Thanksgiving Break

We had a great Thanksgiving break. On Sunday I met with my friend Rachel and she helped me sew for 4 hours straight and we finished the top of the jean quilt. We ended up tying that in Arco and it was so much fun. That project went by much too quickly. The best part was we were in the garage and we couldn't hear all of the noise and chaos from all of the kids inside the house. Ha.

We drove to Arco on Tuesday afternoon. That evening we ate dinner and had pie and just chatted that night I think. Trisha and her family were there by then and also Kelsey and her family. The kids were extra wound up from being at Granny's and being with cousins. It was really hard to get them to go down that night. I think Gabby, Piper, and Ryan were all up past 11:00. We were able to get them to go to bed earlier than that on the other nights.

On Wednesday we got up and went and walked laps in the church while the kids ran around and got some energy out. Later we tied the quilt. Keaton and Amanda showed up Wednesday night but not after running out of gas and needing Kelsey and Justin to go rescue them. Good one! I will admit I have run out of gas on my drive home from Rexburg as well. We all went to bed earlier that night and Chase couldn't believe that we were all so pathetic and in bed by the time he and Rachel arrived around 11:30 that night after driving for 10 hours. My dad did stay up and wait for him at least. On Thanksgiving my mom was up and working bright and early and had everything ready by 10:00 as usual. We ate at 11:30. Ha. We don't care, we love it. It was so good. I really want some RIGHT NOW. We mostly just hung around and that night we played a killer game of Rage that I was in the lead for about two seconds. Dang you change rage! We watched a movie late that night. On Friday we just hung around a bit in the morning and got packed and left after lunch. Chase, Keaton, and Justin were going hunting and Corbin wanted to go so we let him stay and hitch a ride back to Boise with Kelsey and Justin. I guess they hiked for 4 miles and played a game of "would you rather" with Corbin that he really liked.

Since we've been home we've just been putting up Christmas decorations and watched Christmas movies. I feel like I have to soak in every moment of Christmas time. It always goes WAY too fast.

Scott wrote part Three of his China trip if you missed that, scroll down the blog for that.

Now I need to make and put on the binding. UGH. Ha.

Rage!

Hunters

Putting up our charlie brown Christmas tree.

The kids kept playing right in the way and in my mom's living room (much to her dismay). Luckily nothing was broken again. My mom's glass coffee table has lasted for over 20 years. I don't know how with the amount of children and grandchildren involved.

Chase's birthday was on Thanksgiving. Trisha got a pinata. It was fun!

I was sanding a chair project Saturday and it was messy!

Gabby's cat collage.

Gabby wrote me this card forever ago. Such a cute card.  It sounds like a poem to me. "mom I love you yes I do, love you, you are the best mom, yes you.

Gabby made me a picture frame and then painted a picture to put in it for me.

I love that she can make her own frames.

Scott's China Trip - Part 3: Shanghai to Yiwu

We all met for breakfast in the hotel restaurant for my first officially Chinese meal. I had heard mixed reviews about the food in China, but this meal was quite good. One thing that was definitely different was the variety of things accepted as mainstream food items. I decided to make a plate only of items that I did not immediately recognize or that you wouldn’t find in a US hotel restaurant and give it a whirl. Most of it was quite good, especially the different kinds of fruit that they had.

My "all Chinese stuff" breakfast plate. It was darn good! That white, puffy things was filled with a sweet, black jelly of some sort, and that pear-looking thing was crisp, refreshing, and delicious! I ate one every chance I got.

A street-cart vendor near our hotel selling grilled corn-on-the-cob and grilled sweet potatoes. Yum! Later in Yiwu there were a lot of similar vendors selling long wedges of a Chinese variety of cantaloupe on a stick, which were delicious!

It was great getting to know everyone after a much needed night’s rest. It turns out the guy who slept through his flight was getting on a different flight and would be joining us later that evening. We were kind of taking things easy as the training technically didn’t start until tomorrow, so I took some time to go and wander around the vicinity outside our hotel. Everything was very clean, but at the same time there was so much construction going on everywhere that things seemed kind of chaotic as well. It was quite humid and overcast, but the infamous Chinese air quality didn’t seem too bad to me at first blush.

We checked out of the hotel and loaded up in several mini-van cabs with all of our luggage to make our way to the train station. I had the chance to talk to Trish, from Arizona, who was there with her two daughters. We swapped real estate stories as I marveled at the endless expanse of high-rise commercial and residential buildings that just seemed to go on and on as we drove the 30 minutes or so to the train station. We got our tickets and boarded the high-speed mag-lev train in Shanghai and headed to Yiwu.

My closest view of downtown Shanghai's recognizable "bottle opener" building, the Shanghai World Financial Center building. For a while it was the tallest building in China (1,614 feet, 101 floors above ground), until it's neighbor (also pictured), the Shanghai Tower was constructed.

A pretty cool bridge over one of the Shanghai area's many, many canals. 

The Shanghai/Pudong train station. Very clean, very nice, very loud, and very very busy.

I ended up next to a Chinese guy who was watching some melodramatic action-drama on his iPhone at full volume without headphones. He even mimed to me at one point to switch seats with him so he could sit closer to the power jack. Behind me, Matt sat next to Kerry and the two recorded an interview for Kerry’s podcast collaboration with Mike and Matt called “Easy Residual Income.” I listened in while I stared out the window trying to take in as much of the Chinese scenery as I could. As we zipped along at almost 300/kph I noticed that I never saw a speck of land that could be classified as “undeveloped,” for agricultural, residential, or commercial purposes. It wasn’t until we were about 30 minutes inland from Shanghai and started reaching some of the more mountainous terrain that the steep hillsides and rocky outcrops resisted the comprehensive use of the land. We passed so many canals, a sizeable river, and high-rise after high-rise after high-rise. It seems they build high-rises in bulk as it seemed if you ever spotted one high-rise under construction you’d quickly notice 5-6 more right next to it.  Oddly, many of the completed high-rises looked utterly vacant, and I spoke with Matt and Kerry about the rumors of China’s “ghost cities.”

An impressive-looking mosque in a wide, green area within one of a seemingly endless collection of high-rises. According to the internet there are about 21,000,000 Muslims in China as of 2015.

More high-rises being built in bulk. Views like this were a constant during my trip. It boggles the mind!

We passed by this massive downtown-looking area on the banks of a large river somewhere between Shanghai and Yiwu. We wondered if this was the Chinese Manhattan look-alike that some people had heard of. However, a Google search indicated that the official Chinese Manhattan is closer to Beijing up North, so who knows what this is.

My first taste of China's famously picturesque mountains, about an hour inland from Shanghai.

We arrived in Yiwu after about 90 minutes on the train and made our way to the street to rustle up some cabs. Mike and Matt explained that, unlike in the more cosmopolitan Shanghai, we would be unlikely to find almost anybody that spoke English in Yiwu. This proved very true with our cab drivers and, since we had to spread out across 5 or so cabs (with Matt and Mike being the only ones who had ever been to the hotel we would be staying out), most of us just had to cross our fingers and hope that there wasn’t more than one Marriott hotel in Yiwu. After a fairly long and anxious cab ride, our cabbie pointed to a giant hotel looming in the distance that said “Marriott” on top. “Maria? Maria?” he seemed to ask, pointing at the hotel and looking for confirmation. We gave the thumbs up, hoping that was the right one, and our cabbie cut into oncoming traffic, weaving through 5 lanes of cars, and pulled us into the drop off at the Yiwu Marriott. Driving in China is an amazing experience, and no one seems to take the rules of the road anywhere near as seriously as we do in the US. Perhaps that’s because there’s so much traffic that no matter where you are you never get going very fast. Perhaps it’s just that people are used to driving a different way, paying attention to the other drivers more than to lane markers or traffic lights, and using their discretion to get where they’re going as quickly as possible. In any case, it was always an adventure and sure made you feel alive.

In a "Hindsight is 20/20" moment, Mike and Matt had Jing write up some English/Chinese instructions to use with Yiwu cab drivers after the somewhat nerve-wracking adventure of trying to get everyone from the train station to the hotel in 4 different cabs.

We got checked in and my room was AMAZING. This was probably the nicest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in as an adult. We all met in the hotel restaurant again for dinner and, as seemed to be something of a pattern I was noticing with Chinese restaurants, our food took a long time to get to us. When it arrived, it was great, but man, almost everyplace we ate in China was slower than slow when it came to actually getting us our food. Who knows why.

Mike and Matt told us all to meet for breakfast in the executive lounge on the 32^nd floor in the morning and then we would head down to the conference room to start our first official day of Amazon Secrets training.

Social Outings

This last week has been a fun week filled with lots of social events. On Tuesday night we went to the school's math night and they fed us pizza (didn't have to cook that night, winning). Later I went to the book club meeting at my friend's house and I was the only one to show up, so that was a bust. I had a good visit with her anyway and we discussed The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene' Brown which is excellent by the way. I've been trying to do at least one pre-school craft with Piper every week. We really need to get serious about her letters. I need to work with Gabby too, she is a little behind in reading. It's so much work. Teaching kids how to read is SO hard. It's kind of annoying that just putting your kids in school isn't enough for them to stay caught up on their reading. You have to work a lot at home, which is tedious and time consuming. We will keep on working!

On Thursday night there was a girl's night at my friend Jen's house. It was fun. I'm glad I went, we all just have to push past the awkwardness of the post mo situation. On Friday night my new friend Rachel invited us over for pizza and to watch the BSU game. Ha. Scott and Nate played magic and Rachel and I cut out squares for my jean quilt (I need to finish piecing together by Tuesday so we can quilt it at my parent's house over Thanksgiving). The game was on in the background and I think Nate watched it. The kids did pretty good just hanging out at their house and it was fun. 

Yesterday I went over to my crazy friend Lisa's house because they want my help to decorate their

home. (Not that I can really do that kind of thing). I'm mostly the mediator between she and her husband who are total opposites. No joke Scott and I have helped these two from the brink of divorce more than once. Anyway George seems to listen to me better than his wife and the goal is to help the two meet in the middle somehow because their tastes couldn't be more opposite. Later in the day Lisa and I went on the hunt for some decent furniture at thrift stores (which is like finding a needle in a haystack) and didn't find anything good. It was fun though. That girl is crazy! In between the consult and thrifting I took my girls to a birthday party. Later that night we went to a party with nearly strangers to continue to make new friends. It was a very fun night and the kids loved it and were asking when we could go back. They had a huge house that was very kid friendly and the kids ran a muck the whole night in the basement. Good times!

I've been making rolls and other preparations for Thanksgiving. I'm excited to go home and see my family. I'm thinking some sort of game tournament would be good!

At girl's night Jen glammed me up with fake lashes, make up and do. 

These kids were SO loud the other morning watching Corbin. It was pretty cute though.

Gabby picture

Cutest tea party.

My friend Lisa literally placing her body inside a huge box to dig for something. Ha.

A Lot of Happenings

I got a message from my mom last Monday, "No blog from you??? NOOOO!!!" Ha. My biggest blogging fan. Let's see what we missed. We went trick or treating. That was very fun. Ryan was adorable. He would run as fast as his little legs could take him to every house, amazingly HE DID NOT FALL. Miracle. Piper was hilarious. She was very concerned we were lost (we were across the street from our house) and she was ready to go home after about 10 minutes, maybe 5. She barely made it. We do not trick or treat for very long, we go down our tiny cul-da-sac and then across the street to a little loop. Apparently too long for Pipes. We love this route, we've done it since Corbin was a baby. It's short and sweet and they still get a lot of candy and GOOD candy. I'm always impressed by the candy our neighborhood gives out. I think because there are few trick or treaters people buy the good stuff. It's great, we love it.

My birthday was on Sunday. We went to Sherry's for breakfast. Later that day Scott took the kids away so I could be home by myself for a bit. I love when I can be home alone sometimes. If I need a break I can always leave the house by myself but sometimes it's nice to be alone at home. That evening I invited one of my friends over with her family to eat dinner with us. It was fun.

Other than that I'm busy with my kids. I'm also trying to make a lot of new friends. I want to still keep my Mormon friends but things are weird and I doubt they will ever be the same. I'm on a couple of local post Mormon facebook groups and I've met some awesome people on there and I've already formed some friendships. I've also had a bunch of playdates with some of my friends from my Christian book club and we are starting a post Mormon book club this week. We will see how that goes. I kind of feel like a misfit toy and like I don't fit in anywhere but I relate the most to post Mormons for sure. We understand each other completely. It's nice to meet with people who totally understand your perspective and don't think you're crazy or that you've been deceived by Satan. Anyway it's kind of awkward to talk about this stuff, but at the same time this is my life and this is what I'm dealing with and I don't want to have this weird secret life. It is what it is. I'm trying to adjust to post Mormonism and it's weird and lonely at times. I feel like my life has been flipped upside down and inside out. It's very disorientating, but I'm also a very proactive person and being happy is important to me. I've had to become a sort of semi-stalker these last couple of months. I've reached out to total strangers and formed a lot of friendships. Scott has been feeling quite a bit better lately. He's trying to find a temporary job until his Amazon business hopefully starts making enough money so he won't have to work a regular job. That's his goal anyway.

Yesterday my friends from my ward took me to breakfast yesterday for my birthday. We went to Kneaders, so good. It was fun but kind of weird. Ha.

The kids were out of school again Thursday and Friday. Luckily the weather has been dreamy this November and we spent some good time outside. Being outside is so good for my mental health I think. Good stuff.

Ryan has been so funny lately, when you ask him to do stuff he's always like "fine, fine, okay." "Ryan will you..." "Okay mom, fine, fine." It's hilarious.

On Friday night we were telling the kids to start getting ready for bed. Corbin said, "Who sends their kids to bed at 7:39 on a Friday night?" Ha. Don't worry we didn't send them to bed that early on a Friday night, (I wish, ha).

Gabby lost her other front tooth. I have to teach her the song "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth." Ha.

Piper, getting all set up.

Gabby school work

School work

HALLOWEEN!

This was at a Toy Story event at the library.

Preschool

Ryan is at that awesome stage where he won't take a nap but will sometimes just crash and regardless he's a little cranky.

I made these headbands for my friend's baby shower.

I got this table for free and I fixed it up for $5. I had to buy stain, I had all of the other supplies already.

Viola

Birthday breakfast! Yum.

Pumpkin cake! Yum.

Gabby art.

Gabby art

Park time

Ryan eats by the fistfull. He is a messy buddy. Look at that mac and cheese all over his face.

Pipes relaxing in her toy tub.

Park time.

Ryan's face, ha!

 

Scott's China Trip - Part 2: Long flights, Small treats, Big Ripoffs, and Misunderstandings

Having traveled a lot for work with my three years of visiting El Paso with my dad, I had learned to pack fairly lightly and get by with not very much in the way of luggage. So despite going on a week-long trip to China, I fit everything into a small carryon and a mostly empty backpack (it mostly just held my laptop and the samples I had ordered off of Amazon of products I was interested in sourcing and selling myself). I flew from Boise to Seattle without incident and then had a three hour layover to tangle with. My friend Walker—who had traveled to China a few times himself—told me the food on the Chinese airlines is pretty good, but I still figured I’d need to get something to eat in case the flight food didn’t agree with me. After finishing a pretty darn good breakfast burrito from Qdoba (or something like that) I found a lonely Egg McMuffin, still in its wrapper, abandoned and alone on a charging table near where I sat down to watch the news while waiting for my flight. After a few minutes of looking around, waiting for someone to come and claim it, I decided to give it a good home. I spent the next hour or so of my wanderings about the airport casually looking for a microwave somewhere to reheat it, but to no avail. I ended up eating it cold but told myself it was supposed to taste that way and it ended up being quite good.

Before I boarded my flight I sent a text message to Matt and Mike that I was boarding the plane and would look forward to meeting up with them in Shanghai. I told them that I had book myself a hotel room at the airport Ramada since I hadn’t made prior reservations due to the whole visa fiasco. Just as I was boarding they wrote back that they had already booked and paid for a room for me with the rest of the group at the Double Tree. For the next several minutes I was frantically trying to cancel my reservation on my phone, but all of the links in the e-mail that said “Cancel reservation” or “Change reservation” just sent me to the home page for the hotel and tried to sell me another room. On top of that I was now on the plane seated in the exit row directly across from the flight attendant. She told me repeatedly that I needed to put my phone away. I would turn it off and put it in my pocket and then when she left to check seat belts or something I was frantically back trying to save myself the $150 I was going to lose if I couldn’t cancel this reservation before takeoff. I finally had a brilliant idea and texted Mitzi to ask her to cancel my reservation since I was going to lose connectivity in a matter of minutes and was having no luck. I barely got the text off and forwarded the e-mail when we took off and I lost connection.

For the first hour or so I was stressing about whether or not Mitzi would be able to figure out how to compete the cancellation. Then I decided there was nothing I could do worrying about it other than make an already long flight longer so I put it out of my mind and tried to get comfortable. The food on the flight was pretty darn good, and the plane was quite nice. I sat next to a Chinese mother and daughter who both slept almost the entire flight, an accomplishment of which I was envious. I tried to sleep in various uncomfortable positions but with little success. If I craned my neck backwards I was able to see out the window and, to my surprise, noticed that after four hours in the air I could still see land. Curious! It turns out our flight path basically had us tracing the West coast of Canada and the Aleutian Islands until we hit the East coast of Russia, Korea, and then China.

Because we were flying into the rotation of the Earth it was daylight for we on that flight for about 20+ hours straight, which was a little disorienting, although I really didn’t feel that tired until a few hours after landing. One odd thing I immediately noticed as we came in for landing in China was how brown the ocean water was. I’m not sure if that’s a result of the rivers carrying lots of sediment to the ocean near Shanghai or a pollution issue or what.  The next thing I noticed was that my phone didn’t work…at all. For some reason I thought I would be able to pick up some kind of cell phone signal and just have to pay roaming charges. Nope, not a blip of signal, nor was I able to access the airport wifi because it wanted to text me an access code, which I couldn’t get. Consequently, I found myself alone in China with potentially two hotel reservations and no means of communication to verify either. My flight also landed me in China about 5 hours before the bulk of the group would be showing up so I was on my own.

After waiting through what felt like a lot of different lines (passport check, customs, security, and maybe one other) I finally made it out of the airport. Waiting for us outside the gate were a mass of people offering transportation to our various destinations. One lady started yelling at me in English “Hotel? Hotel? Where you want go?” I told her I needed to get to the Hilton Double Tree and she came and grabbed my bag and said she would get me there. I told her I didn’t have any Chinese currency but only US dollars and my credit card. She said they would take a credit card and not to worry. Mike had said on one of the China intro videos that the best exchange rate for currency was actually at the Double Tree so I planned to change any money I needed there. The lady asked me 4 or 5 times to point out the exact hotel on the map so she was sure to send me to the right place. Then she charged me $700 Chinese Yuan on my credit card and sent me to wait for the cab. I wasn’t sure at that time but that seemed pretty steep, but I was just anxious to get to the hotel where so that I could meet up with the rest of the group when they arrived. It turns out that $700 Yuan translates to about $109! HOLY COW! Initially, I had toyed with the idea of walking to the hotel (I had packed lightly, after all, had 5 hours to kill, and thought it would be a fun way to get to know the “real” China by foot), but as the cab ride wore on I realized that the hotel was WAY farther away than I had anticipated. However, it was definitely NOT $109 far away. On top of that, before we even got to the hotel the cabby straight up told me to give him a tip, and even said “$20 USD is good.” Tired and resigned I just gave it to him.  I later found out that the cab ride for the rest of the group ran them $26 total, and Mike reminded me that he had warned everyone not to go with those tourist vultures in one of his videos (but it seems I forgot that part, to my dismay).

If I sound a little tired in this video it's because I was.

I arrived at the gorgeous and enormous Hilton Double Tree in Shanghai and went to check in. The used my passport to look up my reservation and…there was none. We tried different permutations of my name—W Scott, Will S, Will, Scott, W S, etc.—but continued to come up empty. I showed them the message from Matt about them having a room “bought and paid for” for me on my phone and they were able to verify that they had a reservation for Matt, so at least I knew I was in the right hotel and that as soon as they arrived we could sort everything out. In the mean time I asked them if I could just park myself on a couch in a corner of the enormous lobby for a few hours to wait for them, which they happily allowed me to do. Again, I tried to log in to their wifi but continued to be frustrated by the “text verification code” issue, and thus was unable to check if Mitzi had successfully cancelled my other hotel room or complete the process myself (and try to save the $150 room fee as some consolation for getting ripped so hard on my cab ride). I was also unable to communicate with Matt or Mike until they physically walked through the door to the hotel, whenever that was going to be. I did bump into a nice American tourist there for a business conference who tried to help me configure my phone to get some small amount of connectivity up and running, but to no avail. In the end, he very graciously allowed me to send Matt a text from his phone to let him know I’d arrived at the hotel but they had no reservation for me on file and that I would just be waiting in the lobby until they arrived.

Now I was starting to get tired, but I was worried the hotel staff would be forced to get after me if I fell asleep in the lobby, so I had to occupy myself. I ended up watching Edge of Tomorrow and 90% of The Bourne Identity on my backup phone over the next 3.5 hours until Mike and Matt walked through the door. I was exhausted. Everyone else in the group was introducing themselves to me, but by that point I’d been awake for almost 24 hours and was not going to remember much of anything at that point, so I asked them to kindly reintroduce themselves to me in the morning. Mike and I worked with the hotel staff to figure out what had happened with my reservation. After about 20 minutes of back-and-forth and confusion, Mike realized that he had mixed up two things in his mind: At the same time he was helping me get my visa sorted out, he was also booking a hotel room for another student that was flying in by himself (who he had confused with me). Funny enough, that student ended up falling asleep in the airport in Toronto during his layover and missed his flight to Shanghai! I ended up taking his room and, after all the hassle and at Mike’s request, the hotel staff actually hooked me up with a suite. The room was fantastic and with an amazing view of Shanghai’s central park. I took a long, hot bath (I love taking baths in hotels because they’re often the only bathtubs I can fit in) and then crashed. I was surprised to learn, however, that my hotel bed which looked so white, fluffy, and inviting, was about as hard as a box spring (like the one I slept on for the first two weeks of my mission as part of a prank by my roommates). The other hotel mattress was similar, leading me to conclude that standards of mattress softness in China are much different than they are in the US. Fortunately, I was tired enough that I slept through the night without trouble. I had made it!

Scott's China Trip - Part 1: Joining the Group and the Chinese Visa Fiasco

After I had given my two-weeks notice at AmeriBen in early September, I downloaded a bunch of podcasts to listen to and hopefully help me figure out what I wanted to do next. One of the podcasts was called “EasyResidual Income,” something I already had some experience with through my credit investing. I listened to two episodes in which Mike Gazzola was interviewed about how he and a partner (Matthew Behdjou) had started an Amazon store selling products they had sourced in China. They had grown their business to over $300,000 in sales in about 9 months starting from scratch (however, building off of their considerable marketing and business experience). A lot of what he said really gelled with many of the sound principles of business I have learned over the years and the way he gave away substantive, actionable information for free in his podcast convinced me that he actually had something of value to share.

A few days later I went to their website and signed up for their program. They do a phone interview to start people off and basically do a sales pitch for their course. In the podcast they mentioned that they were going to be taking a group of students with them to China to learn how to source their own products as well as getting some first-hand experience with Mike and Matt on the ground. I decided that I wanted to be a part of that China group and that if I simply followed their program, didn’t give up, asked a lot of questions, and did my homework, I would be able to at least make back the $10,000 tuition to be part of the China group and potentially much, much more.

The next few weeks were a scramble as my passport had expired and I also needed a visa (which you can only apply for after getting a passport). Consequently, I ended up paying a lot of expedited shipping and processing costs since I was really jumping in at the last minute. Everything with the passport went smoothly enough, but the visa was another story. Mike made a video about a visa company that he recommended and how to fill out their forms to send away for your visa. I got my passport and got everything arranged to send away for my visa on September 29^th. I sent it via UPS overnight mail and requested the 2-3 day processing from the visa company. I received verification that they received it on Friday the 30^th and was confident that they would be able to get it processed and back to me by the 6^th or 7^th of October before my Monday the 10^th departure for China. Well, it turns out the week of October 3^rd thru 7^th is a Chinese holiday and no one was working so my visa didn’t get processed until Thursday and they sent it back to me FedEx discount shipping to arrive on Tuesday the 11^th by 8:00pm! I was FREAKING OUT! It was bad enough I wasn’t going to have my visa in time, but they also had my passport too! I could actually probably have gotten to China with just a passport and then would have had to get a visa at the airport, but without a passport I wouldn’t be going anywhere. This company was about to cost me $10,000 in order to save $10 on shipping costs!

I forwarded the e-mail to Mike, with whom I had been in contact a few times via phone, e-mail, and text to get everything ready for China (his responsiveness and helpfulness also was very reassuring that I hadn’t just bought into a scam). Mike replied that he would look into what he could do but that we were probably going to need to work through FedEx. All this time I was in Salt Lake visiting my family and I was super stressed out because of this visa thing and I hadn’t even told anyone in my family at that point that I was going to China. I got on the phone with FedEx and they were basically like, “Sorry, our system doesn’t allow for changes once a package has been shipped. You need to call the people who sent it and have them call us to make the changes.” Well, I had concluded that after putting a rush order on my visa (which they had not met) and shipping it such that it would arrive 48 hours AFTER I needed it after specifically asking me when I needed it by, they weren’t going to be super helpful. I asked for a supervisor and told him that I needed him to think like a human being and not go off of what his system told him. I told him I needed a person at one of the stops along the way to find that package via the tracking number, physically grab a hold of it, and then put a new shipping label on it that I would pay for and e-mail or fax or whatever to them, and ship it to me overnight so I didn’t lose $10,000. Fortunately, he started thinking like a human and helped me put a stop order in place and gave me the fax number for the first destination hub for my package. All I had to do was print out a new label and fax it to them.

Easy enough, right? Wrong. The next two-and-a-half hours were spent unsuccessfully trying to navigate and operate the FedEx website to get a shipping label printed off, both from my home computer and from a FedEx branch in Salt Lake. Nothing was working and the staff couldn’t figure out why. As I was on the phone with their corporate office I got another call from a NY area code which I ignored even though I thought it could be Mike as I knew he was traveling (and I’d gotten calls from him from different area codes in the past). As I was about to leave the FedEx store to go back home and try on my computer again, I got a text from Mike that said: “Visa is handled will arrive tomorrow check your voicemail.” Hallelujah! I listened to my voicemail and Mike said he’d been on the phone for the past three hours putting the fear of swift annihilation into every person at UsChinaVisa.com he could get on the phone until he got someone who would actually take action and help. He found someone who drove down to FedEx and picked up the package before it got loaded and had it resent overnight mail to me. He even paid the guy $100 via PayPal just for helping us out in such a pinch. But to those who didn’t help he sent a strongly worded e-mail basically threatening to use all of his marketing skill and experience to tear their company’s reputation to shreds if they didn’t make this right immediately. When I called him he told me to delete the e-mail because he didn’t want me to think he was a mean person, but I told him that I was so glad to have one other person taking this situation as seriously as I was and really appreciated his help. This was another huge boost to my confidence that I hadn’t been too rash to invest so much money into a program without taking a longer time for due diligence (I did look them up online to search for any scam warnings or reviews and didn’t find much, good or bad, and kind came to a “no news is good news” conclusion). We got back from Boise the next day and sure enough, under our door mat (per the instructions I left on the door before leaving town) was a FedEx package with my passport and a 10-year China visa. What a relief!

It looked like I would be going to China after all.