I’ve heard a lot of strange names in my life, but I think this story tops them all.

At work the other day, I had to call and see if an applicant would be interested in applying to a position similar to one she had applied to before.  The name was normal enough – Tiffany.  I called the number and let it ring a few times.  A moment later, a man with a rather deep voice answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, may I speak to Tiffany?”

“This is he.”

I nearly fell out of my chair.  Never in all my life have I met a male Tiffany.  I’m still trying to figure out if it his parent’s hated him, or if he changed his name as he got older.  Either way, it’s weird.  Very weird.

Another thing that I never imagined happening occurred this week.  Holy(pronounced Holly), who attened the high school that Phil taught at in Fuyang, China, decided to take his fall break and visit us for the week.  He is attending Troy University in Alabama this semester.  Well, instead of taking the bus to get to us, like we would have in China, he actually drove.   Holy bought himself a car and passed the Alabama driver’s license test.  I must say, it was very strange to be driven around my city, by a guy I met in China and who has only lived in the States for 9 months.  I guess it would be like me moving to China, buying a car, and driving Holy around where he grew up.  I dunno, I guess i just find it weird – and a bit funny.

Here you go guys.  Laugh all you want.  I have no shame.  🙂

This is why I should never fall asleep anywhere in the vicinity of Phil. As embarrassing as it is, I still laughed. I hope it makes you chuckle, too.

Dirty Windshield

I found this car in a parking garage at the Charlotte/Douglas Internation Airport.  I’m just glad I had my camera with me.  What ever happened to “Wash Me”?

I can’t believe I have never told the story of when Phil and I stayed in the super fancy, 5 star hotel right next to our apartment in Fuyang. You can click to see the picture of the hotel here.  The outside doesn’t look that great, but the inside looked really nice.  I can’t remember if I took pictures of the room, but I know I have a brochure of the hotel somewhere.  I’ll try to find it.

Phil and I couldn’t decide what to get each other for Christmas, so we decided to treat ourselves to our first ever 5 star hotel – South China Hotel Fuyang.  We walked past it nearly everyday and got sick and tired of dreaming what it would be like to stay there.  So, about a week before Christmas, we walked into the lobby to find out how much money we would have to burn through to enjoy ourselves.  Apparently, several weeks prior to this, we had been at the same bar with the lady behind the desk.  She remembered us, and decided to drop our room charge in half.  We couldn’t decided if we wanted the regular room or the suite for a few more dollars until she let us see what latter looked like.  We had seen the other one several weeks earlier, when Tim’s(another teacher) parents came and stayed there.

As soon as we walked through the door we were wowed.  It was huge. It had two bathrooms. The one with the bath tub was almost as big as the bedroom – the room not the tub.  🙂  The bed was equally as huge and super soft.  In addition to that there was another large room with a couch and a table – the kind you eat at.  It was sorta like a living room, and I think there may have been a TV(there was another TV in our bedroom.)   I guess it was your typical suite layout, but since I had never seen one before, it looked super awesome.

The room ended up costing us 870 RMB – at the time that was about $108 – not bad for a night in a five star hotel suite.  Without the discount it would have cost us 1500 RMB – more than I would have paid to sleep in a bed anywhere, even if I could take a bath for 24 hours.  And that leads me into what this story is all about.

A week later we showed back up at the hotel and were given our respective keys.  The first thing either one of us wanted to do was take advantage of the huge garden tub.  Our apartment didn’t have a tub, just a shower, so it had been nearly 3 months since we had had a nice American bath.  When you don’t have access to a tub, you really start to miss them.  Our shower was pretty kick ass though.  It was a sauna/shower, and had it worked 100% like it was supposed to, we would have had jets of water coming out of the walls to clean us.  We never could figure out how to get them to work though.  🙁

Well, anyway, Phil and I were standing in the bathroom, taking in everything it had to offer us.  There were all sorts of bath related items that you could use for a price, of course, big lush towels, heat lamps, and a button.

We both looked at it, curious as to what it did.  There was no sign or anything.  It was just a button, sitting pretty as it pleased in the wall, next to the bath tub.

“Should I push it?” Phil asked.

“I dunno.  We don’t know what it does.” I replied.  I saw Phil’s eyes grow wide with wonder and excitement.

Phil has a history with buttons.  In a DnD game that I dragged him to a long time ago, he decided in his inebriated state of mind, that it would be a good idea to push the button that read 13, when we all clearly knew that pushing a button would make a monster appear.  Number one had made some stupid kobold appear and we killed it in all but two seconds flat.  Anyone should have been able to understand that pushing a higher number would make an even larger monster appear, but Phil didn’t care.  He wanted excitement.  So, he pushed it, and the biggest, meanest, ugliest, most difficult creature to kill appeared.  We ran for our lives, and barely survived.

Phil doesn’t play with us anymore.

So, yeah, Phil was standing in the bathroom, staring at the button.  For a brief second he was five years old again. I could tell by the way his eyes were glowing and twitching – like he had found the mother load of mischief .  Oh, he was going to push that button.

And that is exactly what he did.  With his index finger he stabbed the button.

There was silence for a moment and then I started to think that maybe it is like our light switch in the hallway back in our apartment.  Maybe it doesn’t do it’s job anymore.  And then there is a voice.  An English voice.  Talking to us in our five star hotel bathroom. In China.  In Fuyang.  Where 9 times out of 10, people can’t understand what the hell I’m saying. And vice versa.  But I understand this.

“Gentleman, are you in trouble?” (I can’t remember exactly what he said.  I just remember it sounding awkward.)

I looked at Phil and Phil looked at me.

“Oh, we are fine,” Phil said

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, we are fine. Just accidentally pushed the button.”  (Accidentally my ass.)

“Ok. Have a good evening.”

“Thanks, you too.”

As soon as the voice was gone, Phil and I bust out laughing.

Apparently, Phil had pushed the emergency button.  It made total since afterwards, but you still would think that an emergency button would have emergency written somewhere on or near it.  Hey, at least they didn’t come barging into our bathroom.  I can only imagine what kind of comedy would have ensued if they had.

When Phil and I lived in Fuyang, we really wanted some syrup to go with the pancakes we were trying to make.  Our attempts at making the syrup ourselves never produced Butterworth results.  So, we did the next best thing – we asked my mom to send us a bottle of maple extract to help give our concoction some maple flare.  We didn’t ask for a bottle of syrup because it would have made the box weigh too much and a heavy box sent to China isn’t cheap.  Sending just the syrup probably wouldn’t have cost that much, but our wish list always seemed to grow when we found out someone was going to be sending us some western goodies.  🙂

The extract did help with the taste of the syrup, but we could never get the consistency we wanted.  Eventually, we gave up and decided we would just have to wait until we returned back home to get the good stuf.  When it came time to move to Shenyang, we packed it up with all of our other stuff.  We weren’t about to scarifice any of our western goods.

A week after we got to Shenyang, we were told we would be moving again.  Phil and I weren’t particularly pleased that we would be uprooting ourselves again, but we repacked all of our goods up anyway, including our maple extract, and headed to the beautiful city of Xiamen.

In Xiamen, we unpacked everything and refused to pack again unless we were traveling or moving back home.  And for the next three months our maple extract sat quietly on our shelf, unused.  When it came time for us to go back to the States, we offered up all of our western goods to our dear friends, Patty, Eddie, and their daughter Elisa.  We knew they could get some good use out it. Elisa swore it was Christmas when we brought all of our stuff over to them.  🙂

Well, up until a few days ago, I would have thought that our maple extract had finally run out of gas and found a permanent home in a landfill in China or some other needy westerner’s cabinet.  Interestingly enough though, neither happened.

Instead, our maple extract jumped on a plane back to the States stashed away in a suitcase – destination Miami – when Patty and her family decided to leave China.  After a short stay there, it decided that it wanted to do some more traveling, and hopped on the next flight to Colombia – the country, not the city where I live.  For the next four weeks our maple extract took in the sights and then decided it wanted to settle down for a spell – somewhere else.  So, off it trotted to the airport and booked passage to Argentina, where for  at this moment in time, it still resides.  At least until Phil and I travel to Argentina next November, pick it up, and bring it back to the States with us.  🙂

I don’t know how many miles our little maple extract has traveled, I just know it’s a lot.  Perhaps, there is a section in the Guinness World Records that it would qualify for.

The combination of 28 Days Later and 2 1/2 screwdrivers is deadly.

At least for Phil.

I had one my night terrors last night and took my fear out on Phil.

I lashed out and hit his back as hard as I could with my arm.

He woke up screaming, “Why in the hell are you hitting me?!”

A few days ago at work, I had to call and ask someone on campus a question.  The conversation started like this.

"Hello, this is Gabrielle from the Employment Office.  How are you today?" I asked.

"I’m drunk."

It was not the answering I was expecting.

The video quality sucks, but my commentary kinda makes up for it.

Several years ago I started collecting Pez.  After I had collected over a one hundred or so, I ran out of space to display them.  That is when I started pinning them to the wall.  Eventually, they covered the perimeter of my room, and not long after that two of my walls were completely dedicated to Pez.  If I hadn’t stopped collecting, every inch of my room would be covered in Pez. I can only imagine what the ants thought when the found my room.  They probably screamed, “Jackpot!”

I don’t know how many I have now, but I am pretty sure it’s something like three or four hundred.  A few of them are worth some money, but the majority of them are worth less than what I paid.  People ask me why I still keep them.  I tell them that one day the world will run out of food, and when it does,  I’ll be able to survive a few days longer than everyone else.  🙂

I was very nice to the army of invading ants.  I didn’t want to kill them, so I got a piece of paper, scooped them all up and took them all outside.  It took about four trips.  As they all scuried away, I told them not to come back.  And so far, they haven’t.  🙂

Invading Ants

[myspace]http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1286725[/myspace]

During our May Week vacation in Xiamen, China, Phil and I went to the Taiwanese Folk Village. If you missed the original post about it – you can go here . There are several pictures of the place, but much like the video I am about to show you, many of them have that wretched cloud in the center. Somehow moisture got into my camera. I did everything to dry it out, but Xiamen’s humidity won.

We really had no idea what the show was about, but since the admission to see it was included in our ticket price, we decided to watch it even though we probably wouldn’t understand anything they said. Phil told me that we shouldn’t sit on the front row because we’d be easy targets and probably get asked to participate in something. I wanted a good view, so we sat on the front row anyway.

A few minutes into the show, a man came over to Phil and asked him to participate – in Chinese of course. They tried to get me to go too, but I wanted to stay behind so that I could record it. I laughed so hard that I had I tears streaming down my face.

I really have no idea what important story they were acting out , or why they had Phil drink three shots of liquor.  Phil later said that it reminded him of Everclear. I just thought it was funny, and that you might enjoy watching it. You gotta love China. They think of the craziest ways to amuse people. They really do.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTMauhqVaZ0[/youtube]