The Pears Samara family is always more interested in recounting the face plants instead of the boastful successes. Here is a preliminary attempt to detail the top candidates.
1.Leaving half of my tidy whitey inventory of underpants that had just returned from the laundry in my Hangzhou hotel room. The result was having to wash the three remalning items daily.
2.Not eating enough early enough on my 80K bike ride and bonking so badly that I could not concentrate enough to operate the GPS to find my way home!
3.Pills in the toilet. Always put the cover down on the toilet! I’m in the process of opening my pill bottle on day 5 and it falls into the toilet without its cover! I got it out fast. There was very little water damage, only about 10? pills joined together in the bottom of the container. I take 4 pills every day. I have 2 others in the same container for specific uses and I have another container with the pills for extreme stomach and sleep upset. Wife Kim’s father always kept his pills lose in the pocket of his pants. I liked that idea of only having one place for all of them!
4.Saying too much about 7 drinks a day or nude beaches or some unknown phrase that resulted in driving away a wonderful young Chinese woman who had befriended me on my first morning in Wuhan. Probably I was just sharing too much, as is my bent, and it was even breakfast with no alcohol involved! It is remotely possible that she was just checking me out and had no intention of furthering the contact.
5.General poor search strategies, as epitomized by the quest for a Tourist Office in Hangzhou. I seem to be prone over and over to just “head out” instead of really taking the time to figure out exactly WHERE in town has the highest likelyhood of a Tourist Office and take the time to go there.
6.Kind of in the same vein, just stumbling on in a search. I spent at least an hour completely lost the second night in Wuhan trying to find No 9 Brewery. I tend to just go down the next promising looking street instead of really proofing where I am and following a path to the object.
7.I am on the train from Hangzhou to Suxhou. Subconsciously I know the towns are not that far apart and there is some kind of disconnect between the price being a little higher than it should be for such a distance. The tickets do not give the arrival time but they do list departure and fare, which gives one some idea. I get the GPS going and clearly we are on our way to Shanghai, not Suxhou. I’m seated in the middle of a multi-national team who are on a week long trek to suppliers for their exposition supplies business. The man next to me is asleep but I pop up in my seat (I usually ride First Class and chairs are enormous), show my ticket to the surprised man behind me and ask why we are going to Shanghai instead of Suxhou. His answer is, don’t worry, they are going to Suxhou also and this is just an example of the Chinese railroad doing things a little differently.
8.I carry a very large very broken red yellow green blue umbrella all the way from NH. The hotel supplies me with a pretty big complementary umbrella in my room. There is a cyclone predicted to hit and I go out with no umbrella and have to walk home many blocks in driving rain. Timberline shoes are great but hat, t shirt and shorts as well as one of the valuable tighty whites are soaked. There is a wall of windows in the room but it only gets sunlight for a few hours each day and none during a typhoon! I do a lot of hair dryer blowing, consider asking wife Kim if ironing wet things might dry them? My room does come with an iron.