What was I thinking?????!!!!!

June 25, 2009 was the day I totally lost my mind. I blame it on the excitement of television. You see that day was the day I appeared on Good Things Utah modeling for my friend Alicia Richmond.

Alicia is a personal stylist. I met her a few years ago when she came and spoke to our Young Women's group. Being the fashionista that I am, of course I LOVED her and immediately connected with her, and quite frankly I would LOVE to have her job. About a year and a half ago I traveled to NYC with her on a shopping trip/tour. My friend Julie from college went with me. We had a blast. At that time Alicia said that shopping in NYC was nothing compared to China and that we needed to go on one of her China tours because not only was the shopping better, China was cheaper than NYC. I laughed it off. I have no affinity for China, nor do I eat the food.

Well on June 25, 2009, while I was waiting my turn to model, Alicia announced she was making a trip to China in the fall from October 21, 2009 to October 28, 2009, and the cost of the trip was $999 for airfare and hotel for a week. My ears perked up, and mind started thinking and in a moment of sheer derangement I decided I was going to China in the fall.

Now you have to understand me to know why I had to have been completely deranged or taken over by aliens when I made this decision.
1. I am a very picky eater. I don't eat Chinese food in America, much less China.
2. I don't camp, in other words I need a Western style toilet to take care of business.
3. I am A.D.D. on airplane flights after two hours.
4. I think the USA is a perfectly good country, and why would I want to leave?
5. The only language I speak is English, and even then sometimes not so well.
6. Being in a foreign country where I don't speak the language and nothing is familiar, gives me a panic attack.
7. I have personal space issues. The one and only time I have left America, Rick took me to London, and at the end of the trip I was standing in line at the airport when an Indian women got in line behind me and was nearly two inches from my body. It was all I could do to refrain myself from turning around and saying to the women "Look just because there are a billion people in your country does not mean there are in mine, BACK OFF."

This is why the idea that I would consciously agree to get on an airplane and travel to China is the most crazy, deranged, insane choice I have made all year, possibly in my entire life. But alas I made my choice, now I have to fly.....

On a brighter note, my friend Julie, who went to NYC with me, agreed to go to China with me. The thing with Julie and me, is that individually we are fine, but together we just feed off each other, and our personality characteristics are magnified by about four fold. (Feel sorry for the other two girls that had to live with us for a semester in college....) I should probably be less concerned about the food, the bathroom, the language, and my personal space issues, and be more concerned that Julie and I don't some how create an international incident.....its possible.