reason 481 that I simultaneously love and hate China:

Today I bought a DVD of Wanted (possibly one of the greatest movies ever), and a pomegranate, for five kuai each, ( .75 cents), only to arrive home and find that a) the pomegranate was far from ripe, and b) the movie was entirely in russian.

Moral: You can get anything for dirt cheap in China, but nine times out of ten it takes at least a few purchases before you get the right thing.

Funny thing about jing weather that I have learned in the last week is that Asia does not believe in Fall. last week it was 85, this week it is 4o. Yesterday it actually felt like Seattle: drizzling rain, freezing cold. It was a rude awakening to what is in store for me in the next 6 months. I have absolutely no concept of how cold it is going to get - 20 below means nothing to me since I have never lived anywhere really cold (yes it gets that cold in Jing). Farther north its even worse -- The festival that I really want to go to in January - the Harbin Ice Festival (google it), can get to 40 below because it is right on the border with Russia... probably pretty near Vladivostok dad, I don't know if you ever had to go there in the winter or anything.

Was supposed to meet up with Emma last night but she went MIA while I was I luckily had other friends from Qingdao who were at Kokomo so I just went over there to chill with them. There was a good latin band playing a mix of Buena Vista Social Club and then really loud other spanish songs so it was a weird mix. We rambled around from there to the opening of a new club at which we stayed approximately three minutes until we saw the menu and realized that a shot was 180 Kuai. ($25). Then we went to Bellagio, a dessert place, and I got a fantabulous passion fruit ice cream creation which reminded me of when we used to make passion fruit sauce at the Hodges in NZ. Steffan got a towering monstrosity of shaved ice and pean paste / other strange asian things, and proceeded to eat almost the whole thing. Impressive.

I also had some inexplicable problem with getting things from the plate to my mouth even though I had only had two drinks, and they had been early in the night. First I blamed it on the chopsticks and rice, buuuut then I did the same thing with my ice cream so I guess I'm just a klutz, luckily the three others were much farther along the drinking line than me so they really didn't seem to mind I was using my shirt as a tablecloth.

Friday:

I am leaving for Vietnam in 3 hours!! I also just learned that tropical storm something-un-pronounceable may make my life a rainy hell while I am there. I am hoping this is not the case but the weather on my dashboard shows ominous thunder and lighting clouds every day for the next week in both Hanoi and HCMC.

The actual schedule of my trip is kinda up in the air now because I am planning on riding the train from Hanoi to HCMC (40 hours) because I was too cheap to pay for a flight, and I will probably choose a few places to stop and get off along the way - Hue sounds cool and so does Hoi Anh.

Then I'm hopefully going to have at least two days in HCMC to explore at the end of the trip and maybe go on a tour of the mekong river delta which is supposed to be a world of floating markets and stilted houses and awesomely cool.

Ciao