Chopsuey

Very glad to be back in blogging action (and very, very glad to have Star World again... missed the performance episode of American Idol, dang... more on AI later). Will spare you all the boring details of the business aspect of my trip to Shanghai, and share some random thoughts that meandered through my mind while I was there.

1. There is actually a Hooters in China. When I saw the poster (featuring Chinese waitresses who had suspiciously fair-sized boobs), I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I don't think you could ask for a surer sign of cultural decline.

2. At the fashion show we attended, the clothes were modeled by Caucasians in a roomful of Asian executives and entrepreneurs. I couldn't decide who was being degraded by whom, so I was torn between muted outrage and amused irony while watching the spectacle... and checking out the hot male models (hey, I'm only human :p).

3. I envy ABC's (American-born Chinese) who are fluent in both English and Mandarin. My pathetic Chinese-Filipino self can only claim fluency in English and competency (if you can call it that) in Filipino, which is pretty much useless anywhere outside our dinky archipelago. The usefulness of Fookienese is pretty much limited by the same geographical boundary, plus Xiamen and Taiwan, but I've never been to either. I can get by with Mandarin to haggle with street vendors or order "safe" food at restaurants, but not well enough to actually conduct business with suppliers. I am such a pathetic Chinese person.

4. It's so much easier now to get my parents to buy me stuff, because I suspect they're so pleased that I came to work for them, they're sort of rewarding me for it. My mom got me a very nice bag that I can use for carrying documents and which will make me look more professional at meetings, haha. I feel less guilty now when I get expensive gifts like this because I figure, it's part of the fringe benefits of being the C.O.O. *evil laugh*

5. Why did McDonalds Philippines stop serving milkshakes? :(

6. If I hated GMA before for being a lousy president, now I hate her with a passion for personal reasons. It's one thing when she screws up running the nation, but an entirely different thing when she screws up my life. The day of our return to Manila, she had NAIA closed for an hour so she could fly to Jakarta, delaying our flight home by an entire three hours. We spent five hours at Pudong Airport waiting and aging, all for GMA's own frickin' convenience.

For everyone who texted and asked me how my trip was, you may now understand why my response was "tiring, extremely so" (see number 6). We arrived in Manila a bit past midnight instead of 9:00PM, and we had to wait until 2:30AM to catch the second rerun of the AI elimination episode. And as if I wasn't infuriated enough that day, Scott still didn't get kicked off!! What the hell?! I am at a complete loss to explain how such a class act like Anwar could have gotten fewer votes than that unjustifiably smug redneck (did you see how he smirked when Ryan read Simon's negative comment on his performance? augh, I hate his fat ass!). My brother may be right, all the underachievers in America must be voting for him. Perhaps Hooters is not the surest sign of cultural decline after all.