Of course it's good for you, it's all-natural.

Mark and I were in the big city today after a setback involving the wrong business scope printed on some of the certifications we got from the government.

On the way out, we picked up some medicine for Mark's cousin, and while I was waiting, I was absent-mindedly reading the labels of some vitamins behind the counter when something caught my eye. As my eyes wandered down the row, here's what I read, all of the pill bottles looking exactly the same and carrying about 100 pills each:

Calcium & Vitamin D
Vitamin C & Vitamin E
Jean & beautiful
Sheep Placenta
Compound Vitamin
Amino Acid
Galcium + VD

Is that Idaho? Or a kidney?

Every day after class, I walk to lunch through a street where people are butchering sheep on the side of the road, with large numbers of carcasses just hanging up next to them. And today, I wasn't really paying attention, and I came *so* close to stepping on a random organ that had made its way to the street. It's the type of thing where you see it at the last moment, and immediately exert all your strength to lunge forward and step past it.

I think maybe it was a sheep's kidney.

I feel like I should be able to be a little more definitive about that. I think if I saw where it was positioned in the sheep I could've figured it out--but when it's lying in the street, it's a little more difficult. It's like how you can name a state if all the lines are drawn, but it might be difficult to draw Idaho, for instance, in the exact right location on a blank map (Idaho in this way--and maybe others?--is much like that nameless internal organ thrown in the street).

You can call me Bond. Mister Bond. Mister Bond Coffee.

My computer has been making funny noises. If I appear to drop off the face of the Earth, I wanted you all to know what likely happened.

More posts to come about the winter! But for now, I felt like I needed to leave some mirth in my wake. But, how can I best acquire mirth, you may ask, in a culture in which happiness is perceived so differently from the one in which I was socialized?


I buy it! And here is a reproduction of the text on this can of (sort of) coffee-like mirth:

Mr.
Bond
coffee

American pattern

>> I'm young...I'm coffee

Person I Would Most Like to Meet

Open Note, to a Chinese Person Who Has Wisely Chosen to Remain Anonymous:

I understand that you live in a place where manners as Westerners understand them many times are not part of the socialization process. What may be a folkway in America usually doesn't even reach acknowledgment here. People hack, cough and spit on the ground even indoors or on buses, people blow their noses straight to the sidewalk (finger holding closed the other nostril), people push and shove instead of standing in lines. They will pee on the side of the street. In times when it doesn't matter, grown people will sprint to get on a bus before anyone else. They will yell. They will be near-violently physical in insisting that you buy their product or use their method of transportation. They will talk right in your face for several minutes, when you've told them that you don't understand English. They will try to cheat you every time because you are a foreigner (we call it 'foreigner tax').

That is all fine. I understand that it's a culture thing.

But for goodness' sake, if you're going to throw dirty water out of your 2nd floor apartment window, take a look downstairs just briefly. I mean, a casual glance, less than a second. Because it wasn't like that splashed my shoes. It landed right on my head, bull's-eye, to where I took a taxi the last five minutes of my walk home so I could towel off. I would think it was purposeful except that I couldn't bear to. First of all, it's literally freezing outside, and being soaked doesn't help. Then, the smell was somewhat less than ideal, though I've been avoiding that thought pretty persistently. A friend was waiting for me, and so I had to wait for an hour and a half to take a shower. Before I finally did, my hair had dried and stuck together. It was at the end of a long day, and while now it admittedly seems pretty funny, at the time it was almost the last straw.

And if you ever see me around again and want to learn some interesting new words in English, please, please introduce yourself.

Most sincerely,
Drew

Learning some common sense.

You know, it's always a little strange, even disconcerting, to be approached here confidently by someone who doesn't speak English. I mean, it's wildly unusual to be approached confidently by anyone at all. So, when a woman came up to me tonight as I was walking through the city square, I was a little confused. She started talking pretty quickly in Chinese, and when I didn't understand, she said that she didn't speak much English.

Now, I know this may sound a little strange, but I immediately knew she was a prostitute. She was dressed modestly, but after all, it's pretty cold outside. It was in an area of town where there are a lot of hotels (almost any time you stay at a hotel alone in China as a male, you'll get phone calls from callgirls, and if you unplug your phone or don't answer, you may even have some knocking on your door). Pretty much the only women in most big cities that will approach you are prostitutes, especially with that kind of confidence. It was at night, in sort of a darker place in the square, without many people around. I mean, it just made sense. But she didn't seem like she was propositioning me. It sounded like she was asking for my phone number (yeah, right), or maybe she wanted to give me her phone number in case I was interested. But she was acting so strange. And she kept saying something about me coming in the morning to see her (huh?). She kept saying the word phone. And she kept saying something about electricity, maybe. Really, my Chinese isn't very good.

Okay, so all of a sudden I realized that she was one of the attendants in China Telecom, which I'd visited this morning to try and get a phone line connected in my apartment. She wasn't the one I was talking to, she was at the other desk. I'm surprised, honestly, that I even vaguely remembered her. Immediately I'm sure my entire demeanor changed (from "Why are you talking to me?" to "I am so excited to see you!"--a big switch). I had said I'd come in this afternoon, but I didn't have time, so I let her know that I'm going in again tomorrow morning. I'm glad I didn't just say, "I don't want it" and walk away.

There's a pretty deep lesson here, boys and girls: don't assume people are prostitutes just because they're talking to you.

Jump

Old people here are afraid of escalators. They leap on and off, and before each jump you can see them mentally preparing themselves for a possible ugly demise.

Popsicles, or, Almost Getting Hit By Cars

So, in light of a recent post I made mentioning popsicles, I thought that I would make another to further elucidate the subject.

See, many of the current popsicle manufacturers in China have started something truly unique: putting a thin layer of ice around the sides of the popsicle, and making the inside much softer than any ice cream bar in America.

Ingenious, right? Even though it's not nearly as delightful to eat, there's no having to worry about potential drips or, worst of all, the complete loss of one half of the popsicle, broken off and fallen because of structural deficiencies.

Well, wrong. The ice, unfortunately, doesn't continue to the bottom of the popsicle. Therefore, walking down the street you look absolutely ridiculous trying to attend to the top and bottom of the popsicle near-simultaneously. Once you get near to the bottom, the ice has also already started to break up, making the whole thing one barely-cohesive mess on a stick. As this requires all of your concentration, if you are walking in the city square, for instance, hypothetically, you will almost get hit by a car.

Of course, this isn't entirely your fault, or even the popsicle's--cars in China are much less predictable than in America. You can almost get hit by a car while sitting in the living room of your fifth floor apartment if you aren't paying enough attention, especially if you left a window open.

Home Again

On Monday I did a bunch of the official things that need to get done for me to live and work here. The highlight of this was most definitely the physical. I got it in an office building somewhere in the city I was in--you parked in the back and went up this back staircase to find the place. The sign is tiny.

So I go in, I write down my name and birthday, and immediately they start sending me around to all these different stations. It was like an adventure, or a video game, and each different one was a test or a level that you had to pass. I'd go in, they'd motion for me to lay on the table, motion for me to lift my shirt, they'd put gel on my chest, attach all these suction cups to me, wait ten seconds, and they'd stamp the paper and send me off. In one room they attached a red lead (positive voltage) and a black lead (ground) to my arms, and I was terrified that they were going to shock me. Luckily, my boss was with me and could explain most of what they were doing. I got an EKG, an ultrasound, a chest x-ray, and then all the normal stuff from a doctor's visit. Then we headed home that day.

On the way home, there were different people on the side of the road with boxes and boxes of bees. Apparently these people start in northern China at the beginning of summer and start moving down south as the flowers finish blooming where they are and start blooming more south. They follow the flowers until they finally end up in Tibet. Apparently the specific area that I live in, though, is famous for its honey. They live in ramshackle tents, in groups of two or three. They have just huge drums of honey in their tents. The man let us taste some absolutely fresh honey, and it was amazing--if I hadn't known, I might not even think it was just honey. I don't really know how to describe it.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to travel. I love being on the road headed somewhere far away for absolutely no reason. There's something about me that just craves it.

But honestly, this whole past weekend I just wanted to be back here, to the city that's quickly been becoming my home. We had a calm night on Monday night when I got back, but then last night we went with a bunch of friends for another night of karaoke. This time it was even more fun than last time--it was similar, but there was a lot of dancing, and everyone was really into everything and having a lot of fun.

But, I guess that's probably more than enough for now.

A Day Alone, Pt. 3

Right now I've moved to a hotel in this same city. It's a horrible little place with no air conditioning, but I realized too late that I didn't bring enough money, and there's nowhere I can get more until tomorrow. Tonight I'm eating fried rice in a cheap hole-in-the-wall restaurant and hoping that it'll tide me over until tomorrow. I'd like to go back to that kafeiguan later, but that would leave me with 2 kuai--barely enough to buy a bottle of water.

(And later.)

I wrote down the name of the coffee shop I was in earlier and am in now--Oasis coffee Beautiful family: Graceful & Cosy Greenland Coffee Island. At night, though, the dive bar feel is lost--all the lamps are lit, there are Christmas lights and nice music, and the place overall lives up to the word "cosy." It's empty except for me.

I just went for a walk and decided to write down some of the things I saw. I'll post them here for your benefit:

• A toy poodle with its ears dyed pink.
  
• A girl trying to describe something to a friend, making a sound like a train.
  
• Construction workers wearing wicker helmets.
  
• Three 15-year-old boys in dress pants and no shirts drinking beer at a table.
  
• Three men on motorcycles wearing construction helmets.
  
• Someone who yelled "Hello!" to me and gestured with his hand at an entranceway covered with a dirty towel.
  
• Girls practicing a dance in front of a school gate.
  
• An open door covered with a picture of Santa Claus, through which I could see a dark, narrow stairwell up.