A bad week

Last week was has been added to my not so great memories of China. On
Wednesday I fell climbing up granite stairs in the subway. Granite,
although beautiful to look at, is the hardest thing I have ever had
the misfortune to fall on. Ouch! I still have the bruises. I also
wore very flat shoes that day. Flat shoes may seem like the easy
comfortable option but not when you have to walk, run, and climb
granite stairs. It was their lack of grip that probably made me slip
and fall. Their lack of cushion also caused my left heel to feel pain
on every step. Even now, four days later I still have pain in my left
heel when I walk. Sam say's I'm getting old but I think I'm going to
throw away those flats. On Thursday I bought a canvas book bag to
hold my school books. It promptly tore after one use. Then on Friday
I went to ride my bike and it was gone! Stolen! Sam's bike was there
but mine was not. Its weird because Sam's bike is nicer and more
expensive than mine but it was mine that was gone. I have since
learned that the brand of my bike is more popular than Sam's so that
could have been why. I knew it was only a matter of time before one
of our bikes was stolen but I really had hoped it would be longer than
three months. I am now on the hunt for a used and very ugly bike that
no one will want. On top of all this I've been sick with a cold for
over a week. I'm really tire of blowing my nose.

I had a dream the other night that I was eating a bowl of Kix cereal.
It was heaven.

Mooncake correction and shopping fun

Well, I was wrong about the previously stated "chocolate" mooncake
that we ate. It was actually coffee flavored. (Who knew?) Thanks to
Sam's chinese character reading skills we found the actual chocolate
mooncake and not only did it taste like chocolate, it was really good
too! We wished all of them could be chocolate.
In other news, Sam bought a guitar today. Its a chinese brand steel
string acoustic. I've been playing on it a little and the sound is
good. The only problem is that my fingers have no calluses so I can't
stand playing it for more than 10 minutes at a time. Since the
weather is starting to get colder I think playing guitar will be fun
thing to do on chilly nights. I'm really happy that it is starting to
feel like autumn here. I've already bought a winter coat and some
cute boots too! Sam and I have had some fun shopping lately. I
almost bought a fake Louis Vutton purse that I really just wanted to
look at. It was a typical scene here. I was walking through the
purse section of a local market when I heard the words "louis vutton",
"Gucci", "coach".....I looked up and didn't actually see any of those
brands so I asked the girl where they were. She brought out a catalog
full of Louis Vutton purses and asked me which one I liked. I highly
doubted that she had all those purses but I pointed at one anyway.
She brought out a ladder, climbed it and from the highest shelf pulled
out a big black bag. Inside was another bag that was yellow and soft
like suede. Inside that bag was the purse I had pointed to. It was a
really good fake with the tags and everything. Out of curiosity more
than anything I asked her how much it cost. She pulled out her
calculator (standard procedure with foreigners) and typed in 1650.00.
(That's rmb so about 265 US dollars) I just laughed and told her that
I knew it was a fake. She admitted that it was a fake but it was an A
huo, meaning the best of the fakes. (Of the fake goods you can get A,
B, or C huo quality. The A huo fakes are really good. Many times you
can't find the difference between the real.) I agreed that it was a
good fake but I didn't want to spend that much. She next told me she
would give me the "friend" price of 1500.00rmb. I laughed again.
Then she asked me how much I wanted to pay. I typed 150.00 into her
calculator and watched her face. She said she couldn't sell it that
cheap but then she really started to lower her price. By the time I
walked away she had come down to 350.00rmb (About 55 u.s. dollars) It
was a fun experience even though I walked away empty handed.

Mooncakes

Yesterday was Mid-Autumn festival here. Some people also called this
"mooncake festival". Mooncakes are small round cakes that people give
to their friends and family on the day of the festival. Sam and I
knew that these cakes were something special because at every bakery,
grocery store, and nice restaurant you could see mooncakes advertised.
At first I was a little leary of these cakes. Usually what the
chinese call "cake" tastes like lightly sweetened thick bread to me.
But one night a friend cut up one of these small cakes into tiny
pieces so everyone could have a taste. It was actually sweet! I also
thought it tasted pretty good with a cup of tea. So the next time I
was at the grocery store I decided to buy three different flavors to
see what they tasted like. Some mooncakes can be as cheap as 7 rmb (a
little over one u.s. dollar) or they can be as expensive as over 100
rmb (about 14 or 15 u.s. dollars). The ones I bought were 7 rmb. The
first one we tried was sesame flavor. It wasn't too sweet but it
wasn't that tasty either. The second was a strange flavor that we
couldn't get used to. The third one we didn't bother eating because
we already had had our fill. Little did we know that we would be
given more mooncakes than we every could want from friends and parents
of the children we teach. Some were the expensive kind, some tasted
like the ones we had eaten before, and some were flavors that sounded
good but then were not quite what you were expecting. The chocolate
one was good if you weren't wanting it to taste like chocolate. The
most standard one looks and tastes like sweet potato with an egg in
it. What one of my student's mom said sums up my feelings about moon
cakes: "The first couple are good but after that you don't feel like
eating anymore for a long time."