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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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’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 [...]
If there’s any one thing that’s happened to me in China so far that has made the entire experience worth it, it’s been the connection I’ve managed to forge with this family: