It's late January of 2007. My wife and I are in Shanghai for a few days. It's our first aniversery, and we honeymooned in Shanghai, so I thought it would be cool to go back. Now - as I believe - as is universally true of all women, she likes shopping. And Shanghai, I am told, has become a shopping Mecca. So while there are some really cool things to do in Shanghai, we still have to spend a day shopping. This is all cool with me - if it makes her happy, then it makes me happy. So, we end up in this enormous mall. I've never been in such a large mall before. It was at least six stories, it was long, and no space was waisted - shops and kiosks were lined-up and stacked up in all directions. And this place was packed full of people. Spring Festival was just a week or two away, so it was like shopping on Black Friday or Christmas eve in the US.

Well, my addaptive stratagy since traveling to China has become searching for the nearest restroom as soon as I go into a restaurant or store. And I knew that we would be in this mall for hours. Hell, if we did nothing but navigate this huge mall, it would still take a few hours even if we didn't stop to look or buy. And for you guys out there, ever walk into a mall with a girl on one arm and a couple thou' in your pocket; you know you're doing some hard-core shopping. Can I get a witness??? Anyway, I digress. I just knew that locating the restrooms was going to serve me well before the day was through. But, just as usual, I was wrong.

So about two hours into our shopping pilgramage, just enough time for he unusual but down-right tasty spices to reak havoc with me, it's time for me to find the nearest restroom. And given that my eyes have been open for that all this time, I knew that I was not too far off from one. Now, my wife - god bless her - knows how totally inept and dependent I am, tells me that she'll help me find the restroom and wait for me there. But no...me and my male ego...want to show her that, even though I don't speak a word of manderan, other than 'beer', 'spicy', 'hello', 'thankyou', the F word, and - thanks to my trip the Xi'an the previous year - 'I'm sorry', I can still walk 20 yards in one direction without getting lost. Of course, getting lost wasn't ever the problem. So I tell her, 'No, honey, I know you enjoy shopping so I'll find you when I'm done'. So I head out for he public restroom. Find it withouta problem. Unfortunately, there is only one door...and there is a long line of girls waiting to get into that door. And when I mean a long line, I am thinking there must be 25, 30 of them. All girls, all in the teens to early twenties. Is there a door with the international male stick firgure? Nope. Just one dorr. One long line of girls. No other guys. And me, standing there, starting at it all. So I think to myself, there must be a men's room somewhere else. But I can't ask anybody because I don't speak manderan. So, I go find my wife and tell her I can't find the men's room. She points to the direction I just came from. So I tell her what I saw. She grabs my hand and impatiently pulls me back to the rest room. When we get there, I say, "See, I told you so." She say back to me, "No, I told you so." Appearently, I had to get in line and just wait until I got through that door. Appearently, the mens room was in there. If there had been a guy in that line, I would have figured that out.Well, appearences can be deceiving. So my wife says she will wait there for me...appearntly she knew me well enough to know that I would still have trouble with such complicated tasks as going to the bathroom. So I get in line, which is moving steadily forward, So I am thinking that I won't have to wait much longer. Oh, boy...wrong again. Once I get though that door, it opens up directly into a rather large bathroom. There must have been twenty stalls along one wall, and a long sink that ran the length of the opposite wall. And there were a whole bunch of girls. Of course I stand out like a sore thumb, as I am a good foot taller than anybody else and probably weigh more than any two of the girls put together. Luckily, none of them made eye contact with me, or I would have blushed. I can see the headline of the newpaper the next day: American Pervert Exicuted for Peeping. So I carefully back out through the line of girls waiting to get past me, saying and probably mispronoucing 'I'm sorry'. My wife is right there waiting for me. I tell her that's the girls bathroom. She roles her eyes - so quick to forget that she was born and raise in the Peoples Republic and I was not - and tells me that there is only one restroom. So I say, "No mad'ing way". Turns out, it was a co-ed restroom. So, I have to go 'blow it up' with a girl on each side of me. So, my wife seeing how embarassed I am,takes my hand again and stands in line with me. Strangely enough, I am comforted by that and feel less embarassed. I am probably stillblushing at this point, but I think that I have repressed all the memories from that point...but that's not true...if it i was able to repress all the memories, then I wouldn't remember getting stuck in the stall.*sighs*