While cleaning a pot yesterday I heard a dripping sound under my kitchen sink. I opened up the cupboard and saw that the bottom of the drain had cracked and was spilling water directly under the floor. I let it dry out for a while and tried to seal it up with the only adhesive product that I currently have, clear packing tape. This obviously didn’t work, and so I put a small pot under it and called it a day.

Sorry for the poor quality of this picture but it is dark under the sink. Notice the blue tubbing that is coming out of the plastic sink drain. My bathroom sink is assembled in the same cheap, cheap manner. I would like to point that brown thing on the left. I assume that is the line to the sewer. It is covered grease and other strange things.

Still, no reappearance of Ratty, although i did see a dead rat outside the supermarket. It’s the plague!

Update:
I started writing this post before I went to diner, and then got busy packing and hit publish without reading through it. I swear that originally there was a point to this post.

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As tonight is the last night of Spring Festival, a hell of a lot of fireworks are going off. Probably the most since the first night of the festival. On my almost nightly beer run up the street I saw a cook from a restaurant nearby had climbed up a tree, a tree that most certainly should not be supporting humans, and he was stringing up one of those long firecracker ropes. He jumped out of the tree and one of the waitresses lit the fireworks. It was partially in the bike lane of the road, and as it was going off a guy on a scooter drove right through them. And then a rat, who I believe was in the bushes or in the trash, came out of the smoke totally terrified and ran directly at me. I had to jump out of the way so he wouldn’t run over my foot.

Overall, a simple trip turned interesting.

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Today we went to Walmart to buy our usually supply of cheap water and delicious diner rolls. It may give you some indication as to how my standards of what is delicious have changed when I consider Walmart diner rolls to be out of this world. Anyway we had picked up our goods and were about to leave when I saw one of the open meat bins that they often have in stores here. Basically they just fill a large display section with ice and some sort of meat. I find this generally interesting as I am used to meat being secured behind glass cases, not right there in your face. I walked over and saw that there was a guy, probably around 50, going through chicken wings with his bare hands! And it’s not like there weren’t tongs to pick the meat or that he just didn’t see them. In fact he moved them out of the way to look through more wings. I assume that he must have been looking for the ones with the most meat, since he would pick them up, examine them and then toss them to the side. This is dirty for a couple reasons. For the people who will later buy these wings that have been handled so roughly. And for the guy who could catch salmonella and various other diseases by handling the most dangerous of all raw meat, raw chicken. Also right by the chicken wings were, judging by their relative size, pig testicles.

Now I just want to clarify because of this post (and this post) that these are strange cases and do not represent the whole population. It just bizarre cases of weird behavior that I feel I have to document here. It certainly doesn’t negate, and in fact probably enhances, the awesomeness of being here. I would also like to stress that Mother’s brand beef jerky is a great jerky choice in China. Especially the new 10 RMB pack with bigger and juicier chunks. Amazing!

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Today we had lunch with a couple of friends. It was delicious and they had my favorite dish there, shredded pork and onion with bread wraps. The closest thing I can relate it to is a McRib, but actually good. This place was close to the foreign language bookstore so after eating we decided to walk over and browse a little. While walking down the street I saw an old man standing by the large floor to ceiling windows of the store. He is probably about 60-70 years old. Now at this point I can only see him from behind but from that angle he is making a hand movement that can only be one thing. This registers in my mind, but it takes me a few minutes to put it together, that this guy is masturbating on the sidewalk. So I turn my head back around and there is absolutely no mistaking that he is standing there in plain view just going to town. At this point i think he sees me out of the corner of his eye and makes a ridiculous “OH” face while he slowly cover his area with his coat. Once we are inside I tell Jenn and can see that by then the store’s security guard has chased the man away.

After some consideration I can only think of a couple of things that could have excited him so. The store’s staff I think is entirely girls, so he might have just been watching them. Or the section that he was near is the photography and fine art section. Maybe the cover of one of the books had some naked women on it or something. I don’t know. It was certainly one of the strangest things that I have seen here so far, and that’s saying a lot. After that our Chinese friend had asked what happened, and we told her that and old man had been doing something bad outside. I have no idea how we would explain that situation in Chinese. It’s something that is not covered in the language books.

On a somewhat related note (well not really at all) I was looking through the advanced TOEFL book to see what kind of essays it contain. One of them was about a guy who was a cellist, a first person narrative of his playing. Now I am doing this from memory but this is pretty close to how it read.

I place the cello into the notch on the floor. I like to take my shirt of while playing and put the instrument against my bare chest. When I play the vibration from the body of the cello passes through into my body…

This is the kind of perverted stuff that they use to teach English to people? How useful is this to someone who is a non-native English speaker? And shouldn’t someone teach people how creepy this is? I once again don’t know.

It’s amazing how a simple trip to the bookstore can be so bizarrely entertaining.

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When walking down the street you will encounter poop. It is a fact of life, and there is nothing that can be done about. While true in any country, here in China it is a bit different. Every time I see one of those familiar little piles I have to wonder to myself if this is human or animal feces. Parents let and sometimes encourage their children to pee and poop in the street. I have seen this numerous times now and its not just on the side streets, often it is on main roads directly on the sidewalk in view of traffic. One time I saw a women encouraging her child to pee in a Walmart. In a Walmart! This is mostly smaller children, toddler sized, although once a kid that must have been about 5 years old was pooping on a newspaper. The fact that I most surprising to me about all of this is that they don’t try to get out of the way at all, or go in an alley or a less trafficked street. Just directly in front of you, pee and poop. That is why if there is one piece of advice that I can give to someone that is thinking about traveling to China it is this: avoid the puddles.

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Living here where nothing makes sense sometimes forces you to attempt to impose your own meaning to things. Occasionally we will be in a McDonalds or other food place and a random Chinese song will come on the radio, and I will think that it is Tom Wait’s “Cold Cold Ground” or some Jeff Buckley song. Equally strange is when we hear things that are familiar but shouldn’t be here. Like hearing an old PJ Harvey song in a Starbucks. This search for the familiar probably has something to do with why I have been listening to so much Led Zeppelin, since nothing is more familiar then “Stairway to Heaven”. Or why was I looking forward to going bowling here in Nanjing. I know bowling. I understand how to bowl. Fantastic.
A few observations about the bowling should give you a good impressions of the experience. First the smell in there was incredible. It lead someone with us to remark that it smelled like “feet and assholes”. A very apt description. I have to wonder if they ever use that shoe sterilizing spray that is in the American bowling alleys. Also, by the check in counter was a set of toenail clippers attached to a chain. These were large sized clippers that are only used for toenails. The only conclusion that I can come to is that people’s toenails are just so long that they cannot possibly fit bowling shoes on them. And there was a slight twist to that old bowling alley staple, the crane game: one had ciggeretes in it . The bowling itself was great, and you got adjusted to the smell in a rather short amount of time. As an added bonus there was a guy in a tank-top and slacks that appeared to be mixing tai chi moves in with a bowling stance.

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We took the overnight train to Tunxi, and took a bus to Huangshan. After making our way up the mountain we were completely worn out so we thought we would get a hotel room, take shower, and have a bit of a rest. We made our way through the thick mist and after going to a few different hotels found they were all hideously overpriced and also completely booked. At that point we met up with the Americans from Nanjing University and a guy who own a beef restaurant 15 minutes from our apartment that we had met on the bus to the mountain. They had found a suite for 7 people at one of the hotels and thought that maybe they could squeeze us in. Luckily we found them or else we had to try to find something on the bottom of the mountain (I’m assuming equally difficult). So we made our way to check in and paid 120 RMB, way too much for what it was.
The room had four bunk beds in it. The beds, and I am completely serious here, were plywood with a sheet on top. There was a thin mat under the sheet, but it may as well of not been there as it did not to help cushion. The pillow and blanket were visibly dirty. I looked under the pillow case and it had those black spots that fabric gets when it is wet and moldy. The smell in the room was something that I couldn’t quite place. It was musty and moldy but in a way that was more pungent and strong then any way that I have experienced. And everything was damp. The bathroom was outside and was a trough that water occasionally ran through. It was also full of gigantic bugs, and one of the Americans said she saw a hairy spider in the women’s bathroom. Of course there was no shower. Suprisingly there was a TV in that room, considering the lack of any other amenities. We did manage to get some sleep, although sometimes the smell in the room would wake me up like a punch in the face. We were so tired that I think we could have slept anywhere, and it was not too bad if you tried not to think of the many different types of bugs that could be crawling on you.
The next day instead of hiking down the other side of the mountain we took the cable car down and caught a bus back into Tunxi. We wandered a around for a while and after checking a few hotels that were full we followed this lady to her sister’s hotel and got a room there. It is amazing how much your idea of clean can change in a trip. This place actually had a bathroom with a shower! And mattresses! Never mind that everything seemed damp, there were burn/water damage marks everywhere , a gigantic puddle around the toilet and a cigarette butt on the floor We both took showers as quickly as possible. I smelled worse then I can ever remembering smelling. Then we went and got some food and felt totally refreshed. We passed out easily that night, as we were exhausted. Then Jenn woke up at midnight as she heard something on the table. We turned the light on and saw a rat had eaten one of my scallion flat breads I had bought for breakfast. Then Jenn saw a cockroach. We could hear the rat gnawing on something in the wall the rest of the night. Needless to say that we did not sleep much. We bought train tickets in the morning and had an interesting 10 hour train ride back.
So overall it was a great trip; we met a ton of interesting people and the mountain was amazing. But like so many experiences I have had here so far it was something awesome tempered by something terrible.

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