Day 9 - Business, as Usual

Tuesday, February 16th, 2016

Smog Level: 2.5 Mountains

Just a Random Giant Vase in the Mall

My sleep still is a mess. I wake up after about 7 hours, screw around online. My internet disconnects every 10 minutes. Disconnecting and reconnecting seems to give me another 10 minutes. It’s a functional workaround. Frustrating.

The top picture is, in fact, the shower/toilet/sink/washing maching combo that the apartment's bathroom. I'm just happy it's not a squatty potty, since I didn't know how commonly those were used in private housing. I wasn't aware that the shower was commonly just a drain and a showerhead, though.

We're running out of food. Shimou knows this place in the mall that has “cheap pasta.” She wasn’t kidding: a plate of pasta with broccoli and ham for 13 RMB (~2.75). 8 RMB ( for a “panzerotti” (hotdog in a hot pocket). 5 RMB for cheesecake. Shimou said the cake wouldn’t be very good, but 1 dollar cheesecake is 1 dollar cheesecake.

It was a quiet day, recovering from the Jiu Jitsu and catching up on work. Shimou napped and worked on putting up tutoring ads to attract more students for me to teach, while I wrangled with the internet and wrote. Some of that wrangling showed that Google has recently been hiring a lot of people in China, and seems to have plans to come back. 

3 Wheeled, 3 Person Vehicles are fairly common

Please, for the love of God Google, come back. Praise be.

After finishing the last of the food in the apartment, we ordered in “instant hot pot.” This is basically an oily, often spicy soup with lots of whatever you want to throw in it. In our case, thick seaweed, broccoli, tofu, ham, potatoes, and lots of other stuff. Not as good as the restaurant version, but good enough for the convenience!

It's so dry here. Relatedly, there seems to be a lot more static electricity here. Shocks happen multiple times a day, allowing me to make corny jokes about there being “electricity between us” with Shimou.   My skin keeps getting so dry and itchy that I've scratched it til I broke the skin. I wonder how much is environmental dryness, and how much is affected by the pollution. I imagine pollution would dry out your skin, but I don’t really know about these things.

I’ve decided to start learning 5 words a day. It seems like a much more manageable way to chip away at it than the previous method of "massive list of words that I try to run through on occasion." Worth a shot!

Words of the day:
English - Mandarin [pronunciation]

beautiful - piàoliang [pee-ow-lee-ahng]

ugly - chǒu [choh]

hot - rè [rhhh]

cold - lěng [lung]
small - xiǎo [she-ow]