John made a trip to China and Japan for work and you would never guess the amount of time spent at each correctly based on the pictures taken on the trip. He spent over a week in China and the only pictures that came back were of his hotel room. Because he was workign in the assembly factory floor no cameras were allowed so he never took it with him and then forgot about it in the rooom safe.
Interesting story about cameras on the factory floor was that he had his iPhone with him, which has a camera. The first day he headed out to the floor they hadn't told him about the rule on cameras (as well as Thumb drives and phones) and fortunately he coudn't get in because the grounding straps he took with him didn't work and he had to go through the pass through back out of the floor. When he took the phone out of his camera the engineer that was responsible for getting him access to the floor got really worried and ended up having to explain that he hadn't yet been out on the floor. They eventually allowed him to keep his phone. Now the part where it gets a bit more interesting. Later in the week, he had forgotten to take his phone out of his pocket and had gone to the floor by himself. Upon exiting he realized that he had his phone in his pocket. This realization struck abject terror into his heart and then he remembered that every time he went through the metal detector it would beep because he never took his belt off and then he had to be hand wanded to ensure he didn't take anything from the factory floor. So, thinking on his feet he decided to hide the phone in his pants right behind his belt buckle so when they hand wanded him they would think the belt had set it off. He then walked through the metal detector as nonchalantly as possible knowing that he was going to get beeped and then hand wanded and hoping that as before they didn't ask him to pull the belt out to look behind it.
It had to be a one in a million shot going through the metal detector because it was the only time the entire week on the floor and mutliple trips per day that the thing didn't even beep. Funny enough, that just out of habit he started to walk toward the hand wanding station and the guard waved him away. Of course, if it had been detected now he would have had to try and explain why it was hidden if he weren't concealing the phone to hide something.
In his defense for lack of pictures, he did have big ideas of posting on our blog from CHina and posting pictures on Facbook while in China. Great Plan but once there realized that the chinese government blocks all social media and he couldn't get on either of them.
The next stop was Japan and he was not even there for 3 days. It was very interesting that they had their Christmas decorations up in early November. It's expected in the USA, even in September, but Japan isn't really a christian country. John asked one of the supplier representatives that he was visiting if Christmas was big there knowing full well the answer from serving in South Korea on his mission and his reply was, "Christmas not big, but shopping very big." Sounds a lot like the USA is a bit.
On one of his train rides from place to place he noticed that he would be passing by Mount Fuji. This is something his dad had always talked about wanting to visit. So as he passed by, hoping it might be clear enough for a picture, he snapped as many as he could hoping one would be decent and this is the best one he was able to get.
Funny thing is with all the travelling most of the time was spent inside a companies facility or on a train and what he takes away from the trip...how clean the trains are and how they clean them:
