A few observations from China

It's 5:24 pm in Hefei and 3:24am in Houston.  I'm super exhausted, having just awoke from a 2 hour nap. All the girls are still asleep. We're gonna try to wake them up in a few minutes and stay awake for 3 hours, then go to bed and see if we can get adjusted to the new time zone.  They are bringing Ava to our hotel room tomorrow, and she'll be with us permanently after that!  That should happen at roughly 9:30am tomorrow (7:30pm in Houston).

A few funny things I've noticed since we've been here (the past 24 hours).

1. If you are a male, from China, and are in a public restroom, you WILL walk into the bathroom and the first thing you will do is clear your throat and spit in the toilet. I've been in several public restrooms since we landed and literally EVERY guy came in and hawked a big lougie and spit into the toilet before doing his business. A little freaky.

2. In China it is very unusual to see a white guy with a red-head wife, a Chinese daughter and a blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter. As we made our way through the Shanghai airport we were gawked at like crazy.  Numerous people walked up and talked to us, and several took pictures with us, mostly to get a picture of Alex.  She is quite the rarity amongst an entire population of black-haired, brown-eyed Chinese.  This is especially true of middle-aged Chinese women. There were whole groups of them who stared at us with their mouths agape as we walked by. I tried to get a picture of them as they stared at us, but I'm not a very good moving photographer. It's interesting being a celebrity, but having no way to really communicate with anyone.  We just try to smile a lot.

3. Chinese airlines aren't very well used or efficient. It's a huge country with 1.3 billion people, but probably a very small fraction of the populace ever flies on an airplane. Every Chinese airport I've ever been in is pretty much empty. Our flight yesterday was maybe one fourth full, and there were 5 or 6 flight attendants for 35 people. I'm not sure how the service was, because I fell into a mild coma for the entire one hour flight. 

4. If you're a woman, and a professional, you'll definitely dress like a flight attendant from the 70's. Kerchief's everywhere!

5. When Ridley Scott made Bladerunner I'm pretty sure he spend a lot of time in major Chinese cities for his inspiration on what he wanted the future to look like in his film.

6. As far as weather is concerned, Hefei is London. Cold, rainy, foggy. All day long.