Above: the mining town my friend took me too... and insisted on playing catch in.

Hott Stuff

Zong Ke is hot. Just ask the ladies in the club. On Friday I made good on a promise and went out dancing with some friends, who told me I might have to "find my own partner" to dance with. So we're there, and I'm glancing around. One person is staring back. I mean dead drill nail me to the wall staring. She even gives a come hither look. She's not 20. Nor is she 30. Not 40 or even 50 years old.

The woman was at least 65. There is a white haired hand bag carrying grandma bobbing to JZ along with the crowd. And she was hitting on me.

Only in my life.

Chefs

I make a mean dish of garlic-spicy potato strips (suan la tu dou si), but that's about it. Rae is attempting to teach me to cook a couple dishes a week. I generally butcher them, but my fourth try on potato things was pretty good. Good thing Americans won't know the difference.

Re-Entry

In slightly more than two weeks I return to the United States for the fore seeable future. Meaning at least until I graduate from Northwestern. It seems beyond impossible that I've been here almost a year, but I have. I don't expect my re-entry to go particularly smoothly at all, but I'll be fine. That's really the truth: aside from something happening to my family, anything else I'll just push through. Because you know way?

It's a good day if you make it that way.

Striking resemblences.

That's what I've started noticing. And I am not sure why Shuan Shuan's boyfriend is Luke Liang or how a four year old girl I teach looks as much like a little Alice Zhao as I can imagine, but they do. What I find more interesting is my friends here have started reminding me of non-Chinese acquiantences back home. But at the same time I can never quite place them. Does Ge Qian remind me of Marina, or just some other face that I can't quite dredge up? Tough to say.

Neither cute nor cuddly!

"I'm not cute!" I finally lost it on my roommate as she told me that "I'm so cute" for the 10,000 time. "Where!" I sputtered, "Do I look like a 6 year old girl! And why is it," I continued on, "that every girl I meet tells me I'm cute! Ahhh!" My outbreak (imagine my vioce raised slightly) subsided, Rae proceded to tell me that, "Cute is a good thing," sending me off again.

Turns out we simply suffered from miscommunication. In Chinese calling a boy cute means something like he's not a mean bastard, or that he doesn't treat girls poorly. Basically that he's a Mr. Nice Guy. And so while Rae kept telling me that I'm a "nice guy," all I heard was that, "You're like a 6 year old girl."

Rae then told me I am nothing like a girl. "Good," I said, "why?"

"You don't wash your clothes enough."

Case solved.

Above: I told you airline stewardess can't resist me! :)

Zong Ke Learns to Teach

Zong Ke (me, for the record) is now an English teacher. Bring your nearest 4 to 12 year old to my school and I will teach him or go hoarse trying. I'm not sure that I am really meant to teach little kids, but I really enjoy teaching the 12 year olds. I teach things like, "hot day, hot weather, hot girl!" or "what's up?" Very practical knowledge! If I ever open my own school, it will be called, "The School for Precocious and Sensitive Young Ladies that Want to Learn English Good." Of all my problem kids, not one is a girl. One little boy in particular I wouldn't mind turning him into a slurpee, but that's probably illegal.

Bad bad Baseball

Having completed intensive and extensive daily training for two weeks (no, I'm not kidding) the Zhe Da baseball team is off to Beijing. I will join them for a few days next week, but my four year olds are crimping my style. Despite all the hard work, we are still really bad so I am hoping some sort of mercy rule exists because to be honest, we only have 3 pitchers. And so the pitcher of the day automatically gets a complete game. Besides, we'd have to make a call to the bullpen cell phone because there's sure to be no real phones!

MB Phone Foreigners!

I would, if I could. Except that my cellphone has 70 numbers and only 1 is a foreigner who lives in Hangzhou. And he's a 50 year old man. At first I got pretty lonely when I realized that all the Americans were gone, even though I wasn't close to them I guess their presence was a normalizing factor on me. But I suppose I'm fine now. Give me two weeks and I'll adapt to most things in China anymore. And my friends like to point out, usually while singing karaoke, "you've got us! and we won't leave."

MB Sing Songs!

I do. I even have a repoitoire that I can rock it out too. My specialities: It's my life by Bon Jovi and Everybody by (none else) the Backstreet Boys. In my defense, English song selection is limited and I can only sing about 2 Chinese songs. I ought to be more diligent! Everyone go download (band) S.H.E. (song name) Superstar

4th of July. Left to right: Wu Jian Guang, a student a Zhejiang University of Technology (ZUT) that I met during my first semester in China. Gao Rui Xia, a senior in college in Beijing whom I met in January. She wants to be a psychologist. Chen Shuan Shuan, one of my migrant worker friends, she is from Henan and has mad badminton skills. Huang Lei, my current roommate and a student at China Art Institute. Majors in sculpture. And on the right, Wang Guo Jiang, my first roommate. He probably got the worst end of the deal, as he had to live with me when I hated everything in the universe.

We're celebrating the 4th of July on the 5th because 1) I had the day off and 2)I used the time difference as an excuse. They all piled into my apartment and I whipped up some burgers with steak sauce, chips, fruit and of course pot stickers (饺子). It was a really nice celebration. We even sang America happy birthday.

People often e-mail me and ask, "Michael, when it's 102 every day, what underwear do you like?" I reply that while I have done exclusive testing under multiple conditions, the results seem inconclusive. I present the following scientifically gathered data:

Boxers: while cool and hip, in extreme heat less than ideal. vanderwalls bonding in the boxers will cause them to shear, slowly ascending the corpus rearus and creating a wedgie maximus. Best worn under reasonable conditions.

Stretchy underwear (with cool insignia): while insignia attempts to make them cool and hip, intense cross polyhesional bonding creates an impermeable layer of material, or greenhouse fabric, around critical areas. Also best worn under reasonable conditions.

Conclusion: while no underwear is suitable for Hangzhou in the summer, it still must be worn. Effects can be minimized by replacing jeans with light pants. Shorts aren't the solution.

Despite how much suffering goes into underwear in general, at least underwear shopping can be a real morale booster. Observe:

*Excuse me, what size is this?

*Medium, but that's way too small for you

*Oh? What should I wear?

*I'm thinking at least extra-extra-large, let me look in the back

I apologize for any and all inappropriate imagery that was generated by this entry!

The Travel Gods decided that I was not sufficiently accommodating to my family on their China vacation. And so they arranged for my friend to invite to visit his home in the countryside this weekend. My karma has been balanced.

Perhaps it was the personality disconnect between my friend and me. Dressing in US military fatigues didn't help when he showed me his voyageur home made video of his girlfriend's cleavage. He's likes to pretend he's a gangster, except he has a snoopy backpack.

Or maybe the fact that he mostly brought me along to practice his English on irritated me. His parents speak dialect and Mandarin, he speaks dialect, Mandarin and sort of English, and I speak Mandarin and English. So why the hell did we have to converse in either dialect or English?

More than likely it was the environment. His own house was interesting. Three stories, bigger than my house in the states, and modern. Except floors two and three are devoid of anything. Far more stressful was the mining town his relatives work in. We visited. Might as well have had aliens land.

They mine rocks and then crush them. That's their life. When I walked in the house, the early twenties husband was asleep on the bed, an IV in his arm. A cold, my friend explained. His young wife, several months pregnant, alternated between laying on the bed next to her husband and wandering, comatose, around the house. Flies buzzed everywhere, dust layered. The moment I stepped in, I wanted to leave. I think they felt the same.

Instead, my friend insisted on playing baseball catch in the street. Miners stared. I felt like a moron. My friend showed off and threw the ball out of controll over my head. The ball hit the dirt, rolled lazily past a miner's foot, and into a puddle. The miner blinked. I retrieved the ball. Finally we left.

The food pushed me too. I hate surrending control of my diet because it usually ends like this: octupus tentacles and frogs for lunch, expensive fatty beef for dinner. I managed to dissuade thm from cooking the live eel in a bucket behind the house. It was from the nearby crick.

Unbelievably, we stumbled into the only foreign teachers in this remote town on Friday night. My friend was delighted--English he couldn't understand to listen to and foreign girls to ogle--and I was happy. I really know any foreigners in Hangzhou now. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had if I had somehow ended up in a town like that.

But what you must understand, and probably can't, is that the town was fine. A beautiful park. A huge modern high school with an artificial turf soccer field. A KFC and a department store selling Oil of Olay products. This is the contrast that foreigners can never completely wrap around, myself included. A modern city. Ten minutes outside, it's as if fragments of technology had invaded 100 years ago. Old men on electric bicycles bouncing past cattle.

And I understand ever so much more why working 60 hours a week at a tea shop is a good job in a lot of my peasant friends' eyes.


In other news, I lost my super cool umbrella, which was a crushing blow. Not only did it collapese on its own, but I was also rather fond of it. Other news soon.