Hangzhou hang what?

In Hangzhou China, when you make a hand signal like you're saying "hang ten" in Hawaii, it means the number six. This is just one of the many things I've re-learned since entering the great land of China again. It only took me a bijillion hour flight. I flew from Cincinnati to Detroit, where I was reunited with some of the returning cast and crew members. We kept our eyes peeled and spied some tiny white kids on a flight to Tokyo, and knew we had found some of our SOMA buddies. We met them and the rest of the cast in Tokyo, and then we all hopped on a flight to Shanghai. Luckily there was nobody with TB on any of these flights, but they were loooong! Even after we arrived we had to take a three hour bus ride to get to the middle of knowhere, Chicago-like Hangzhou.

I stayed awake the night we got in until about 4am China time, which screwed my sleep schedule completely when I slept until 6pm the next day. Now, a week later, I'm finally back on regular people's time. Since I've been here I haven't been doing much shopping or sightseeing, since I've been to China before, and I'm in no hurry because we'll have days off once the show starts. So... we've been eating (or trying to eat and sometimes ending up back at McDonald's for a second course) and sleeping and rehearsing. About half of the cast has returned, which includes almost every lead. The new kids seem very nice, although there are a bunch of NYU kids who all graduated together and are besties. I've been trying to bring everyone together, and it's slowly working. It's so strange to be working on the same show again months later. It's nice to give it a second chance, but it's so easy to feel like I never left.

As far as China goes, it is like I never left. I'm still getting marriage proposals (in Chinese, thanks to the translations from my roommate Jessica and my friend Stu) and seeing babies with split-bottom pants - there are no diapers here. The distinctive smell pervades the country, as well as the lack of toilet paper. It took me a week to find peanut butter, and I'm still searching for the perfect dumpling. We already have a favorite bar with a female Thai cover band where we picked up some hot foreign guys as a cast and made friends with them. Basically we're working and biding our time until the show opens and we can party!

Until then I'm eating Chinese food and going to bed early! Well, relatively early anyway.