Friday August 22, 2008
A one day update! Damn, my ego just got a boost!
Yesterday I slept for a long time (I don't know why but I seriously feel like I need 10 hours of sleep here – not tight) then got up and Sam and I went to get a bite of lunch (zhong shue zhao – dumplings in sweet-n-spicy oil) then I went to the coffee shop for a while and read. I also called a contact about a teaching job and set up an interview. Then Rick called me and he, Sam and I played dou di zhu (I misspelled this one before – pinyin zh is pronounced as j) at the tea-house midway between our houses. It was nice enough to sit outside during the day and was probably somewhere in the high-70s, low-80s.
Sam and I went to Green Dragon for dinner, got an amazing tofu dish, a sweet potato dish and an oily beef dish. It was way too much food and we stuffed ourselves before taking a nice stroll home. Yulin is a great neighborhood for people- and girl-watching, sitting in front of the glass windows of the restaurant, looking out at the constant streams of people walking by. There are, like, lots of, like, people in China.
We got ready for the night, Oz having alerted us of a good bar/club to meet at. Rick came by and met us, then we met Oz and his co-worker Justin, an American. The bar was alright, exceptionally overpriced (30RMB for a Bud Ice – 3x as expensive as a big Tsingtao and much worse) but the girls were beautiful, so I guess that's a plus. It was really busy and when I went to the bathroom I got a back massage as I washed my hands, and for me, that made the whole experience worthwhile. It was a first.
Sidenote: Height. In the US, I'm pretty tall. In China, I'm gigantic. I've seen seven Chinese people taller or about my height since I've been here. It'd be hard to quantify how many Chinese people I see in a day but it's a lot. I feel like in the US, I see at least a couple people taller than me every day. Additionally, it's not like in the US, where there are lots of dudes who are six feet tall. I'm, on average, six inches taller than Chinese guys, probably eight to ten inches taller than Chinese girls. I'll try to keep this count going for as long as I can. The main reason I bring it up is that yesterday I saw two guys my height or taller. Nuts!
So we sat around for a while. This bar was funny because there's an electronic board that posts singles ads, complete with the table number of the interested party. Rick wrote up an ad, I don't know if it was posted, but it was a pretty funny situation. Oz and Justin ended up joining the table of a couple cute Chinese girls but after a while realized they couldn't talk to them. It is very important to know Chinese in order to pick up Chinese girls, much less to communicate with them. This will be a large motivation for me. So they left, Sam and I sidled up and I had a good incomprehensible conversation with the girl next to me, but I was able to tell her my age, find out hers, learn her name and get her phone number. So I figure, after a couple weeks of Chinese class, I'll call her and see if we can get together. Gotta start somewhere.
The girls left and we figured we'd do the same. We took a cab home and played some dou di zhu. When we play dou di zhu, we bet 1RMB per hand. The profits from the game go to a general pot for a bottle of Jameson. As we grow nearer to Sam's departure and the pot gets closer to fruition, we have been playing more and more dou di zhu. It has quickly become my favorite card game. I stayed up way too late and got up early for an interview and got a job offer. But you'll just have to wait...until the next update.
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