Leaps and Bounds

Big stuff today. First of all, the rumored trip for Diego and me to explore China is now a striking reality. We met with our boss yesterday and he suggested we visit Shanghai, Beijing and Xi'an, as well as a couple smaller cities in between Nanjing and Shanghai in order for us to gain a respect for the broad diversity in the Chinese market. But I think it's just an excuse for us to travel. We will have a couple chauffeurs in our unofficial guardians at the company, and we will stay in hotels wherever we go! Our itinerary is to drive to Shanghai next Thursday (by hiring a driver and car, obviously), stopping along the way in one or two smaller cities to see the company branches there. We will spend Friday and Saturday in Shanghai. Diego and I have a USC luncheon to attend on Saturday. On Sunday (I think), we fly to either Beijing or Xi'an. We spend a couple days there, seeing the Great Wall/terracotta warriors, etc., then switch it up and visit the other city for another couple days. We return to Nanjing on Friday after eight days of travel. IN CHINA.

I'm not sure if I explained this before, but there's a holiday coming up in China on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We don't have to work on those days, so the factory is working this weekend instead. That part kinda sucks, but the point is that we have three days off, then we leave on our trip, and we come back on Friday of the following week. We have two full weeks off! Diego and I are in awe of this ridiculous opportunity and don't really know what to say to our boss to thank him enough. Mostly we just don't say anything because we're afraid we'll screw it up and he'll call it off. But you can bet he's going to get the coolest gift known to man when we return to the good ol' USA.

But that was just the beginning of the news. Well, ok, it was also the best part of the news. But we also found a rock climbing gym! Diego wasn't really too excited about it, but I was super excited. It's a little too expensive to go all the time, and I didn't want to buy any kind of membership before I left town for two weeks, but all the same, the guys there are really cool and friendly. They have a really long wall filled with holds, about three different angles, and they just set routes as they go and compete against each other. I climbed for awhile, it was really nice.

The last thing is that we found peanut butter! We've been looking everywhere! And we found it! Diego was really happy and called it his one true love. He said he knew they would find each other. I gave them my congratulations.