Chinese Food makes me greatful for Fiber Crackers....

Chinese food is good.... most of the time. Some of the time it is really good, and sometimes its weird, and sometimes when it taste good it feels weird the next day. This time it felt weird the next day....and the next.... and the next ...and the next all the way until Saturday. I had been eating at the student cafeteria which is pretty tasty and is supposed to be pretty sanitary. Then Tuesday afternoon I went and got a cup of fruit the fruit looked pretty good from the outside it looked really good but when I started eating it it tasted a little funny, sort of like fermentation. I paused but thought about how most Chinese people don't waste very much and I thought maybe Chinese oranges and grapes are supposed to taste this different. After a couple more pieces and one incredibly nasty taste of orange that made me shiver I realized that different and bad are two entirely different flavors. I threw the last peice away and headed off to class where I began to feel like the fruit tasted, nasty. (the meaning of the word nasty in this context should not be confused with its slang usage as sick, wicked or awesome)

I headed home for class and spent the next couple days on the couch, trying to avoid puking, and my bed which is so hard that my but hurts after a good nights rest. It is better than my previous bed though which made my but fall asleep while I was sleeping... a pretty funny feeling I might add.

I was really greatful to have a nice couch to sleep on, some good friends Daniel gave me a priesthood blessing and Susanah brought me peptobismal and high fiber digestive crackers, which were pivotal in feeling better.

Most of the time it was nice to relax not worry about class and as long as I stayed on the couch or bed I was pretty comfortable. I am greatfull to be back on my feet and able to eat Chinese food again.

明孝陵，中山陵

A quick smattering of some pictures from to historic sights in Nanjing, Mingxiaoling, and Zhongshanling. I really like literal translations, remember if you want to ride the wheel it is free depending on the admissions ticket, ....understand?

Monopoly Money

After spending the weekend in Shanghai I moved into my apartment in 鼓楼区三条巷 on Monday evening. My landlords are super nice and I got a pretty good deal on rent. The house is also close to campus, and clean. So far I have only seen one cockroach which is good for living in huge city. My air-conditioner just started raining again though. The money is to pay for five months of rent. In China people don't like to use checks so almost everything is done in cash. My rent for my two bedroom apartment came out to be 11,000 rnb with a 2,2oo rnb security deposit so I had to go to the ATM and pull out as much cash as I could the whole weekend that I spent in Shanghai. It was sort of scary and cool to literally have my pockets bursting with cash.





While I was running down the street to check out a house the previous day my pants ripped... now I have another pair of shorts.

A Broken Watch and the White Guy in the Waiting Room

June 23 2008
After a sleepless night (By Choice) I am in LA waiting for a delayed flight to Shanghai. On the last flight I meet a guy named Jasper who plays in a rock band called Rock Fed from Moab Utah. He was a super chill guy that was stocked about his musical dreams. I sat next to a 30 year old Jewish girl after talking about kite snowboarding, surfing, the word of wisdom, kids and adoption we thought I had a five hour layover so she invited me to go swimming in the mansion that she is house sitting at. After double Checking my flight time, I found out that I wouldn’t have time. It would have been fun to be that spontaneous, I even had my swimsuit in my carry on. Traveling alone is a little nerve racking but going solo puts you in positions to meet some really cool people.

Finally I arrived in Shanghai after not having slept laying down since the 21st, and went took the Maglev ( A train that goes super fast levitating on magnetic repulsion) to the sub-way where a really nice Chinese guy told me which subway to take and a nice Chinese girl helped me buy a ticket from a complicated looking machine that turns out to be very easy to use if you are not nervous, used to millions of people running around behind you speaking Chinese and have used the machine before.

With there help I made it to the train station only to find out that the tickets to Nanjing were sold out. There were tons of people in the square outside waiting to watch the closing ceremonies. I thought they were all waiting for trains so I considered sleeping in the square until the next morning when I could take a train. When I nice taxi driver came up to me and offered to take me to a hotel I thought for sure he was going to steal my everything. Instead he saw that I was a poor college student and charged me less than the normal fare for Shanghai taxis and got me a deal on a room for the night, still expensive but fair for Shanghai.

That night I had to get out and walk around so I left the hotel with the address and the Chinese in my head and promptly got lost. It is amazing how similar all the buildings looked in the dark. I was doing fine until I tried to take a short cut. I ended up walking past a park where nice man wanted to sell me DVDs when that didn’t work he asked me Sex 你要不要。 Do you want sex, startled I told him that I would rather pet a porcupine and kept walking. (I don’t know who to say porcupine in Chinese so that part isn’t true but it would have been a good story if it was.) Eventually the people on the street told me how to get home and I slept well, I woke up with the sun but had no idea what that meant the room had no alarm clock and my watch had broken the day before so I had to go all the way down to the front desk to ask the time. That morning I got free breakfast, roasted peanuts, soy milk, fried rice, fried noodles, some little cakes and a big pot of warm water with rice in it, which was actually okay once I decided that it didn’t matter if what it tasted like.

That day I made it to Nanjing got hustled by an illegal cab driver. (if you are in China only take the official cabs that have 出租车 written on them, some people drive around ordinary cars that don’t look like taxis and charge you as much as they can get from you. This one wanted 90 yuan I ended up giving him 40 which is about 20 more than a real taxi would have cost. The big difference is that if you get caught in one they take everyone in the car to jail and if you get hurt in an accident they don’t have any insurance so you lose all of your money. When I finally made it to my hotel I was so tired of traveling I wanted to see something familiar so badly that I thought about going home then I ran into a friend and life was instantly better. It has been amazing to see how far you can go when you have no idea where you are going. It really boosts your faith in God and your fellow man. When I was standing confusedly at the subway station a man came up to me without me searching him out and told me which train I needed to take. It was a small miracle that step of the journey so much easier.