Dear friends,
Well, it's been a flurry of activity getting "accustomed" to American living again. (And it's not for the faint-at-heart to return to an intense degree, at an intense place, the week before Finals, having been gone for the previous three!). So my presence here has been decidedly absent.
Bob left a note on my blog saying that I needed to finally *explain* two of the running jokes of the China tour. The first is called "Putting on the Dog," an older version of the current "Puttin' on the Ritz." It was fun to explain this joke to Zheng. As anyone knows who speaks several languages, it is a mark of fluency when you can "pun" or use idiomatic phrases in a tongue that's not your own. You can read more about this here: (http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/put+on+the+dog).
People certainly "put on the dog" for us, the entire time. This included: meals with 13-17 dishes on the Lazy Susan, fancy outings, Beijing renting a van and driver for us to go see the Great Wall at Badaling, Ayeing sending us home with more gifts than I could have ever imagined.
The other joke began in the business-class lounge at Sea-Tac. Bob joked that Ellen and I "respond well to pampering." This eventually became the slogan "Better Life Through Pampering," (BLTP for short). We joked about things on the trip being on the "BLTP" program.
Things that were on the BLTP program: lattes, anything in business class, our hotel in Kunming, Ellen getting a massage, etc. Things that were *not*: riding in bread trucks, not being able to find a taxi, taking crowded subways, and problematic or non-existent internet connections in hotels.
(Also, when one of us was ill, or when things weren't going "as planned," like not having lights for a dress-rehearsal, we joked that this was "eating the dog.").
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