The past few days at work I spend the first part of the day studying mandarin and after lunch go to work various parts of the factory. I spent a second day working in the packaging department, once again putting on tags, folding clothes, and putting them into their packages. The theme for that day were the classic Hanes white undershirts. I found it slightly ironic that the I was in China packing up t-shirts in which the outside of the wrapping said "All-American Comfort". The next day I spent putting the packaged clothing into cartons. I had to mark the boxes correctly to ID which box contained what clothing, then assemble the boxes, and finally put the clothes in the boxes. I think they kind of slowed everything down for me and I would have liked to see production at full speed.

This weekend my uncle Jack and his wife Ann left for Shanghai to be with their son while he had to take his 2-day college entrance exam. Unlike the SAT or ACT, where you can really get any score and get into some school, the test in China you must actually get a certain score to pass. Then depending on your score various colleges recruit you. Anyways, I am home alone for the weekend and am looking forward to a relaxing weekend to myself. I can sleep, watch movies, read, and cook not Chinese food without anybody looking over my shoulder. From experience I have found that Asians tend to worry to a ridiculous extent, so naturally Jack and company were scared to leave me home alone, but I insisted I would be fine. Last night a coworker, Minni and her friend, took me out to dinner to a new restaurant. I had steak and coffee, 2 things I have found to be very rare here. Although the steak was slightly overcooked I was glad to eat it. After dinner we walked around the city a bit and I kept seeing the oddest thing where people would line up in the streets, play music, and then all dance in unison. It was like out of a movie where people break out in song and dance and you're asking "how does everybody know the same dance moves already?" Then we decided to rent a small motorboat and drive around the river, which surrounds the downtown area. It was cool to see the city at night with lights and fountains and all, but we overestimated the length of the river and a short trip turned into about a 2 hour river expedition. I think we were low on gas by the end of it b/c we were puttering along the river while all the other boats were zooming by us.

I got back home around 10PM, my first night alone, to find that USA vs Brazil was on TV. I clearly had to stay up and watch the game and cheer on the US, but it turned out to be a very embarrassing game. USA was losing 3-0 when I had to turn off the TV from shame. They played with no emotion. The entire team was sluggish, made basic errors, there was no passing or movement off the ball. It seemed like the players on USA were afraid and didn't want the ball. One of the US players got a red card for a stupid late foul because of frustration and mistakes. Meanwhile Brazil was playing beautifully and constantly danced around USA players. After watching this I'm not sure if USA will even qualify for the World Cup, let alone do well in the tournament. But on the bright side Birmingham City seem to be doing well and picking up strong players in a fight to remain in the Premier League next season. Newcastle seems to be in shambles dad. I'm staying very up to date online about soccer and global news because it is tough to get information in China because of the censorship and my lack of understanding the language.