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My house is alive. really, I went on a biological buying spree lately, adding to my beatiful try i bought a little flowery bonzai kinda thing called mei hua in chinese. It’s supposed to be rare and cool and is is the best of it’s type, it only flowers after the spring festival so I ave to be patient. I also got an ornamental orange tree and a four foot bamboo grovr in a pot. Amanda bought me some weird bulbs that we cut in strange shapes I guess they will grow into flowers.
To top it all off i bought a lizard. i think it is an austrialian two lined lizard, but I’m not sure, it’s coloration is different from the picture. When I bought it the guy first said “from austrialia” in chinese, then when he decided I couldn’t understand him he strated saying “china long” (long means dragon) and laughing, so I wasn’t sure if it was from china or down under. i finally found him something to eat, (which is tasty meal worms!) this was after two days of him not eating so I am pretty excited. He hates people now, because the gf was torturing him, but she will soon grow to love him, he is very cute.
I will get pictures up soon as I get off my lazy ass.
Well this was probably a boring ass post, but I am rather proud to be the caretaker of so mny living things. Hopefully only a few of them will die….
In other news I had a visit by my siter nora and her two good friends meridel and gina. They all stayed in my place which made it rather cramped but they were fun to hang out with. I hope I was a good host despite being sick for most of their visit here. I got to practice a lot of Chinese taking them around. It really made me remember how hopless I was when i first got here. I have made strides in at least being able to get around fairly easily. I also got to see Hang Zhou from a tourists perspective and frankly as far as western tourists go, there isn’t that much here. Sure west lake is nice, ling yin temple is one of the better temmples around (why do all chinese temples have to look the same?) and the tea villages are fun, but I don’t really understand why it is the number 1 tourist spot in the country.
Oh yeah, that reminds me. The other day I had one those “why is china so stupid” moments, th first one I’ve had in a long time. It was around 6 and me and the women were trying to find a taxi. But in Hangzhou, the taxis all change there shifts right around 6. This means that you see lots of empty taxis that you try to flag down, but just don’t stop, or they stop, but only take you if you are going in the right direction (thy also change shift about 6-7 in the morning, i.e when you need to catch a train).
This is fucking stupid. First of all it is an idiotic business practice. Rush hour is the busiest time of the day, it is the time that taxis can make the most money. By having empty cars waisting time changing shifts during this time is like throwing money away. Move the shift change to 3-4 or 8-9 and you will make a shit load more money and you won’t have a lot of pissed off custumers.
Which brings me to my second point if hangzhou wants to present itself as a world class tourist destination it hasto get rid of idiotic shit like this. It is very frustrating to be trying to catch a cab and see open cabs drive past you without even a glance in your direction. Worse yet is when a cab stops for you tell the driver your destination and he refuses to take you there. In fact this happened to my sister and her friends and they had no idea what was going on. they thought that maybe the drivers didn’t want the trouble of picking up white girls. Seeing as how Hang zhou highly values it’s image, it needs to change shit like this.
Pictures coming soon.