Hello Back Pain

Yes ... it's finally happened. We have one more day until our 3rd week is offically over and so far I've been feeling pretty good. I won't play like my body isn't tired ... but nothing pulled or sore other than overuse. Today was the day though ... my back muscles have had enough impact haha. I'm up on stage for the 1st show by the time the show is over my back muscles decide they're not going to relax. I just lay down on the floor back stage to try and relax them ... but as of this very minute they're still not relaxed. I feel like I have a solid piece of board as a back. It's not fun. Thankfully ou day ended a little earlier today so we'll all have more time to rest up for tomorrow. I've never looked forward to a Tuesday more than I am right now.

Here's something else weird that keeps happening to me here. People keep poking me. Yes that's right ... poking me. I stand at the side of the stage waiting to go on and people will randomly come up to me and poke my arms or my chest or my abs and then either laugh or smile, or say something to me in chinese that I obviously don't understand. It's not happening every single day ... but it happened a few times in the first few weeks and then again today. The guys are all standing by the side of the stage, we're in cargo pants and black vests. These two men come walking up beside us ... they look at us ... then at me ... and then poke my arm O_o; They turn to each other and say ... something ... then turn back to me and one of them is holding his hands out in front of his chest. I turn to Carl and I'm like "Um ... is he trying to tell me something about breasts? Do I have breasts? What's going on?" We all start laughing and I turn back to them and they give me a thumbs up and walk away. I don't think I'm ever going to get used to that one.

I think I'm also getting known down in the eating hall too. I went down to have dinner last night with my usual mountain of food and this table of women watched me as I piled all my food up and ate. Now when I say watched me eat I don't mean glanced over their shoulders every now and again discreetly to peek. One lady fully turned around and was just flat out staring at me. They were all laughing and talking in chinese while I was eating so I guess it was some kind of show? I dunno. I guess they're not used to seeing someone walk back with 2 plates of food at a time and then pile them both together to make a food mountain. I'm really enjoying being able to eat so much without having to buy grocceries though, but I'm gonna have to start watching it 'cause I've put on a bit of weight since I've been here. Usually for people it ends up being the opposite. Because of the long travel and the new environment and foods people tend to lose some weight when they travel. Not for me haha! I'm not concerned that I'm getting fat obviously ... but still. If anything drastic in that realm occurs I'm sure someone on the team will let me know.

Not too much else happened today so as promised I'm going to start on the catch up from the last two weeks. I'll do it in sections ... but I warn you ... it's a pretty long read so if you're interested ... go grab a snack and get comfortable. Here it comes:

Day 1: Everyone including me decided that it would be a good idea to stay up all night and try and exhaust ourselves so that we'd be able to sleep away most of the dreaded 15 hour flight to Hong Kong. I don't know about the others ... but I was pretty excited so it wasn't hard for me to stay awake. I did nap for 2 hours though right before I left my house. (not to mention I was a bit groggy from the numerous shots my doctor gave me for the trip for all sorts of weird diseases and stuff just a few hours prior)

So we all meet up at the airport at 7am getting ready for our 9am flight. Our flight was booked electronically so we had printed copies of our itinerary that we would use to check in. We've all done this before so we figured it would be no problem. We get in line to get our boarding passes and check in our luggage but the guy at the counter won't let us check in with the itinerary we have because the return flight is just a dummy. To be honest, I don't know what the problem was because a lot of people fly that way when they're not sure when they're coming back, but for whatever reason this was unacceptable and we couldn't get through. So now we had to wait while James made a bunch of calls to try and sort everything out. The best part is that Adrienne had a separate booking so she was already checked in and set to fly out to Hong Kong alone. She ... wasn't too happy about having to be in Hong Kong by herself. Here's a bit of video commentary I made about that:

The next 2 hours went a little something like this: Lucy sat on one of her bags napping on the airport floor, Christian sat on the floor staring at ... something, James was running back and forth making calls and trying to figure out what was happening and get us on a plane, Carl and I had a mini break dance battle in the middle of the terminal and then watched videos on his laptop, Adrienne sat around trying to figure out what she was going to do in Hong Kong alone for a day, and the people that came to see us off stood around talking. We were an interesting crew.

8:40am hits (our flight takes off at 9am by the way) we already figured we weren't going to make it ... but now it was obvious that we weren't getting on our flight. James had been trying to get us on another flight during the day ... but to no avail. Thankfully Adrienne managed to get her stuff off the plane so she didn't end up getting sent off alone ... but now we had to reschedule our flight and travel arrangements until the next day HA! So ... we all went home.

I was super productive during the day since I now had an extra day in Toronto ... as you'll see in the next video:

Okay maybe not so productive. The day I should've been flying out to China was spent doing some last minute shopping, watching tv, and napping. It was a bit frustrating ... but really funny at the same time.

Day 2: So we're back at the airport at 7am ... ready to try this entire ordeal again. This time, with return tickets ... and on a different airline haha! Thankfully everything works out fine this time and we're ready to go.

We say our goodbyes and head through to our gate. Nothing eventful happened here ... we bought and ate ridiculously overpriced airport food ... we waited ... we boarded the plane.

We're now flying Cathay Pacific rather than Air Canada, which I've never flown before, and from what I looked up online the day before (my productive day), the planes looked really comfortable. Overall, it was ... my only gripe was that they have this system where they give you more space around your seat by having all the seats recline by sliding down rather than moving back. This way it doesn't take up room for the person behind you ... but at the same time ... you don't actually get to lie back either. I just kind of rolls your body down so that you're slouching. So I slouched ... for 15 hours. My back loved it! Okay one more small thing ... they also decided that rather than have a big space to put a backpack or carry on under the seat they would use that space for a huge box (I'm assuming it's your lifejacket etc) so the row that Christian, Carl, and I sat in was completely full with our bags and we barely had room to put our feet down. Now this is a small issue because I can't blame an airline for the fact that Carl, Christian, and I wrecked up the place like slobs as soon as we sat down haha. (There's a video fo that so you'll see what I mean). The only real reason there are any complaints at all is just because of the length of the flight. Nothing can make a 15 hour flight good except the plane landing. They treated us well and it was as comfortable as I'm sure it possibly could be ... I'm just so glad that isn't happening again for a long time.

Now, I'm not sure how the others did on the flight, but I didn't manage to actually get any real sleep. I half passed out for 30 minutes or so every now and again but that's about it. I'm not good with sleeping in vehicles of any kind so I don't fall in to a deep sleep. I spent a lot of time looking outside my window though and it was cool because we flew pretty far north, so the sun never actually went down even though it was technically night time. As the sun went down we ended up following it as we flew north, it made it to the horizon and then as we flew in to Asia is started coming back up again. There were time where the cloud cover was thin and we could see glaciers and mountains too. The only other person I know for sure that didn't sleep was Christian. His flight was spent watching every single movie in the tv system(including Sex in the City .... no comment).

Anyway, after 15 hours of movies, music, quick naps, rice and chicken and pork, instant noodles , and back aches ... the plane finally landed in Hong Kong! We got our luggage and headed out to ... tada! Nowhere! Well since the day before got messed up we needed to wait while James arranged a hotel for us now that we were a day later. We got some quick snacks while we waited (and felt like millionaires because when you convert $1 to Hong Kong dollars you get $7 ... but then it was also weird to see a $20 price tag on a bottle of juice) and sat around the airport for a while James did his thing. I went out and bought a Hong Kong SIM card for my phone. My phone number is now 8 digits long.

It took a while to sort out, but soon we finally piled into some cabs and off to the Ramada Hong Kong.

First observation I made, everything is packed together very tightly and is a whole lot smaller in Asia. The roads are nowhere near as simple and straight as back home either. I have come to very much appreciate our nice, clean cut blocks going north, south, east, and west ... this here was just a maze of criss crossing random turning roads and bridges and highways. As we were driving I swear we passed by the same places like 4 or 5 times and we were driving in circles ... but we got to the hotel in good time.

We checked in got up to our rooms and they were really nice ... but again ... really small. I'm not a huge guy, but I barely fit on the bed! The bathroom had a shower that was like a futuristic tube. I wasn't able to turn 360 degrees around in the thing without my shoulders hitting something. (video of the room) We all needed some rest but we wanted to adjust to the new time as soon as possible so we took a quick 2 hour nap and then forced ourselves to get up and go out. We walked around the hotel area a bit and went out to eat ... more rice and meat. Food is really cheap though (once you convert it back to Canadian dollars) I got my dinner meal for $5 ... a full plate of fried rice. I asked for water though and the waitress seemed to get really upset at me for some reason. No idea why. I've been told though that drinking cold water around here isn't normal though ... it's all hot water so maybe that's why? Sigh ... so much to learn.

After dinner we explored a little more ... jumped on the subway (which is a million times cleaner and faster than ours back home) and went to a few stores just to check everything out. I didn't have my camera charged at this point because I thought that the hotel would have the converter for the plugs ... but it didn't. I took a few pictures on my phone though. At this point I was completely exhuasted ... we got back to the hotel and I passed out in my midget bed in about 5 seconds.

The next day was exploring and shopping day ... and it was my birthday YAY! It was funny though because I woke up and forgot it was my birthday because we're 12 hours ahead and I didn't switch my phone or my watch. About an hour after we got up it hit me and I looked at James and went ... hey dude ... it's my birthday today. Everyone got a good laugh at it. Maybe I'm just losing my mind in my old age. I didn't technically do anything special for my birthday, but then again I was in Hong Kong so that's pretty cool.

The girls got up early somehow and took off before us ... the guys slept in and then went out to eat. We jumped on the subway again (which we found out was connected to Disney Land haha) and went to this huge shopping mall. Now I'm not a mall or shopping person, but it was cool to walk around and see all the stuff they have. James had to head out to meet up with Giulia (who I didn't mention before had to go to a wedding before coming to China so she was meeting us later). I can't say much about the shopping or the mall other than it was big, because I don't shop and don't remember anything about stores no matter where I am. We say these projector tv glasses that you can hook up to an iPod or something of that nature and watch video as if you were looking at a huge tv. I've seen them around before and tested a few at some video game conferences I've been too ... but Christian was going nuts for them. I think every other sentence that came out of his mouth had something to do with video glasses haha.

I did go outside to try and get some pictures but it's so smoggy and so humid outside that I couldn't really see much. It's actually really gross most of the time ... but I'm kind of used to it now.

We walked around checking things out until we got a call from James to meet up after he picked up Giulia from the airport. We meet them at the subway station in the mall ... and Giulia has nothing in her hands except a small bag. They airline lost her luggage. We're all kind of laughing because ... well it's funny ... and we assume that it was just misplaced considering there aren't a lot of flights from Canada to China anyway. (we weren't laughing much later because her luggage didn't end up showing up for days ... but it's funny again now). Now what you have to understand about Giulia is that she's allergic to ... pretty everything on the planet earth ... so all of her medicine was in her luggage (because you can't take bags and bottles of pills on the plane) AND all of her costumes for the show were in her luggage because there were too many to fit in a carry on bag. So she had nothing! An interesting situation to say the least. (again ... not so funny at the time as she rolled around in bed with no medicine and having to do shows in clothing that wasn't her size ... but funny now)

We met back up with the rest of the group and walked and ate ... did the whole tourist thing. Not that it wasn't exciting to be in a new place ... but at this point we're all still tired and want to rest. Okay ... well *I* was really tired and wanted to rest.

The next day we took off for Macau on a ferry so we could get to The Venetian ... our new home for 3 months. It takes about an hour by ferry to get from Hong Kong to Macau and then took us another 20 minutes by cab to get to our area. (oh did I mention Giulia gets sea sick too? ... ya ... pills for that ... in the luggage HAHA!)

The area we're in is just packed with casinos and hotels etc ... it's crazy. I can't figure out how all of them survive with so many of them so close together. People love their gambling here.

Trying to explain the hotel won't work so I'll have a video for it instead.

We got set up in our rooms (I live on the 16th floor) and then met up to check out the rest of the hotel and get something to eat. At this point ... I still haven't seen even half of the place and I've been here for 2 weeks. I got a few pictures on my phone (which are up on facebook) while we walked around ... but didn't stay up too late because work started the next day.

I'll leave the first day of rehersals and work for another day since this has already been a very long read (I'll be surprised if anyone has even made it to this point). My fingers need a break ... my back needs a break. Time for some much needed rest before tomorrow.

Peace out!