Scott's visit

“I don’t get this money thing,” Scott told me yesterday. “ A yoga class costs 200rmb and a flight to Beijing costs 600?”
It was just the latest of my visitor’s observations. Scott is a yoga teacher from Denver who bravely took me up on a widely cast offer to come visit. He seized the chance and from day one has “Carpeted the Den,” excuse my Latin.
But the money thing takes some getting used to. At 8 yuan to the dollar, the exchange rate takes a little adjusting to, but things are out of whack in other ways. For example, a thousand mile flight costing just four times the price of a yoga class at Hangzhou’s most chic-chic studio. A cab ride is a $1.25, a full Japanese dinner costs $12, but a packet of English cookies runs $4.
China confounds everyone who comes here, but Scott has embraced the collective craziness.
The first morning he was in Hangzhou he’d started having adventures. By lunch time he had hired a boat out to an island, found $50 coffee mugs in Starbucks, looked at a lock of hair purported to belong to Gautama the Buddha himself and been drafted to sing Jingle Bells to a lakeside crowd.
Four days into it, he’d hired a guide to take him to Beijing and show him the sights, found a Mao clock similar to mine for a third of what I paid, successfully fed himself, received two foot massages from the same woman, learned words for bargaining, entered a movie house, left early and bought a handful of pirated DVDs.
Today he found his own way to the antiques market, Starbucks Americano in hand and managed to not buy a carved ivory tusk. Pretty as it was, we weren’t sure that he’d be able to get that past the customs inspectors. Tonight, presumably, has gotten on a train to Beijing though I can’t really be sure.
It’s nice to have a fresh set of eyes around here. Because after just five months, it has shown me how inured I have become to daily life. Not that such is bad. It just is. And now dear readers, I ask, who will be the next to come to China to rekindle my appreciation of this far out foreign land?

If you decide to come soon, though, be forewarned. Scott is freezing his butt off. We gave him the guest room, but after ten minutes, he moved to the couch upstairs and flipped on the heater. And he’s been wearing long underwear during the day just like the Chinese. Weather’s been a bit cold.

Today was terrific, though. After class, I met a friend and had a very nice game of Frisbee out by the new museum. Even one of the guards stepped outside the box and had a couple throws. We finished with dinner at Xihu Spring, a popular new restaurant. I invited Lindi and her housemate Cynthia, two of my women friends. Being vegetarian, as I have since shortly after coming here, this always comes up, when people ask me what I eat. I tell them I eat pretty much anything, or can pick around the stuff I don’t eat. I’m easy about this. Good thing, too. Because while we ordered fish ball soup, it wasn’t until I’d drained the whole dish that Cynthia told me the balls were actually fish-pork. “Didn’t you hear me tell you when the waitress served you first?” Apparently not.

Sean and I have gotten a new aie, or auntie. You’d probably know them as maids. Ours was recommended by a friend and she’s been great. Not only does she clean, shop and do laundry, she cooks really good Chinese meals. We’ve been eating out less often. And Zhou has been helping me learn the language. Unlike the last aie whose response to my ignorance was to just talk louder, Zhou actually slows down and enunciates. It’s gotten to where this week she called my phone to tell me she’d bought apples so I didn’t need to get any. But as I was already at the store, I bought more. I’ve been juicing them and having extras is no big deal, or so I thought. Zhou was kinda pissed at me coming home with apples after she’d told me she’d already bought them. She was all frowning and scolding me and my suggestion to ‘soften her face and smile’ didn’t really fix it. Sean assuaged her a bit when he told her I really like apples. So now I have to juice a whole bunch before she gets back on Monday. And besides, we’re both getting a cross cultural experience though she is not adventurous when it comes to food. She won’t touch the Thai curry paste I brought back from my recent trip. And she wrinkled her nose at the expensive French cheese I found in Shanghai. But that’s okay. The upside is I think my chocolate stash is safe, from her anyway.

I’ll finish with a short story from Thailand. While in Khao Sok visiting my friend Stephen, I went for an elephant ride. Amy rightly observed ‘how could that be anything but spectacular?’ and I have to agree, the potential was there. Unfortunately, the animal was little more than a pack beast and I had very little interaction with it. It could have been much better, with just a little creativity. Still, one must be careful about what one wishes for. A friend told me she was on an elephant tour recently when a baby and momma elephant came on the trail in the opposite direction. When one of the passenger elephants separated the two, momma charged. The taxi fled, breaking its own trail through brambles and low hanging brush, with two people on board, strapped in by a flimsy rope. Apparently that ride was quite spectacular and ended well enough, the passengers received only minor scrapes. Love to see that video.

That’s all for now. More adventures later.

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