These can be found in a variety of places, and some are the size of my head. This one is about the size of a macintosh apple, and cost me 5 RMB ($.60).

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A Delicious Snack Resturant Sanmingzhi in all its glory:

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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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I realize that many of these posts are food related. But dealing with the daily challenges of eating is one of my major activities here, thus it tends to be written about. On a recent trip to Walmart I needed to buy some more peanut butter after Ratty had eaten all of ours. Well not all of it, but there is no way I was using the rest of it after his sewage encrusted head had been all over it. And low and behold, I saw this jar sitting on the shelf.



The label looked like my favorite brand of peanut butter, the honey nut flavored one. I really should have learned by now not to make these assumptions. It is peanut butter with rice crispies in it. It’s sort of like eating bugs.

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Located near our apartment, the Delicious Snack Restaurant (actual name) is a fried chicken restaurant that is quickly becoming my favorite place to get take out food from. It is way cheaper then our other fried chicken option, KFC, and the level of crazy crap going on there is way higher. Besides the fried chicken they have other food products that are equally bad for you. One is the sanmingzhi. This just means sandwich and is one of those words where they adopt characters to it just to get a sound that is fairly close to what it sounds like in English. Warmahr is another example (Walmart). But their version is three slices of white bread, a slice of ham, a fried egg and lettuce. A delicious snack indeed.

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This the first part where an Orc, a Tauron, and a Troll steal these girls and the coke.



And then the three different endings:

Ending #1

Ending #2

Ending #3

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To complete the trifecta of animal posts, this donkey was running through the streets of Hongcun making angry donkey noises. He seemed to be in a hurry. No clue as to who owned him, or where he was off to. Picture once again by Jenn.

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Caged chickens on the side streets is a pretty common site here. While we were Shanghai we even witnessed a chicken selling lady snapping one of their necks in a chicken killing machine. But a few days ago when I was walking around I saw 3 chickens outside of a bicycle repair shop. Not caged, not contained in any sort of way. Just wandering around pecking the ground. And this was on a major street, about two blocks from the downtown super expensive high-end retail mall which sells Burberry and DKNY goods. Sometimes I love this place.

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Everyday I see this dog sleeping on one of the dirtiest streets I have seen in Nanjing. Somehow he manages to stay lovely. Picture taken by Jenn.

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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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