A Travelogue and (occasional) Sketchblog
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I wish I could do this:
Teaching. It’s… not me. I’ve thought about it for a bit – since I got here, really – and I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that I’ve got a lot of traits and skills that might make me like a teacher, but that’s not exactly my thing. My enthusiasm for the things here that [...]
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 [...]
Say what you will about raptors or the T-Rex, but this actually scared the pee outta me; the thought of such an animal existing:
Paleontologists have discovered fossils of several crocodile species that indicate some crocs galloped upright on land, some were enormous, and some literally ate dinosaurs for breakfast.
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Unlike modern crocodiles, many of these ancient [...]
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 [...]