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.