After surviving mainland China, we arrived in Hong Kong with high hopes and we haven’t been disappointed.

I may have screwed up a little on our hotel (it’s very nice, but located down at one end of the city), but other than that we couldn’t be happier.

The skyline is amazing. Traffic barely backs up even at rush hour. It feels very foreign, but everyone speaks English (well, everyone under 40 years of age). There’s a ton of stuff to do and see. And the subways and electric trams are cheap and easy to figure out.

This is going to be fun.

I mentioned in an earlier blog item that our friend Richie is Buddhist. In fact, it should be noted that he’s probably one of the world’s very few Cajun Buddhists.

Richie’s wife Jill calls him her little Buddha. Well, Jill, today we went to see Hong Kong’s Big Buddha.

Big is not just a figure of speech. This buddha is really big. He’s 111-feet tall and top of that he sits on top of a mountain.

The thing is, seeing the Big Buddha is not easy. Getting to the monastery required a 40-minute subway ride followed by a 30-minute bus ride up a series of switchbacks. And just when you breathe a sigh of relief because you’ve finally reached the monastery, you find out that you still haven’t reached the Big Buddha. You still need to climb a stairway with 238 steps. Then, of course, you need to do all of the above in reverse to get home.

You’ll be happy to know, Richie, that we threw all our spare change into the collection boxes located in several convenient locations around the Big Buddha.

Those monks don’t monkey around when it comes to money.

We had to get up early to catch our flight to Hong Kong. Our room faced east and we decided to leave the drapes open all night so the morning light could flood into the room and wake us up.

I was shaving when Jamie called for me to come to the window. She was looking out and said, “What are those things hovering outside our window?”

Whatever they were, there were six of them, they had red and blue lights on their undersides, and they seemed to be hanging in the air outside our 20th floor window.

Holy crap. I was already paranoid enough about blogging in Communist China, being unable to access Google and having Ray’s photo of Tiananmen Square censored. Now it looked like Chinese drones were watching from right outside our window. It was strange.

When we checked out of the hotel I asked the front desk clerk if he had any idea what we might have seen. At first he said he didn’t know. Then he said, “Ahhhh, sometimes the elders fly their kites early in the morning because the wind is good.”

“But they have lights,” I said.

“How else could they see them in the dark,” he replied.

How else, indeed.

Were they really kites? Were they really drones? Well, as a wise man once said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

NOTE: Two of the “kites” can be seen in the upper left side of the photo just above the yellow reflection in our window.

Call me crazy, but I thought we could walk into Tiananmen Square and recreate the photo of the lone Chinese man standing in front of the tanks. No tanks, of course, but I thought it would be fun to have a photo of myself assuming the man’s famous pose.

Unfortunately, you can’t do anything “lone” in China because there are 1.3 billion Chinese and maybe even more tourists. And a goodly percentage of them can be found in Tiananmen Square at any given moment.

Another thing you can’t do in China is perform a Google search. The Chinese government is still a Communist dictatorship and they censor the internet. I was unable to access Google to search for that famous photo until we got here to Hong Kong.

I thought I could get around the Chinese censors by sending my friend Ray a cryptic email asking him to “Use that popular search engine to find the famous photo of the lone guy standing in the famous square and send it back to me”. He sent me the photo, but I was unable to open it.

There are lots of other sites I was also unable to access in China. CafePress, which hosts my T-shirt business, was unavailable. YouTube, which I think is owned by Google, was unavailable. A bunch of other American news sites were unavailable.

Thank god for the First Amendment. As long as it lasts.

Despite the fact that this is the 19th anniversary of our first date, Jamie walked out of the bathroom this morning and announced that she’s leaving me. I know this comes as a huge shock to our friends and loved ones and I’d like to give you more details, but I’m unable to do that until I tell you this story:

When I was fourteen my family took a driving vacation across the country. We timed it so that we could go to a Los Angeles Dodgers game in Cincinnati and I even talked my dad into staying in the same hotel in which the team stayed. It was called the Netherlands Hilton.

My dad was a Dutch dairy farmer which by definition means he was tight with a buck. Our typical vacation accommodations were some low-priced, no-name motel along the main highway. So we knew that a downtown, brand name hotel like the Netherlands Hilton would be a move up in quality, but we didn’t know how big a move up.

When we rolled up to the hotel’s front door, a uniformed valet came out and drove the car away. That immediately made my dad wonder what he had gotten himself into. When we walked into the lobby my mom and dad’s eyes bugged out. It was huge. It was ornate. It was beyond anything they had ever experienced.

My mom turned to my dad and in complete horror said, “Bill, let’s get out of here.”

I, being sophisticated far beyond my fourteen pimply-faced years, tried to act as if I was used to walking into grand hotel lobbies. I tried equally hard not to let anyone see my legs shaking.

There is, of course, a point to this detour into history:

No matter how far and wide I may have traveled, no matter what degree of success I may have achieved, and no matter how sophisticated my friends may be, I am still my father’s son. The old saying “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” really is true. In other words, I have no trouble admitting that our hotel in Shanghai, the Waldorf Astoria, is not only far beyond my expectations, it’s far beyond my comfort level. This level of luxury just isn’t me.

With that in mind, let’s get back to the headline: Jamie announces that she’s leaving me.

She didn’t say she was leaving me for another man. She said she’s leaving me for our Waldorf Astoria toilet. And I don’t blame her.

This is the fanciest toilet I’ve ever seen. When you open the bathroom door the toilet lid raises automatically. The seat begins to warm automatically. A soft light turns on automatically. And it flushes automatically. It has a control panel that would look at home in a jumbo jet. It’s so smart that it may win a Rhodes Scholarship. And to top it all off, the little son of a bitch has apparently whispered sweet nothings in my wife’s ear and caressed her anatomical nether regions. And it has cuckolded me in the process.

So although I will miss her tremendously, I wish Jamie the best in her new life. She clearly deserves something better than what I am able to provide. I’m sure she and the toilet will have a long, wonderful life together.

I’m sure you join me in wishing them well.

I read somewhere that there are 50 cities in China with more than five million people and more than 160 cities with more than one million.

Makes sense, I guess. It would be tough for a country to have a total population of 1.3 billion people without a long list of large cities. The thing is, I’ve never heard of most of them. Cities like Guangzhou, Shantou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Wuhan to name just a few. Wouldn’t you think you’d have heard of every city in the world that’s home more than five million souls?

Our tour guide to the Great Wall mentioned that Shanghai is the largest city in China, but added that Beijing is only number three. What the hell is number two? I had to look it up. It’s Chongqing, another city I’d never heard of, which lies somewhere in the middle of the country and is home to 28,846,170 lucky devils.

We’d never heard of Xi’ An nor Chengdu before we visited. Yet the former’s population is 13,000,000 and the latter’s is 14,000,000.

Who knew?

EVERYONE IN CHINA SCREAMS! THEY SCREAM INTO THEIR CELL PHONES! THEY SCREAM IN CONVERSATIONS WITH PEOPLE IN THE NEXT CHAIR! THEY SCREAM IN THE STREET! THEY SCREAM AT THE MARKET! THEY SCREAM IN THE RESTAURANTS! THEY SCREAM IN THE MORNING! THEY SCREAM AT LUNCH! THEY SCREAM IN THE EVENING! THEY SCREAM WHILE THEY’RE EATING! THEY SCREAM WHILE THEY’RE SMOKING! THEY PROBABLY SCREAM WHILE THEY’RE SLEEPING!

IT’S JUST AN ODD LITTLE CULTURAL IDIOSYNCRASY, BUT ALL THIS SCREAMING MAKES ME SO CRAZY I COULD SCREAM!

Every hotel we’ve stayed at in China — the Marriott Great Wall in Beijing, the Xi’ An Hilton, the Chengdu Shangri-La and the Waldorf Astoria in Shanghai — has upgraded us to a far nicer room than we paid for. We can’t figure out why.

For example, here in Shanghai the guest relations manager showed us to our room and said, “This is my favorite room in the hotel.” Then she opened the drapes and showed us the remarkable river and skyline view out our window.

We can’t figure out why we’re getting special treatment. In Beijing we thought it was because we’d come all the way from Moscow on the train and they felt sorry for us. Then in Xi’ An we said, “Well, maybe it’s because we have a lot of points on our Hilton credit card.” But the Shangril-La in Chengdu is an independent hotel with which we had no prior connection. In other words, there seems to be no rhyme nor reason for our upgrades.

Maybe this is it:

I’ve mentioned Bob Colombatto, my first creative director, more than once on this blog. He hired me over the phone without having met me in person because he liked something funny I put on my pathetically thin resume.

When I showed up for my first day of work he said, “I’ll be damned. I thought Jim Lee deYong was going to be Chinese.”

Maybe that’s what all the Chinese hotels thought, too.

UPDATE: We left China, went to Hong Kong and the upgrades have ended. Hmmmmm.

First of all, let’s have a big round of applause for Jamie. She just wrote her first headline (the one above).

It refers to the fact that every Chinese driver and every Chinese pedestrian is constantly playing chicken with every other driver and pedestrian. And then you throw all the motorcycles, mopeds and bicycles into the mix and you get pure chaos. Every driver, rider and pedestrian constantly pushes every other driver, rider and pedestrian to see how much they can get away with. There’s no sense of order or fairness that we’ve been able to discern.

My first creative director at DJMC Advertising wrote a radio commercial I’ve always loved. It was for the motocross races at the old Ontario International Speedway. It featured a big, brash, loudmouth who said, “There’s only one rule in motocross. And nobody knows what it is.”

That’s exactly what it’s like on the streets here in China.

Traffic signals, stop signs, lane markers, speed limits and even directional indicators are only suggestions and they are freely ignored. Traffic weaves in and out willy nilly and horns are constantly honking and it’s absolute anarchy. We met a Chinese woman who in perfect English said, “In China all laws are open for discussion.”

You might think things would be safer on the sidewalks, but you’d be wrong. When the streets are too crowded, that’s where all the motorcycles, scooters and bicycles go. Every block you walk, dozens of them miss you by mere inches as they zip down the sidewalk.

If they were in America, each and every single one of these people would have their licenses suspended for the things they do. They wouldn’t last five minutes before they got pulled over and ticketed.

Yet somehow it works.

Back when we were in Russia I said that country’s traffic was insane, but there’s a huge difference between Russian traffic and Chinese traffic:

The Russians drivers were aggressive and angry. They acted as if being passed on the road was a challenge to their masculinity. They screamed. They gestured. They drove at breakneck speeds whenever possible. It was really kind of frightening.

The Chinese, on the other hand, never lose their cool amid the chaos. They seem to take it all in stride because, I guess, they know they’ll be the ones doing something crazy 30 seconds from now.

Here’s the most amazing part: Despite all the craziness, we haven’t seen a single accident. We’ve seen a thousand close calls — including several that involved taxis in which we’ve been passengers — but nary an accident.

Nevertheless, we’re pretty much convinced that every one of the 1.3 billion Chinese is eventually going to die in a traffic accident. The final two will probably meet their inglorious ends when they arrive at a four-way intersection simultaneously and both insist that they have the right-of-way.

Hot pots are a very popular dish in China, but especially here in Chengdu. Jamie had no idea what a hot pot was, but decided that we should try one for dinner.

She found a restaurant that specializes in hot pots just around the corner from our hotel. We went in and sat down, but realized pretty quickly that we were in trouble. The menu was entirely in Chinese with no English translations and none of the waitresses spoke a word of English.

Two of those waitresses — Sisi and Gaoxia — were unbelievably cute and they tried soooooo hard to help us. One of them pulled out her cell phone and brought up a translation app. We eventually worked it all out and each ordered a hot pot.

So now I guess I need to explain exactly what a hot pot is. It’s a pot that’s split into two halves. Half the pot contains a very spicy broth and the other half has a more mild one. Our table had a burner for each of our pots and they worked our broths to a low boil.

The waitresses started bringing things to the table and motioning that we should add them to our pots. Things like fish heads, meat, cabbage, lettuce, tomato, yams, and a few other items we were unable to identify.

It was hot. Really hot. Jamie and I were both sweating. We’re not sure if it was caused by the spicy broth, the heat generated by the boiling soup, or the stress we were both feeling.

At one point Sisi and Gaoxia took pity on us and brought spoons to our table. I used mine, Jamie didn’t use hers.

It was so much fun. The waitresses were great sports. They ended up going down the elevator with us to continue our Google Translate conversation.

So what’s our verdict on hot pots? Tasty. But next time, we’ll tell ’em to hold the fish heads.