Busy week, long update

It's been a few days since I last posted. Here's what's happened:

• I went to the Entry/Exit Admin to apply for my visa extension on Tuesday. It was successful in that they accepted my paperwork this time. I go back Tuesday morning 12/23 to pick up my passport. I do hope it contains a visa extension. Otherwise I have to go back to the hotel, pack my things, and immediately leave the country.
• I tried to go shoe shopping after I was done turning in my forms. That was a big disappointment. See, the shoe district is actually a terrible place to buyer shoes. Not because it's expensive there (it's not), but because it's full of wholesalers, just like the leather district. Everything here has a district full of wholesalers. They usually have a small box of old samples you can buy. But a US ladies size 8 is not something easy to find here, even in a store that is willing to sell one pair at a time. If I try on clothes, I tend to need a large (rather than the small I wear in the US). All the cute tops are designed for someone with no chest at all. So basically, I feel like a big, fat giant at the end of a shopping trip. I'm now thankful that I don't need to buy clothes for Brazil here.
• Aki headed back to Finland, so now it's just me and Billy here. That means we'll be spending less money on wine at dinner, but it also means we've lost the only person we had to hang out with.
• We bought our tickets to return to NY on Jan 12. We couldn't get on the same flights we used to come over here, so we're flying from Hong Kong to Tokyo instead. We'll be driving there (there's a coach that pics people up from all the hotels) and get to spend 1 afternoon & evening in Hong Kong. That should be fun. Keep your fingers crossed we get confirmed for upgrades on the Tokyo to Atlanta flight!
• On Wednesday evening, we got together with one of Billy's fraternity brothers. Turns out Ethan now works for iRobot -- the people who make the Roomba and the Scooba (and now they have a gutter cleaning robot, how cool is that?). They've got some manufacturers in this area so he was in Guangzhou for a day. He's been over a few times in the last year, and he's actually pretty good at Chinese. Limited vocabulary, but impressive pronunciation. It was nearly an hour taxi ride away (total cost, about $15 each way). How could we not go hang out?! What's the other side of the city when you've already come to the other side of the world? So we ate sushi at his hotel then went out to a street market. It was my first experience not a wholesale district. If I really needed cheap tops or handbags or jewelry or socks, I could have gotten some. I even tried on a cardigan and a jacket. Yes, the prices were good, but do I really need a pretty purple jacket right now? It would have been less than $40, but who knows when I'd ever get to wear it. Not this year anyway.
• Last night we got Papa Johns delivered. Yup, they have them in China, too. They even have the garlic sauce. Got a thin crust pizza, a pasta bake, and cheesy garlic bread. It was pretty good. We'll probably order from them again. And it's nice not to have to go out to a restaurant for once. Although it turns out our favorite Italian restaurant also does delivery...

The reason I haven't posted in a few days is that I've been especially busy with work. We had a super important release of a whole new global nav over at oDesk on Thursday. The monthly newsletter and blog posts had to be coordinated with the release. Basically, I'm back to full-time work again. Now need to develop a strategy for a total help content overhaul. Near all the help content is now either obsolete, or painfully out of date. We're trying to shift to less documentation, more in-line help, and more tutorials. Which means lots of fun work for me. And I'm not saying that sarcastically, either.