Monday, September 12, 2005 (8:47 PM)

Music - Pardon Me, by Incubus

I'm home now. Things at my apartment are pretty different. So let me start with the night I came back. I didn't get back to my apartment until about 2 in the morning. My dad drove me to my apartment, and he helped me get all my luggage up to my room. I unlock the door and push it open, but I can't open it. Turns out, the chain on the door was in place. So I ring the doorbell and knock on the door to try to wake up my roommates. After about 3 minutes of knocking and ringing and shouting into the crack, nobody comes to the door. Maybe they're very deeply asleep. So I go downstairs to use the visitors' buzzer, which is louder and more annoying. I hold the buzzer for about a minute until someone picks up. A female voice says, "Who is it?" Ah great! My roommate is up!

I said, "It's me, Cherry, your roommate."
She asks again, "Who is it?"
"It's Cherry, I live in the third room. Your roommate"
"Roommate?"
"Yes, I'm your roommate. Can you open the door?"
"What do you want?"
"You put the chain on and I can't get in."
"Uh...who is it?"
"!!!!!!"

Maybe she didn't really hear what I said, so I thought that since she was awake now, I'd go upstairs and talk to her face-to-face, through the door that can only be opened a crack. Now I'm back upstairs and knocking on the door again. I hear two girls' voices whispering behind the door. Goodie, both of them are up. Maybe one of them will understand me. I open the door as much as the chain will allow and what I see is astonishing. Two full grown women were cowering in fear around the corner, peeping out at the freaky person who happened to have a key to their door. As it turns out, my two previous roommates had both moved out while I was in China. The two new roommates were afraid of robbers, so they put the chain on the door. After we cleared up all the confusion, they let me in. Yay, finally!

The next day, I meet the two roomies formally. I've already forgotten their names, but that's not important. One of them is normal and sweet. She is studying viola at school. The other one, the one who put the chain on the door, is absolutely insane. First of all, she is terrified of robbers. She puts the chain on the door every night. Nevermind the lock on the doorknob AND the deadbolt on the door. Nevermind the lock on the main door downstairs. The chain MUSt be on the door. In fact, two nights after I got locked out by her, the other roommate had the same problem. The really stupid thing was, it was only 10 pm. This crazy nut comes home at about 9, puts the chain on the door even though our third roommate isn't home, and then she goes to bed! Geez, if she insists on putting the chain on, then she should be the one to open it for the other girl. So when I heard the chain rattling and our normal sweet roommate's voice calling out for someone to open the door, I ignored it. I didn't do it out of malice. Well, it wasn't malice towards the sweet roommate anyway. I waited for about 15 minutes. The insane broad didn't even wake up. I felt bad for the nice roomie and I let her in, apologizing for the other dummy. She agreed and said we needed to talk to her about it. Oh yes, indeed.

That's not the only strange thing about her. She is also terrified of cats. How one can be afraid of a 4-month-old friendly kitten like Gidget is beyond me. But whatever, she's afraid of cats. When she's not home, I let Gidget run around, but when she gets home, I keep her in my room. I think that's reasonable enough. This afternoon, I went to the kitchen to get some tea. Gidget was still in my bedroom. When I was coming back into the room, Gidget ran out between my legs. She ran to the kitchen where my crazy roommate was cooking dinner. I swear, I thought she cut off her finger or something. She screamed bloody murder when she saw the kitten. She wouldn't stop screaming until Gidget ran out. She's yelling at me to put the cat away, but now Gidget is so freaked out from her screaming that she won't settle down enough for me to pick her up. It takes me a long freaking time to calm her down and usher her back into my room. The whole time the insane roomie is telling me what to do. "Keep your cat in your room! Close the door!" Mhm, yes dear, I have to open the door sometime. What can I do, she just ran out. I find it so ridiculous for her to react like that to a cat. Sure, some people are afraid of spiders. Personally I'm afraid of water. But I can still take a shower. People who are afraid of spiders don't come near the point of fainting when they see one. Lady, as a higher-level mammal, can't you understand that the little kitty-cat just wants to come out and play? Sheesh.

Today is my one year anniversary with Will. Yesterday he came over and we went to see Blue Man Group together. It was fun, for sure. Now I have a playbill with one of the Blue Men's autograph (blue lip print) on it. Thanks, Will, for a super time. Happy One Year to us.

-- Tsunami pities her poor kitten

Friday (xingqi wu!) August 5, 2005 (12:19 AM)

Music (yinyue!) - Jerk It Out, by The Caesars

I'm in Beijing right now and my sister is asleep. This is the first night since I arrived here that I've stayed up a little later, so I decided to put my laptop to good use. So, about Beijing. We are staying in the same building as last year, but in a much higher floor with many more mosquitoes (wenzi!). Why does being on a higher floor have more mosquitoes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Anyway, this building is supposed to be among the best on campus, despite its many quirks. For example, the first night I was here, I woke up at 3 AM to find no electricity. I called down to the front desk, and they said they had shut off the building's power because of the electricity shortage. So, I had to pee in the middle of the night, in the dark. I thought I would pee all over myself. It took me a good minute to find the toilet paper because it had fallen onto the floor and I couldn't feel it until I happened to put my foot on it. Ah well.

After having used the dark dark bathroom, I went back to bed. I woke up in the morning and wanted to take a shower. I got all my stuff ready and was all undressed in the bathroom and voila, no water. As it turns out, turning off the power the night before also turns off the water pumps.Therefore, the pumps were warming up and so far, there was only water up to the sixth floor (di liu lou!) and none on the tenth floor (di shi lou!) where I was waiting. It was a good thing that June had showered the night before, because by the time the water came up to the tenth floor and I could finally shower, I barely made it to class in time. Equally lovely.

Oh yes, and the water. There is an electric kettle in the room, so June and I boil water, let it cool, and then fill our water bottles with it. The problem is, calcium deposits built up in the kettle go into the water bottles, and gross little white flakes end up in our water. So I had the brilliant idea to buy some coffee filters to filter the water before we put it in the bottles. We went to the supermarket (chaoshi!) and walked around a bit with no luck. We started asking people, but our Mandarin is pretty awful. The closest I could get was something like this: "Excuse me, the paper that you use to do coffee, do you know where it is?" Having embarrassed myself like this to 3-4 employees, two very helpful women asked me if I wanted a sieve. After much more discussion and frustration, we finally all came to the conclusion that coffee makers are not popular in China and therefore there are no coffee filters. There are only coffee presses. Rather, they pointed me to a filter that you put inside a water kettle to attract the calcium. I still don't know if solving that minor problem (xiao wenti!) was worth all that confusion and difficulty. Still, it was terribly fun to fumble around looking for something that they don't sell.

If you can't stand gross things, don't read this paragraph. That being said, I have the most awful canker sore ever (zhen taoyan!). It's as big as a tooth and annoying as futility. I've had it for about 2 weeks (liang ge libai!) and it just won't go away. Will insists that I have herpes (I don't). Finally I went to see a doctor about it, and she gave me vitamin B2. I don't know if that will really help, but I'm taking it anyway. With any luck it should be gone by the next time I post. I don't know why this sore is so persistant. I have been eating plenty of vegetables and fruits, avoiding fried stuff, and drinking lots of water. It has no reason to fester on me like this! Go away, canker sore!

If you couldn't tell by my random exclamations, my Mandarin is coming along. My level of proficiency (shui ping!) is still quite low, but hey, if I can go to the doctor and kind of buy a coffee filter, it can't be THAT bad, right?

-- Tsunami

Tuesday August 16, 2005 (6:05 PM)

Music - Shanghai 1943, by Jay Chou (Zhou Jie Lun!)

My canker sore is gone. Hurrah.

This past weekend, a bunch of foreign students (like me) all went on a 2 day trip to Luo Yang. The weather was pretty awful; you can't stay cool even indoors. We spent almost all of the tour outdoors, but I was pretty good about wearing sunscreen so I didn't tan, thank goodness. On the first day of the tour, we went to the White Horse Temple. It wasn't really that spectacular. We also saw the Longmen Grottoes, which had a ton of Buddhist carvings and sculptures. There are some pretty neat pictures of that, so if I find the urge to post them up, well...maybe. So then that night we stayed in some hotel in the area. There was a bar in the hotel called the "Foreigners' Bar." I didn't have much else to do, so I went to check it out. The bar was on the second floor, and it looked nothing like a bar. It looked like a bunch of guest rooms, most of them with their doors closed. Two of the rooms had their doors open and inside were these girls dressed up in pretty nice clothes. They looked like they were waiting for something. Then in a third room there was some music and a karaoke singer. When I was walking around, two men in dark suits asked me who I was looking for. They were rather intimidating. I told them I was just looking around, and they gave each other this look like they were displeased. I was so freaked out that I left. I swear I walked in on some kind of prostitution

The day after, we went to see the ShaoLin temple. The temple itself looked like a lot of other temples, but the part that was special was the Pagoda Forest in the back. Each pagoda is like a big monument under which a past abbot's ashes are buried. There were 200-something pagodas in the area. The current abbot isn't dead yet, but he already had his pagoda erected. He has all these stone panels of technology on it. He has pictures of airplanes, cars, computers, cameras, trains, and boats. The idea is that he hopes these are modern conveniences he gets to use in his afterlife. I thought it was a neat idea.

-- Tsunami

Friday, July 22, 2005 (8:05 PM)

Music - The little jingles they play in The Sims

Believe it or not, it is one of the things I hate most that is prompting me to post today: the heat. It's so hot out that I refused to go outside all day, and the resulting boredom is why I'm posting. All the asphalt here in the city makes going outdoors like walking into an oven. It's outright immoral to break a sweat walking from the front door to the sidewalk. I'm so grateful to work in an ice rink, but even there it gets warm.

Yesterday I said bye to Sky Rink for a while. I'm going to China with my sister this Sunday. The more I think about it, the more I fear the extreme heat there. I am rather looking forward to exchanging email addresses with many eager eager people though.

I adopted a kitten a few months ago. She's clumsy and overeager and fuzzy and messy and noisy and everything a lovely kitten should be. She's a grey and black striped tabby. She's learned to come when I call her. Oh boy, I love her so, my warm-bellied troublemaker.

Anyway, there's not much for me to say, just letting all of you know that I'm alive. Maybe I'll have something to write when I return from China.

--Tsunami