Surprises are always fun

This weekend was looking to be another quite boring one.  I had some fun plans but all of them fell apart late Friday.  Then Friday night I managed to meet up with a chinese friend of mine to go eat some BBQ and Saturday I met up with Kelly.  She was supposed to be working all day with a decent lunch break so I had planned to meet her during her break but when I met her she said she had been tired so she told them she wasn't going to work.  I guess in the low-level jobs you can call in tired.  Cool, but I guess it makes sense since they work for essentially $1/hour.
She had never had pizza and I decided I needed to change that so I took her to an Italian place that actually does pretty good pizza.  I think she liked it well enough.
While we were there a foreign friend of mine (Adam) happened to come in on his own so we talked for awhile and he said he was going to play "football" (soccer) so we went with him to the University and kicked it around for awhile and tried to throw a frisbee but it was really windy, even for DY.  Others were flying kites and we thought that sounded like a pretty good idea so we wandered everywhere and managed to buy one for about $2.

Adam and Kelly assembling the kite.

When we got it back to the field Adam got it flying for about 5 seconds when the string just ended.  It had never occurred to us that the string would be so short.  We managed to get it back but it's a pretty low-flying kite.  I hope to find some more string today and try to fly it.
While we were flying it we attracted the usual crowd of chinese people watching us... ok, more likely watching Adam as he's really tall.  He's been here awhile now and has plenty of friends in the city but I'm always looking to meet new people so I started talking to them.  A few of them added me on QQ and 2 of the girls even took me out for dinner.
So a day that had looked to be quite boring ended up being really great.  With any luck I can duplicate this.
This upcoming week I have to work 7 days in a row.  I also had to do this back in October but at that time it resulted in the following 7 days being off so it was worth it.  This time there is a holiday on the following Wednesday so they move the preceding weekend to Mon/Tues.  As a result I work 7 days, have 3 off, then work Thurs/Fri before the next weekend.  Really for the 1 day extra we get off I'd rather just not have it or just have a Wednesday off.  Ah well.
They're starting to talk about contracts for next year more seriously now so I'll probably have to make some sort of decision within a month.  Hoping something big happens to make me want to stay or leave :-)
That's my update for now.  As always I welcome comments or emails.  I added a few more pics online in the March 2012 folder.
Wiseguy1