A Karmic Lychee @ rah-kun.net

Ain’t never been so drunk that I’ve neededt ohug a toilet, but rigt now, I’m higging a toilet. rock on

sprong festival is nutty.

It’s been a bit difficult to fire off entries lately, or at all, really. Things happen so fast here – on a daily basis, for the most part – that stopping to ruminate upon just one thing means I’m probably simultaneously leaving out three or four other things I could be writing about, or I’m actively excluding myself from something that’s happening at that moment. One thing that’s clear is that, a) my brainspace is limited when trying to be experience and digest simultaneously (thinking, constantly, about how much I’d love to write and relate that really cool thing that just happened, and simultaneously trying to figure out when I’ll have the time AND energy to do so).

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But it’s okay, I only have a short update.

Today, for dinner (a second dinner, mind you), I managed to accidentally eat an eyeball, and I tried both frog legs (they were good) and turtle (there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed).

I maintain, though, I don’t like to eat things that look like themselves. Frog legs did, in fact, look like legs. Very well developed muscles those little guys have. And the turtle was just strange and brought back memories of a really fucked up nightmare I had several months ago, but I won’t get into that – it was fucked up but I remember very little of it save something vague about turtles.

And the eyeball… well. That was hidden in a portion of fish that, in the end, turned out to be the head. I managed to miss this fact since the thing was swathed in a delicious sauce that covered the eyes. Unknowingly, I popped the eyeball-laden face-segment into my mouth and, seconds later, there was wretching. You see, eating an eyeball is an unmistakeable experience. Unless you ever eat an especially juice-swollen kernel of corn with an unusually strong skin that also happens to contain something small, round, and semi-hard within it.

Anyways. That’s all for the now. Sleep needs to happen before class happens tomorrow…

…so close to finishing with this crap. More on that soon…

Augh… something is seriously not okay with my insides. Something that started off feeling like indigestion and turned, very rapidly, into traveler’s stomach hit me hard on Sunday night after a very long, bad weekend. I slept it off through Monday and Tuesday and it was just about getting back to normal, when suddenly, this morning, at 2 AM, I got hit with a full relapse.

This is not good. I actually broke out the antibiotics, of which I only have course, sadly. One week of stomach problems can’t decide if they’re getting better or not, I think, is indicative of not bad food – that I’ve had plenty of – but something alive in my gut. This must me remedied.

On the downside, I think I might have to skip work this afternoon. I’m feeling quite woozy now. By the rules, I’ll get docked 57 RMB/hr, but it’s possible I’ll have to fight the boss if she decided to institute her Special Math where she gets to siphon off as much money as she wants per hour.

It’s times like this… and I think this is only the third or fourth time since I’ve been here, and the first time since the mid-fall, that all other thoughts in my head (the ones about jobs, Istanbul, South East Asia, etc) are cancelled out by an overwhelming “I wanna go home.” Ah, the land of pasta and bread…

Mein gott – two posts in a day?

It’s ’bout that time… my daily routine (the one that sorta makes it difficult to write on account of every day looking kinda like the day that came before) is starting to break up a bit. Now I spend afternoons pouring over travel sites, looking for stuff to do in the coming months.

I’ve waxed poetic it enough – but there’s a two month furlough between the end of my contract at the end of February and when I’m pegged to be in Istanbul by come the middle of May. My plan for the two months has had various permutations, stemming from cost considerations, political stability of various regions, what seemed to strike my fancy at the time.

But right now… I’m looking at something like this -

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Last week was a particularly trying time: stressful, tiring, annoying, expensive, and long.

My brain and presence of mind being what it is, I’ll see what I can do to piece together the events of the last week for your reading pleasure…

…the first thing that comes to mind is the big hassle that was my endeavors to transfer my money from here overseas back to the States, where the government can idly chew on it to sate my debt. I’ve got an account with the big Construction Bank of China. It’s one of the biggest banks in China, and more popular, I’ve been told, than Bank of China. Hooray – I didn’t expect to be pulled through the ringer sending money abroad.

Well, to be fair, it was two things that made it difficult.

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“You are a waste of beautiful things.”

The best mixed compliment I’ve received in my life. My big eyes, long eyelashes, and long, thick hair are a constant source of annoyance to my many female coworkers. When I have to retie my hair at work, the girls make big, annoyed sighs and stamp about* because my hair is, apparently, by far better than theirs.

So, the other day, upon close examination, one of the CTs – a particularly prickly one with a forward personality quite uncommon for a Chinese girl – declared me a “waste of beautiful things.”

To which I laughed. For very, very long time.

Stuff like this has started to come out more frequently since I and everyone else just realized that I’ll be leaving next month. Crazy.

*this is because, for all their age (21-24 range), they act like 15 year olds… which is both very very strange and very endearing.

Some more things:

I bought these. I ate them. They're horrible. Literally every third bean tasted honey-roasted while the next tasted like a bit of crap one might find wadded up under their shoe.

A really cool alley way. It's dark, seedy, and leads to a sketchy pool hall in a basement. Little American alarms started going off in the back of my head as we walked down said alley, but... China's really safe... right?

Ah.. Christmas. In China. Working for privately owned training school. If there’s one thing that didn’t fully dawn on me until it was too late, it was how severely I and the other foreigners here would be used as marketing stooges by the school. There’s really no dignity to be had, and thankfully, as foreigners, there’s no real expectation of dignity. We can really do whatever the hell we want and people will think nothing of it. Social codes and stuff be damned, nothing matters if you’re a foreigner. It’s just your “style.” And we have no face here, so humiliation is a non-issue.

That said. I was made to dress up as Santa Claus. But first – pictures from the first couple Christmas related things I did.

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Today, I discovered two potatoes and an onion that have been sitting in my fridge since sometime in mid-November. To my surprise, both were still valid food items, the onion merely having shriveled on its outermost two layers and the potatoes seemingly untouched by the ravages of time. So, me being me, which is both lazy and of the attitude of “well, let’s see what happens,” I cooked them.

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Happy New Year from 13 hours in the future (by the EST reckoning, which I now tend to refer to as the “Shire reckoning” for ha has).

Today has stacked up to be one of the more ironic New Year’s I’ve experienced on record. As some of you may remember, I have made many posts, especially in the beginning of my stay here in Xiangfan, about the local Chinese penchant for firing off rockets at all strange hours of the day. I’ve had rockets go off by my apartment anywhere from 4 AM to the middle of the morning, noon, afternoon, late evening, all the way to Midnight. Actually, pretty much everyday there’s a barrage going off somewhere in immediate earshot at around midnight for some reason.

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