random updates
nothin big goin on, but i had a couple things i wanted to mention.
- Bats. it seems the city of Hangzhou has bats everywhere at night. i think this is awesome, but everyone else seems to be like “ho hum, bats, whatev”. I’m trying to figure out a way to take a picture of them, but it’s too dark. I’m thinkin maybe i could find a big bright sign or something and take the picture in silhouette.
- Flute. i bought a chinese bamboo flute, and then i found some instructional books at the bookstore…except they’re in chinese. So i got myself a bigger dictionary (chinese-to-english only, and it’s still 1500 pages!) and i’m gonna try to fumble my way through. I’ve already figured out a few things on my own, after i found some fingering diagrams on the interwebs. The flute has only 6 finger holes, so i had to figure out how to make that work, but it’s not too hard. The hard part was trying to do the right lip thing to make it go into the higher register. low notes are easy, high notes are insanely hard. i’m starting to get it tho.
- bikes. seems like every bike in town is too small. The one i bought is the biggest one i could find, but it’s several inches too short still, even with the seat raised as high as it can go. I occasionally see one around that looks bigger, but i don’t know where to find one for myself without jacking some poor dude’s bike ;)
- Chinese is hard. I dunno why, but it seems much more difficult this week. The stuff we did before was so easy in comparison…but only as a book exercise. Actually using it all in conversation is pretty tough. I’ll have to spend more time previewing stuff in our textbooks before class i think.
- Food. I’ve figured out most of the vegetarian options in the cafeteria in our building here, and i know how to read them and say them, but if i go anywhere else to eat it’s really tiresome to slowly go through the characters on the menu to try to figure out if it’s full of meat or not. I went to a different cafeteria in another building the other day, and almost everything was meat so i just gave up and went back home. at least i’ve got a home base i can fall back on so i won’t starve.
that’s all for now. more to come, soon
Ride hard, ride free