The benefits of soloing (This is a Long Post for a Chinese Censor to Read)

...are mostly that you get to keep all the lewt and experience. And that's where I'll try to end the MMORPG references.

Second of all, I found a workaround that allows me to see my blog, comments and all, without having to go to the normal listed url, so pictures should appear just fine and comments are now solicited. (Thanks though Robert)

As a bonus for reading this entire thing, you get three, count them, 3 pictures sprinkled throughout. Remember to click for a big size. Let's start:

And now to the actual content: The city is once again in a hazy shade of factory byproduct, and the sky (天, which is also the first character of Tianjin. By the by, I have no clue what the jin means. I have asked several Chinese people who live here and none know. It could mean nothing and exist solely for Tianjin, but that is very rare for Chinese.) is back to a completely blank gray like it was in The Matrix 2 when Morpheus or whoever tells Neo they blotted out the sky to stop the solar energy harvesting of the robots. Okay so it isn't exactly a roiling mess with random thunder and lightning, but you truly cannot see any blue nor signs of weather-related clouds. Speaking of awful air conditions, tomorrow we are going to Beijing for the weekend. We have a Peking Duck dinner reserved for tomorrow night but other than that nothing is planned. I'm not decided on whether I'll be taking my computer or not. I have no clue whether or not the hotel has high-speed internet, how good the hotel is, or where it is. This entire program has been very unscripted, or at least it appears that way to us. From our delayed flight to the Beijing trip to the teachers' plan to mix up our classes (I have no clue why) there is not a lot of rhyme or reason to a lot going on. Which is fine. Odd, but fine.

The MMORPG reference was I guess in relation to the amount of useless crap I have bought already here. My inventory is as follows:

!-A Chinese Chess set which cost <$1 and will be completely useless in the States where no one knows how to play it.

!-A set of playing cards that in theory helps teach Chinese characters (汉字)

!-A sweet-ass poster that is a "Table of Monarchs of Chinese Successive Dynasties"

!-A cool glass from a restaurant (stole it) that has the Beijing 2008 Olympics logo and the Tsingdao logo as well

!-An extremely mediocre cell phone that gets 40 minutes of time per month, and 180 text messages. Definitely not giving the number out, not only because receiving international calls is either impossible or prohibitively expensive, but also I don't even know it. I am so cool I have my own number stored in my phone.

!-Several advices. An "advice" is an ATM receipt. Nothing too special about them, though the fact that it is called and advice is a constant source of mirth. (Did You Know?: the word 'mirth' appears in Supreme Court records [ie as opposed to laughter] only during a select few years. Apparently one stenographer was a vocab teacher. My parentheticals are getting longer.)

!-Sunglasses. They were rather expensive for China, and the sad thing is, I actually haven't even used them. See large paragraph No.1 for explanation why. -4 or so pairs of chopsticks (筷子) I bought from Carrefour. Some have characters I can't read, one set says something like Happy Bear. They cost about $.40 each, and I'll be bringing a bunch back to the states to give out.

!-A ton of random foodstuffs that look mighty suspicious. Take, for example, Cucumber Lays. They are every single bit as awful as you think they are, and worse. I also have a large bowl of ramen that I cannot for the life of my figure out what meat it is flavored with, or contains. I can't find the cow (牛) or chicken (鸡) anywhere, which is bad. I'll probably end up eating it in a fit of desperation.

!-PASTRIES. Oh god, food is good. After two weeks of bitching about the lack of breakfast food not consisting of rice porridge and pickled vegetables, I have found a suitable bakery. They sell danishes, muffins, all sorts of delicious delicious things I can keep down in the morning.

!-A rice cooker. Unfortunately I have no dish soap with which to clean it. This is a conundrum.

!-And this, the current king of the inventory. If only we had warned Burma. (Too soon?)

Those were purchased from a random shop while I was out on a walk on Tuesday. It was a nice walk, only covered a half dozen city blocks or so, but I brought my camera and snapped a bunch of pictures. A lot of them were me messing around with B/W settings and f-stop and exposure time. If you want to look at them, all my Tianjin pictures (tried to prune the duplicates a little) are at www.mywebspace.wisc.edu/emathis/web/tianjin and the ones starting with my walk are at 375-411. It took me something like 6 hours to upload them all so you'd better enjoy them. I am still open to other image hosting sites, ie ones that will give you a preview. Snapfish seems to require even viewers to register, which is supremely annoying. Flickr's free accounts have something like a 100mb/month bandwidth limit, which isn't going to cut it when I can consume that it one day's worth of pictures. I don't have the ability nor inclination to resize and crop my pictures. I am looking to Picasa. For now, the UW Webspace will have to work. And there should be no more than 2 duplicates of any picture, so you'll have to trust me and just load each one. Do not begrudge me though. At least you have real broadband. While on the walk, I encountered some fairly entertaining things. A condom vending machine, and old guy, and a shiny new banking building remarkable only in that it was a few dozen yards from a decrepit apartment building probably used as a crack den or Triad base. Pictures 376-379 if you care to investigate yourself. Truly, gentrification old school. The old guy is cool enough to warrant a picture of his own right here. As I expected, he spoke a very fast and unintelligible version of Chinese. I literally did not understand a word he said. His dog seemed as excited as all the little Chinese kids usually are to see tall whitey with blonde hair. Dogs are color blind of course though, so my hero's welcome will have to exist only in my head. The walk filling my requisite picture quota for the week, I returned to my room to do some character repetitions. Soooo fun!

We are still on the subject of people staring however. I went to McDonald's, (麦当劳) and hand to god, I like it more here. The spicy chicken sandwich was not at all processed. It was positively delectable. The fries were done perfectly (though that is usually true at McDonald's anyway) and the sundaes are apparently even smoother here, though I did not partake. While at McDonalds, I truly feel in my element. People stare (and it is still funny) but my imaginary response is, 'So what? Whitey invented this place. What are you doing in my store?' Of course, that would be almost racist, and they aren't my exact thoughts, but I feel at home nonetheless.

For now at least, I've run out of things to say. I have had a taco craving. I have not yet contracted Montezuma's Revenge. DotA basically does not work, and I am going to be incredibly rusty at the end of the summer. I finished reading China Road and only have 3 books left to read. Class is still class, and our teachers still don't speak a lot of English. I am downloading season 2 of The West Wing. I didn't think I would have a craving, but I made the mistake of watching the few episodes I still had on my computer, and now need to get watching again. Finally, I am still looking for my mailing address. It'll probably be in the program handbook or somesuch, somewhere.

This post has taken enough of your time, and I have a test tomorrow, so the same goes for me. I will probably update on Monday next. Or not, who knows.