Day 3 -- Shanghai, China to Suzhou, China

We left the airport at about 12:30am and started the trek to Mom & Dad's in Suzhou. The driver avoided the highways (not comfortable? tolls? not really sure why.), so the drive home took longer than it normally would have. On the way home I got a text from my good friend Tim who just moved back to Boston. He told me that Boston gave him a welcome home present--a snow storm and knocked out the power. I told him that Tokyo gave me a present too and I was now traveling with just the clothes on my back. Arrived at the 21st (top) floor apartment about 3:00am and had a mini-Christmas with my parents. They got us mostly fun/Chinese gifts and we got them practical gifts that would be easy to pack when they come home or move on to the next job. Enjoyed a peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich, then finally wound down about 4:30am and went to bed. Woke up at 10:00am and called the airport about my bag. My Chinese language skills haven't escaped me totally as I was able to ask (in Chinese) if the girl spoke English (hey, it's not much, but it's a start). They still didn't know where it was and said they would call later. I took a long overdue shower, borrowed some clothes from Daniel and my mom (fortunately she had just bought some CK knock off thongs that fit me), and we headed out for a taitai (wife) lunch. At "The Italian Restaurant" we met several of the wives (their husbands work for various companies here) and some of their kids too. There were some from Colorado, Wisconsin, New York, Holland, and Denmark. We had quite the array of accents. Even though it is "The Italian Restaurant," you can order just about any type of food--Italian, American, Mexican, Indian, and some others that I'm sure I missed. After lunch we hopped in a taxi over to Bar Street and did some last minute shopping with Sally, one of the GE wives who will be headed home (end of the job) on Thursday. We hit the DVD shop and I couldn't resist buying seasons 1-4 of "Scrubs." Everything DVD is 7RMB (Yuan) per disc (exchange is 8.1RMB to US$1). Sometimes the packaging on the discs are impossible to read (either in Chinese or such garbled English that it just doesn't make sense--occassionally you also get the description for another movie on the wrong cover), but more often than not, the DVDs are decent. "Brokeback Mountain" and "Jarhead" are also out, so Mom bought one and we bought the other. Left Bar Street and took another taxi to go talk to Mi, a travel agent that has also become a friend of Mom's. Mi worked with us to figure out the best plan for an upcoming trip to Beijing, Changsha, and possibly Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Sanya. Stopped by Starbuck's before taking a taxi and arriving home just before 6:00pm. Dad was home from work when we arrived and had me call about my bag again. This time they said it was supposed to arrive tonight and they would call when it got in to arrange for delivery. We decided to walk to "The Banana Leaf" with Jerry and Sally for dinner. We were greeted with a "Sa-wat-dee Kaa" and had excellent Thai and Malaysian food (curry, satay, etc.) served to us family style in a private room. Some entertainers also stopped in to play guitar and sing "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers. We ordered too much food for 6 people to finish (I had already way over-indulged), paid our 375RMB bill (total--yes, that's a VERY nice, fancy, EXPENSIVE meal for less than $8 per person) and headed home. I lasted about a half hour on the couch before falling asleep by 9:00pm.