#269 Halloween B-Day

Halloween night was a dual holiday in the Cazzato house. Joseph's 9th birthday is on Nov-2nd, so he invited several friends over for trick-or-treating followed by a birthday party sleepover.

You can see the Cazzato kids donning their Tinkerbell, Harry Potter, Ghoulish Ghost, and Dorothy costumes. Kathleen and friend Paige were Dulwich schoolgirls. I carried on with my nun-suit, carrying a wooden ruler and communion wine around the neighborhood.

Joseph is posing with his birthday party guests - we have the Incredible Hulk, a rather small Terminator, pirate, skeleton, witch, and another ghoul. Intimidating bunch to say the least. Again, Kathleen did a first rate job of entertaining these kids and looking after them until the finally fell into a sugar-induced coma at 1:00 AM.

#268 Cat Halloween

Halloween is not a popular holiday in Suzhou, but our general manager loves Halloween and encouraged everyone to celebrate at work with costumes and an contest for best individual and team costumes. Dressing as women seemed to be a popular option for the American men. You can see me in my custom tailored penguin suit and my colleague Jon as an overstuffed drag queen. Jon won the award. He was much more flamboyant than I.

#267 Costume Tailor

In an obscure location, down an alley on the northwest side of downtown Suzhou, within sight of Tiger Hill is a tailor who has been identified by the expat community as the "Costume Tailor". Today mission after church was to order custom made costumes for Juliana and me.

This area of town is called "Wedding Street" and it has hundreds of custom dress shops filled with white wedding gowns, red wedding gowns, and dresses of every bright color of the rainbow. You can wander down endless alleys and find shop after shop filled with dresses.

This tailor shop had three women at sewing machines and a floor covered with scraps of fabric, linen, and buntings. They have a couple of tattered costume catalogs from Germany or can reproduce any picture or sketch that you bring. Halloween is Saturday, so the tailor has four days to make our costumes from scratch. Cost will be $20 USD each and they said "no problem" to have them ready by Thursday.

Last year, our office had a costume competition and the employees really got into it. All I wore was one of the kids' silly wigs. This year I am putting a little more effort into the costume - or at least having the tailor put in some more effort. I'll leave you guessing on the costumes until Friday or Saturday when I can post pictures.

#266 Sports Days

Forgive me friends. It has been 14 day since my last blog entry. We are approaching the start of Motor Grader production at Caterpillar Suzhou and one of my duties is to organize a "Production Readiness Review" to assess and report back to the U.S. on the readiness of our product, factory, supply base, product support systems, and dealers to launch the new K-series motor grader in Asia. The review is Tuesday and many of us have been busy these last few weeks getting issues closed and the review prepared.

Nonetheless, there was time this weekend for several fun activities. On Saturday, Kathleen took Juliana to Shanghai for a soccer match (they call it football here). Juliana's team got beaten badly, but the day was a beautiful one to be outside playing sports. October is the best month of the year in Suzhou. We have had blue, sunny skies and comfortable temperatures for several weeks now.

The other three kids and I went to the Caterpillar Sports Day in a gymnasium at the Suzhou University East Campus. A group of employee volunteers organized some competitions in basketball, badminton, a running relay, and a "5-Legged / 4-Person" race. The event was fun and the kids did well. Maria spent the afternoon with my friend Shelley who gave her the one-on-one attention that she likes so much. Marco and Joseph found a couple of other boys to hang out with and join the competition.

To add another element of fun to the day, we took city buses to go out to lunch, travel to the sports day, and return home. We do not have a car available on Saturdays because our driver has the day off. I have started deciphering the bus network ever since someone pointed out to me that the little red numbers on my city map are the bus numbers. We are finding it is very cheap (30 cents US) to ride the bus, kids are free, and you can ofter find a bus sooner than a taxi cab outside our housing compound.

#265 Pirate Birthday

Marco hosted a Pirate themed 7th birthday party today for five of his friends from the neighborhood and school. The fearsome outlaws played pirates charades, walked the plank, and went on a treasure hunt around the Jin Shui Wan neighborhood. Kathleen put some serious effort into planning this event and I think the boys and Marco all had a good time.

In the group shot you can see the full crew of pirates: Joshua, Marco, Leon, Owen, Brodie, and Isaiah. Final shot is Marco with his home made skull and crossbones chocolate birthday cake. This is a happy boy.

#264 Maria Rides

On the last day off before returning to work, the project was to teach Maria how to ride a two wheeler. We took off the training wheels and Maria reluctantly tossed them in the trash. Joseph later retrieved them for use in a robot he and Marco are building in their bedroom.

We spent about an hour working with Maria until she had a fall and did some damage to the bicycle that needed professional help to correct. Today Kathleen took it to the Giant store and got it repaired for $3 US.

While I was at work, Juliana took Maria out for a practice session and succeeded in getting Maria to pedal on her own. Maria rode solo around the block five times and was very proud of her success. Congratulations Maria on a major accomplishment.

#263 Chinese Acrobats

I have three more days off from work after our return from Hong Kong. We decided to spend a day in Shanghai on Tuesday. The agenda was shopping at Hong Mei Lu, dinner at the Blue Frog, and a show at the Chinese Acrobat Circus.

The knockoff market was business as usual. I bought several items that I don't need but could not live without - pocketknife, Shanghai refrigerator magnet, solar powered cat with the waving arm, two framed 3D images of Beijing opera characters, and an "advance" copy of the new Dan Brown novel. The kids bought some useless trinkets and knock-off Legos. Kathleen found a store with pants that fit a westerner and stocked up.

The Shanghai Acrobat show was very good. The performers showed amazingly strength, balance, flexibility, and coordination. My favorite was the guy who spun a very large ceramic vase on his forehead. This show gets two thumbs up for novelty and wholesome entertainment value. The kids loved it and so did Kathleen and I. If you go, don't bother spending too much on your seats. Ticket prices range from $10 to $90 each but the theater is small and most seats have almost equivalent views.

#262 iPhones

Hong Kong's biggest lure is probably the shopping. Every airport gate, train station, underground pedestrian way, and street level block is occupied by a shopping mall or high end retailer shop selling (at full price) every luxury from Jimmy Choo shoes to Rolex watches to Maserati convertibles. I do not enjoy spending time in shopping malls and I felt like Joseph looks in his picture above at a Hong Kong shopping center.

One bit of high end shopping we did however, was to purchase new Apple iPhone cell phones. Kathleen has been angling to purchase an iPhone for several months now and has had many enthusiastic demonstration of the features by her fellow Tai Tais in Suzhou. I was not too supportive because of the high price and the seeming need to keep up with the Jones'. Nonetheless, when I saw the brief demonstration in the store, and realized that Kathleen was going to have a much nicer mobile phone than me, I decided that I too needed an iPhone - so we bought a second one on our last morning in Hong Kong.

You can see us above holding our new toys. We will call these our anniversary gifts. Year 14 is the electronic anniversary, right ?

I have posted a further collection of Hong Kong pictures at

#261 HK Education

Day three in Hong Kong was an educational experience all around. We spent the morning at the Hong Kong History Museum which has some great displays chronicling the natural and human history of Hong Kong from its volcanic origins to the present day. We learned a lot about Hong Kong's prehistory, the native people, the dynasties, opium wars, colonial period, Japanese occupation, and modern times including the handover from Britain to China in 1997. There were some elaborate and interactive displays that we all really enjoyed.

In the afternoon, we went to the Hong Kong Wetlands Park which is a nature preserve in the "New Territories" adjacent to an area of intense development. We saw lots of birds, dragonflys, butterflys, pre-frog tadpoles, and fiddler crabs.

#260 Kowloon

In the afternoon and evening on day two, we took the historic Star Ferry across the harbor to Kowloon. Kowloon used be the seedier, less developed part of Hong Kong, but like the rest of the city is now full of high rise office buildings, fancy hotels, and very expensive upscale shopping.

Along the waterfront is the Chinese version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame with celebrity signatures and handprints in the cement. You can see Marco comparing handprints with the most famous Chinese actor of all time - Jackie Chan.

During our four nights in Hong Kong we ate once at the CA Pizza Kitchen, twice at an great Italian restaurant called Fat Angelo's, and on this night in Kowloon we ate at a not-so-great Italian restaurant called the Spaghetti House. Kathleen and the kids were not interested in sampling the local Cantonese and seafood cuisine for which Hong Kong is famous. Kathleen's rationale was with the forced marches we were taking during the day, she did not have the energy or the interest to take on challenging local cuisine in the evening with four kids.

Everynight in Hong Kong there is a festival of lights show that is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest permanent light show in the world. There are spotlights and building lights that flash on and off to the beat of a music track every night at 8:00. I struggled to get a good picture of the light show at night as I could not find the right setting on my fancy DSLR camera. The night skyline above is by far the best picture I took and it was taken before the flashing light show began.

Again, you can hardly imagine the beauty of the night skyline that surround Victoria Harbor during the Hong Kong evenings. It was a spectacular sight.

#259 Victoria Peak

The cityscape of Hong Kong would remind you of Chicago with all of the tall buildings and water, but the major difference is the hills that surround the city. Downtown Hong Kong is on an island which is dominated by a 1000 foot high peak called "Victoria Peak", named by the British after Queen Victoria.

On day two we did the essential activity of taking the historic tram ride from downtown to the summit of Victoria Peak. I can tell you that the view from there was absoulutely stunning. You can see a couple of my favorite pictures above of the skyline, hillside, and Victoria Harbor below. We were fortunate to have a beautiful sunny day as well.

From the peak we took a lovely 3.5 kilometer walk on a shaded path around the peak and saw some wildlife and a waterfall. Kathleen bribed the kids with some designer jelly beans to non complain on our hike. Afterward we had a nice lunch at a sandwich shop overlooking the back side of Hong Kong Island. Everyone found what they wanted for lunch at the upscale shopping mall at the top of Victoria Peak (McD's for the kids, a gourmet sandwich for Kathleen, and a focaccia from an Italian deli for me).