Pudding and Chopsticks

Some of you may know that I have a brother. He is younger than I and is married. But there is one other thing that you also may not know. He joined the Marines. When I left LA for China he left Michigan for Cali to start basic. I’ve been in touch with my parents. Apparently it’s been a rocky road. Something one should probably expect when joining the Marines. I got to thinking how I was going to send him letters. What do you think the US gov. would think if a letter from China was sent to a military base in the States. Who knows. So the plan is to mail my mom things to then send to him. That sounds like a good plan, right? I hope so. I don’t know if he reads this or not. I’m sure that he is a little preoccupied shooting things and practicing throwing grenades.

For the past three years or so I haven’t lived at home. I don’t get to see him much. It’s weird when you get older and do your own thing. Even if I lived at home I don’t think that I would of seen him very much. Of course more than I did not being at home but you know we got jobs, friends, girls. Things to do in our own lives. I suppose all you can do is remember the good times. So yeah, just in case he does see this.

What up bro? How are things. Sorry I haven’t written you. Going to send mom things to send to you. Your done with basic in a month and a half. Hang in there. I’m sure that it only gets better. If you got the net, shoot me an email or something. Until then have fun blowing things up and putting holes n things from 500 yards away.

Peace.

I woke up this morning with sort of a hangover. A night full of the whiskey demon and a Chinese disco. Last night we went to a Chinese disco… There are a few things that you notice when you go into one of these little establishments. Like: The music is 3 times as loud as it should be.  Too dang loud.. Now I’m all for loud music and whiskey, mostly at a Lucero concert though. The next thing that you notice is that none of the people dancing are actually close to one another. At all. In America people are dancing all over each other and bumping uglies. Here I guess you try to avoid one another like the plague.  Whatever, we left there and headed to an outside place where we could drink cheap beer, eat rice and meat.. Charred meat. I did however get a chance to ride a pit bike around. That was cool.

Back to the real reason that I am writing this, besides the obvious fact that I want to become famous, is that I had no power this morning. So in my slight under the weather feeling I noticed that I had become a pool of sweat. The air was off. But it was working when I went to sleep. Then I noticed that none of the lights worked. Then it hit me no shower. Oh great.. How am I supposed to put out the vibes in China all dirty and junk? Awesome. Really awesome. I looked out the window and noticed a huge gigantic traffic jam in the intersection by my place. Weird. Nothing out of the ordinary. Didn’t give it much thought. I headed out the door to work and then it hit me.. There was no power in the hallway to the elevator.. Which meant, no elevator, which in turn gave me the pleasure of descending 9 double floors in pitch-black darkness trying not to bust my skull open on the stairs. Man I love China.
After that little episode I headed to get myself a taxi.. Then it hit me.. All the traffic lights were out. No power anywhere. Accidents galore. Now I know why there was a traffic jam. So to add the bad driving that everyone already does here, there where no signals. I like this country.
And that’s about it for what happened today. Not much in the world of the PRC.

I got a “body check” yesterday. If you were wondering what that is, well, I was too. But through my great deducting skills I concluded that it was basically a physical. I am required to have one and the one I took in America wouldn’t cut it. It came down to me not getting it notarized. F that. But whatever so here I was taking it in China. Whoopee.

This image has nothing to do with this post.. But I liked it, so I included it into this awesome blog post. For those who don’t know what to do with a sitter toilet.. Do not squat on it.. Yes, people are that dumb here.

On with the story..

I went to the only place that you can go to have one of these done in the city. I had heard stories of the place being packed to the gills. So off we went through traffic jams and a down pour to see if my lean mean killing machine was still up to operating snuff. We arrived and headed inside. There was a long glass window, resembling a 7/11 in LA at 1 am. The bottom 1/8th of the window was open to exchange items.  Except instead of a bunch of Middle Eastern people we had a bunch of Chinese women.

I had a guy and a girl with me. The girl spoke Chinese and told me what was going on. We filled out some paper work and then headed to the second floor where most of the poking and prodding would take place. Lucky for us there was no one there at all. Booyaaah..

With my paper work in hand I headed to a room that had a much smaller 7/11 window. I was handed a test tube looking thing and a little pouring cup. Little explaining was needed. I headed straight to the bathroom and began to painstakingly fill up a cup and pour into an opening the size of a pea.

I placed my little vial of processed liquid and placed it onto a cart and headed back to the room for phase two. She grabbed a needle out of a cup. I was a little worried about this part. I told the girl who spoke Chinese to make sure that it was a new needle. The lady across the counter insisted it was. Here we go. I told her to look for a vein in my right arm. In the middle of the inside of my elbow. Not that I use my veins a lot or anything. I did live through the nineties and listened to a lot of Nirvana. But that’s neither here nor there. The women shook her head and went for another vein near the top of my arm. She stuck it in and what do you know, my life giving blood trickled out like a leaky faucet. It took a few minutes to get what she needed. If I could say I told you so in Chinese I would of. But whatever, we were off, to phase three.

Phase three what was phase three, um, oh yeah. I remember the eye test and blood pressure. These were easy. Especially because I had my contacts in. Oh well, passed that with flying colors. Next up was the ECG. This is where they check the electrical resistance of you body or some junk. All I know is that it looks like the earthquake thing from the movie tremors.. Little up and down lines but with out all the slime and people eating. When I had this test done in the States there where nice little disposable sticky things to stick to your skin and then they hooked the little alligator clips to them and started the digital machine.. bam. Here nope, she took the big ass car battery clips and clamped them on my ankles.. I felt like a 12v getting charged up. Then she took the other wires and stuck them, that’s right stick them to my chest full of man fur. At least they were suction cups and not tape. She flicked the switch on the analog machine and dzzz dzz dzzz done.

After that we bolted to the ultra sound room. Not sure what the heck they were looking for. TB I suppose. Maybe they wanted to make sure that I still had all the necessary tools to perform the devastating Chuck Norris round house clone kick. I say clone because no one can ever completely copy his round house. Only Chuck can do it. That’s pretty much common knowledge. The jelly tickled, that’s all I had to say about that.

Next was the.. um.. oh yeah x-ray. I rolled into this big room, stood in front of this little target and bam that was it. No shield to protect the manhood or anything. Good thing I don’t want to have kids soon. I might be having some radiated ones with three arms or something.. oops..

Done. In and out in 30 minutes. In Vail when I had this done. 2 hours. Just goes to show that when the Chinese what to get shit done it gets done. Then again if they don’t care, then you’re out of luck.. You could be waiting for a long time. So look the H out Henry Ford, the Chinese took the assembly line and applied it to getting a physical. Look the hell out.

Since I had begun writing this a few days ago I got my test results back. The bottom line: you don’t’ want to be in a bar fight with me. The lean mean killing machine is in full effect, and STD free in case you had any concerns with that.

I went to In N Out burger when I was in LA. Thus I have concluded that I am going to move to LA. Preferbly to a loft apartment ontop of an In N Out. Pretty sure it would be the closest thing to being in Heaven.

Read the story here:

If you don’t agree with me on this.. Well then, we got beef. In fact, lets make that a Double Double, with Animal Style fries. OH baby…

Oh junk. I got deja vu. Right now. For some reason. In any case I am watching Eagle Eye and blogging away. I was just thinking about the state of media here and China and and America. For one, this dvd that I am watching costs 1$ here. Maybe 2$. In the states, 15$ maybe 20$. The difference? The one here is pirated. Yes a copy. But who cares right? Well I don’t know. All the movies here are pirated. I watched Wolverine last night. It was good, but it didn’t have the special effects. Just cgi templates. It wasn’t even finished. Crazy huh? You remember my post on fake things in China. This relates to it as well. Why buy legit copies of movies and sell them when you can copy that crap for free and sell it. Exactly. So here I am. Contributing to the down fall of movies. I would feel more guilty if I didn’t have to spend so much on a dvd in the States. Same with music. If a cd of music was 10 bucks instead of 15 I would feel better about it. But until then I will support the artists that I truly believe in by buying merch and seeing concerts. Maybe then the music industry will stop producing crap and make some lovable sounds that I want to hear. Hell they might even give some of the money back to the artist. Nah, I doublt it.

So while I am here I am going to buy all the dvds and shows I ever wanted. Why, because they’re cheap. When in Greece, do as the Greeks do.

I haven’t written about this because well, I forgot. Or rather just didn’t think about it. One of the biggest things that you will notice when coming to China, and Asia for that matter is the toilet. The squatters as they have been so affectionantly known. From what I understand Chinese culture thinks that actually sitting onto something is gross. Which if you really think about it, is. But for the greenhorn mounting up to one of these bad boys it can be a daunting challenge. Think about it, you got to squat, aim, and fire all while keeping those Levis clean. Kind of like camping in the woods.

Slip, foot stuck, carnage, overspray, no tp, misalignment, sit down, etc….  I found this little gem at the outside place we ate at, it was inside, the door barely shut, and there was junk all over. I think maybe in LA it would get a rating of Z. Oh well, the food was good.

So next time you are mounting up and reading your favorite magazine just think how talented the people are over here, balancing, smoking, reading, all at the same time, and without pulling a muscle.

When you go out to a bar in the United States you drink. What do you do after? Well if you were myself, or many college kids, you get a slice of zaaa or you get a dog. If I remember right there was a rolling hot dog car downtown were we used to go out. There was also a little place where you could go and get a yard dog with all the fixings. What’s good about these things? They’re cheap. The hot dog cart has no overhead. Or minimal at most. It’s a rolling cart with hot water. What’s also good about these things? They are outside.

In China they have the same thing so to speak. Cheap food that people eat outside after a hot night on the town. Heck you can eat it before your night on the town. So after work we went out to just such one of these places.

I forget what they call it. It’s basically do it yourself bbq with a bunch of weird stuff. But like my Travel Channel mentor Andrew Zimmerman says, “you got to try it twice.” Alrighty sign me up.

You roll up to one of these places and there is a bunch of tables on the sidewalk. There is trash lying all around. I forgot, the other good thing about places like this; it’s all one big trashcan. Just toss the junk you don’t want behind you, without hitting someone, wouldn’t want to get shanked, and go on your merry way getting business down with a hunk of meat.  This is a man’s place.

We got meat, shell deals, oyster things, cloves of garlic, burnt skin from reaching over to grab something, and last but not least, beer. With five people we killed about 50 some. Like, 5 cases of beer. Dang. But really that’s China. There are few things that bond men. A good talk about cars, gambling, drinking, and the mother of them all war. You need to get business down you meet for dinner, a meeting, a lunch, and you have a drink. If you don’t I would consider it an insult. Thus is what goes on in China. So with all five of us I had only talked to 2 of them. You may not think this works, but consider the next day when the other three gentlemen said what up to myself and went out of their way to do so. Money doesn’t make the world go round, drinking does.
Anyway back to the food. All of it was good. Surprisingly. Oysters good. Meet good. Weird thing good. It’s all cheap. Really cheap. 5 guys pigging out, getting hammied, with food left over, less then 10 bucks a piece. Awesome.

With built in air-conditioning, good cheap food, and a massive trash can (which is cleaned up every morning), I will be visiting these more often. Although I might want to learn some KungFu.. It’s a violent world out there…

Oh Crap. I was just surfing the net and found something that directly pertains to what I planned to write about. Oh jolly, we ended up eating at a special restaurant last night. The article says some bad things. However with everything else you have to take it with a grain of salt (or msg). Everything can kill you, so onward. I’m not in the United States, kinda obvious. If however you didn’t know this please reread several times my other posts, then have someone slap you in the head or possibly stick a cherry popsicle into your ear lob. I moved to China, I came to experience what the Chinese experience. Even if that means doing things that Americans don’t like or find disgusting. So I leave you with these some photos. These are not gross as in Saw the movie gross. It’s pretty common over here. But else where in the world, maybe not so much. So if you happen to have a rascal in the house by the name of Fido. You should possibly visit another web site right about now…..

Sorry for the photos being all blurry. Trying to hand hold a 1/4sec is not a feat for the faint of heart. I didn’t want to use the flash. Creative choice, you dig?

Leafy thing with not really that hot of peppers deals on it. It was ok.

Mini fish, aka anchovies. They were ok. But for some reason Finding Nemo comes to mind.. Huh..

Um.. Clam veggies deal. Kinda looked like a cross between an alien movie and things that otherwise might be found in a farmers omelet.

Beats me. It was also ok. Weird.

Spinach with hot clear liquid of some sort making it all shiny and stuff. Was pretty good. Had a nice clean heat.

Dried fish torn into stripes and rolled in melt you face off hot spices. Pretty good.

Some sort of mushroom concoction.

The sauce for what’s next. Was nice. You would think that it was hot and spicy by the way it looks. Nope, actually clean and refreshing. Not as refreshing as eating a ceaser salad and getting a palm to the face by a ex girlfriend but nontheless refreshing. What’s in it. Um.. yeah I know exactly.

Ok here we go. Can you guess what this little rendition of Heaven is? Ruff, ruff. That’s right, dog. Hey don’t get mad. People here eat all kinds of this little loveable creature. Just because Americans and the other parts of the world don’t eat it doen’t mean anything. Hell they think sitting down to drop the kids off if gross (will blog about that later). You may look down on me as a bad person but lets be honest. It’s pretty good. Combine it with the sauce and it’s pretty, pretty good. Super tender. Even more so then a filet of beef. I found that interesting. It also tastes like, dark turkey meat to a certian extent.

So there you’ve seen it. Not so bad. I had a pet pig once, I still eat bacon.. but then again that’s bacon. You can’t really compare anything to bacon.

Click here for awesome story.

That’s the link to the site I found today. Fate, mere coincidence, who knows. Am I foaming at the mouth yet, no, but I will take photos if I do…….

Food, Food, Food. Oh wait, opps. I was going to post something about labor in China. Ok then back on track. Sorry, it’s lunch time. I’m having a stand-off with my stomach.

I took this photograph the other day because I found it interesting. Whether you also find it interesting, is well, up to you.

Do you see anything odd about this. Here’s how this was working. The cement truck was pouring cement onto a tarp, then a dude was shoveling that onto another tarp on the platform, then another dude was shoveling the cement from the platform into the window which, by my awesome power of deductive knowledge, I am thinking it went onto another tarp. In the US you would get a cement pump or some other device that was more efficient. Well here in China, the pump probably costs more to rent for the day then it would be to pay 10 dudes to come shovel it up to the second story.

As goes most things in China.

Opps, I forgot. I bought a case of beer, that’s 12 500ml, 6 L, 1.58 Gal, or 202.88 oz of mean green, um, whatever.. For the whopping price of.. 30 Yuan.. Or 5 bucks. Nice huh. water.. was twice that..