growing in it. Very fun looking.

The menu was a bit odd- they had some "american" type food there which is why they took me there. And after seeing fried bullfrog and pigeon on the menu I decided to go with
"piza" I ordered the black pepper and sausage kind. Mistake one. I am not sure what kind of cheese it was but it was kind of different and not very tasty. But the sausage - wow, not sure what it was but it kind of tasted like cut up hot dogs on the pizza. Then I started thinking about what is in US hotdogs and got very nervous about what I was eating. I was glad it was only about a 6 inch size but I only ate half of that.

The adventure of the day was the bathroom at the plant. I knew I should have gone at the restaurant. I wrongly assumed that the plant would have "normal" toilets - by that I mean normal to the US - but nope - they had the good old Chinese squaters!

Now I remember why I pack a little thing of kleenex in my purse as well! It is just a very different thing and one I can't get used to - and frankly just don't want to!

The trip home was long and we had a brief spell of some very heavy rain. That was a little scary since it didn't seem like people actually slowed down.

The country side here is very interesting. There are a lot of little clusters of houses and some of them are really quite beautiful. Most are 3 or 4 stories and from what my coworker said these are primarily farmers who live here. He was saying that they usually have 3 generations living in them - one to each floor. I'd love to be able to have stopped in some of the neighborhoods and looked closer. In many of them we passed there was a little pond or canal alongside. A one of the groups we passed there were about 20 kids that were swimming and jumping off into the water. Looked like they were having a ball. I snapped a shot out the window just to illustrate - so excuse the blur as the driver was going about 140km at the time!

Tomorrow the GM from Lunar comes here. She is travelling in Asia and wanted to stop by. So - that will be interesting. Hopefully all goes well and it is a good day. She has been very intense over the audit and I am hoping she is just positive and not too crazy as that will just make everyone more insane!

well, I'll be back tomorrow

Tina