A Travelogue and (occasional) Sketchblog
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Note to self – my Chinese gets exponentially better once I’ve got a little bit of booze in me. I had a small class of Jianjiu, or Yaojiu (medicine wine), which is basically the local baijiu with roots and herbs in it. It’s still pretty nasty, but I can pretend that it’s got some kind [...]
It’s been a nutty week or two here, time seems to be flooding by both quickly and slowly. I tell people, “I’m two minds, really, one part of me loves it here and wouldn’t mind staying a bit longer, the other part really misses Kelly and wants to be back with her.” Well, both halves [...]
It’s cold. It’s very very cold. It’s been hovering just above freezing since three days ago and there’s a couple inches of snow on the ground. It’s a damp cold of the likes that gets into your bones and doesn’t get out. Ever. My apartment, I’ve discovered, is little more than a hollow concrete shell [...]
I think I’ve mentioned this rule I decided to live by here in China, the first rule of improv, “always say yes.” I follow this rule within reason when people make suggestions of me and it’s gotten me into pretty interesting stuff. Of course, when I say within reason, I’m referring to things such as [...]
I’m getting itchy. Like… under my skin. I’m getting tired of a bunch of things here – mainly my inability to form connections due to the language barrier, that damnable wall I hit every time I try to forge some new communication with someone, or when I have a question I want to ask but [...]
There’s something about precocious children. They’re so… precocious. And Friday nights too, good things tend to happen on Friday nights for no apparent reason other than it just so happens to be Friday night.
It’s been pretty dull here lately, and I’ve been rather lonely since my non-school related friends dwindled in number from two to [...]
…everything is so freaking hard here. Not that I didn’t bring it on myself knowingly coming to a relatively remote city. Nevertheless, the circumstances that keep getting in my way are particularly… I don’t know, it’s like someone’s actively seeking to thwart me.