Blogs from Dongbei, China, Asia - page 12

Today I spent most of the day doing some sort of Chinese. Not that I suppose that's uncommon as I'm in China but it was a long day. There was one woman sitting in a red costume with a mask on. She was absolutely beautiful. She looked real sitting there but I knew she couldn't be nor was she. I was simply looking at a picture in a museum in Dalian. There are very few of them here in Dalian and this particular one was filled most of the way with Russian art - not actually Chinese art. It was on the corner of Russian street - a huge tourist spot for ... well ... Russians. So I suppose it made sense to have a lot of Russian art. It's just a line. I thought to ... read more

This is my last entry for a little while. I'm going to go off to Guangzhou. While I'm there I want to see Zhaoqing, Shenzhen and possibly Macau or Hong Kong. We'll see once I get there though. I more than likely will write my entries down and type them up when I come back but if I have to write while I'm there I will do that. Camillo thinks that I'm going to be in trouble. He thinks Guangzhou is very seriously not safe and that I am going to be in trouble the way I want to go. He thinks that if I want to be safe at all there I should go stay in a nice hotel and not a hostel or a cheap hotel. Now what I keep telling him doesn't seem ... read more

I feel like a fool sometimes. They look at me and think "what great strength! She came all the way here from another place to live by herself! " But I'm just like all the others - living in my comfort zone surrounded by my friends in a place that I know. A place where I wake up every day and do the same thing - go to the same gym, the same mall, even the same places to eat (although they get dull sometimes). The same job Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. I too am scared to leave my comfort zone so I search for yet another job that I can do here - within my comfort zone. The strength and energy it takes to leave the zone is intense, tiring, sometimes overbearing. So I stay ... read more

I could never get breast implants. It's bad enough being a walking advertisement in one country. Walking around the streets doing your daily business - going to the gym to work-out or to the bank to get a new ATM card - and having someone walking up to you to ask a question. "Excuse me. Are you American? My husband is too but he's away now and I need someone to tutor my kids. Can you do it?" one lady asked me in perfect English. "Can you speak English" a lady asked my Chinese co-worker "Can you translate something for me?" I suppose everyone's their own walking billboard. Some just keep it hidden better than others. You start having a conversation and you both end up talking about your lives. Soon you realize he's a computer ... read more

Rain here is just a big huge joke. I've literally never seen it rain here. The other day when we were at work it "rained" and someone told me it was raining outside. I looked outside and said "where? It's not raining." They looked at me like I was crazy until I explained that where I come from rain means the sky opens up and rains, not sprinkles. Here all they seem to get is sprinkles. Just now before I came home from Camillo's we saw lightning outside and Camillo looked out because he said if it was raining I'd better go home right away. He looked out and was like "Oh, my goodness, it's raining really hard! What do we do?" "I can sleep on the sofa." He started looking for a blanket then looked ... read more