a little bit of everything

The thing I love about China is that there are babies everywhere. Not just babies but little toddling things running around all chubby and dressed up in mainly what looks like traditional Chinese outfits, only with special pants that have a slit in the bottom for going to the bathroom because no one uses diapers. Parents wrap their kids up in blankets and carry them around so bundled up it is often difficult to discern whether there is actually someone inside or they are simply going to do laundry. It is strange to look at all the thin as a rail students walking around and think that they were once, well, round. Dieting for girls is big here, although I haven’t seen as much evidence here as in Beijing, where my friends roommates would alternate weeks when they could eat breakfast or lunch, or even dinner. I can understand not wanting to eat food drenched in oil and msg all the time, but this does not seem to be their reasoning. Also they have a very strange concept around healthy, er, bowel movements. The next few sentences may be a little graphic for some people so feel free to skip down to the next paragraph. I have a friend whose roommate informed her that if your bowel movements are yellow, that means you are really healthy. My friend tried to contest this of course because it was weird and didn’t sound right, insisting the proper color was brown, but no, no, her roommate said that same from eating too much meat or chocolate. So she went and researched it herself since she was confused, and found that yellow indicates eating too much msg. yikes. And they think its healthy, but not that surprising when considering the looks we get when we ask for food made without msg and especially after discovering the clearly labeled “msg covered salt” that we found at a nice Japanese restaurant.

In other food related topic, I ate a HAMBURGER. The first one I have ever had in my life because I don’t eat beef in the states, but it’s harder to do here because the lack of fresh vegetables and Italian food, which I have realized is my main staple. The Italian, not the vegetables, sorry mom. Anyways I have just lost one of my best truths for Two Truths and a Lie, I’ll have to think of a new one. We decided to have a cookout to show the roommates that hamburgers can be more than the flat boring patties you get at McDonalds, although I can’t really talk cause I’ve never had one, so we made burgers from ground beef that would usually end up in dumplings or buns or something, and got a lot of condiments, most of which are still in the kitchen, but the hardest part was finding charcoal for the grill. And there was no lighter fluid. We had to go around asking restaurants if they had any coal they could sell us, finally finding one that did, but it was the slowest start to a grill I have ever seen in my life. It ended up working out in the end despite some of the frantic worrying earlier, which seems to be a trend with any American food we try to make here, for example the pancakes we made the day before. Things didn’t start out so well since we lacked a mixing bowl, spoons, plates, frying pan and a stovetop. So we made do with a converted juice container, a knife, bought some plates, and used a wok and pot on the two hotplates provided for us in the kitchen. The first couple were a disaster, but after that we started to get the hang of it, flipping them in the wok without a needing a spatula. Well, I didn’t do it that way, never have been able to flip pancakes like that, but perhaps I will try next time.

I went to West Lake for the first time, which was necessary since it is essentially considered sacrilege to go to Hangzhou and not see it, and I have lived here for a couple months already, or at least one month anyway. I went at night and only to eat in the area, so I didn’t get to see that much, but it was really pretty, bigger than the Hou Hai lake we used to go to in Beijing. I have to go again during the day and walk around it, but just haven’t found the time so far. I don’t really have much time for things besides my work and two extracurricular classes, unfortunate, but I like my wushu and ping pong class a lot. I have realized that even though I may work up a sweat during ping pong I am not going to come out of this class as the best player ever, but instead will simply have an understanding of the proper basic technique, which is fine but people should not expect me to beat them now if I wasn’t able to before. My wushu class is a lot of fun, there are only 4 of us but its good since it makes it less embarrassing when we look like fools jumping around trying to do serious kicks and instead simply falling over. I come out of every class extremely sore, you’d think after a couple weeks that wouldn’t happen anymore but obviously my body disagrees.

So I kinda cheated with this entry since I wrote before I went on break to give you guys something to read while I was away and then didn’t have time to post it. So I actually just got back and now am posting and will try to write about my vacation when I get caught up on work. They don’t seem to understand that vacation should indicate no hw, especially since we are expected to travel the whole time. Oh well.