Christmas Apples

---

Driving a car through some of the most beautiful parts of the US. What can I describe it as that would make the world of foreigners understand? Trekking. You're working to get somewhere for the day and that place is your goal. In the meantime you're not really doing much work, unlike trekking you let the car do your body's work and the rest of it is just making sure the car stays between two nice lines and the people around you don't go too crazy. The scenery around you stays consistently beautiful and you wonder who lives in these tiny houses in the middle of nowhere.

Christmas goes on in these houses and occasionally you pass a house completely decorated with plastic toys of Santa and the reindeers or nativity scenes of Merry and Joseph and the baby. Lights are all over the houses - on bushes, on columns of the houses, on Christmas trees inside and outside the house. Wreaths also are used to decorate the doors of these houses. Every place is decorated, malls have strings of tinsel lights lining the roofs, grocery stores have fake boxes like presents on top of the aisles of food and fake trains go around the sides choo-chooing their sounds of coming Christmas. Radio stations play songs of Christmas - some old traditional ones and some newer versions of the old songs. Parents start asking what their children want for Christmas. Stockings are hung by the fireplaces and Christmas trees are bought from side stores specially open during this season or simply brought down from the attic. These trees are special because they're made from plastic, a valuable resource that is being fought over and stolen from everywhere to suit countries like ours where there are still Bush-supporters who think that oil will last forever. Forunately some of these trees have been owned for many years, long before we all knew we had such large oil problems brought down from former generations. I spent some hours yesterday helping my aunt put up one such tree which she was telling me her father used to put up when she was much younger and it used to have nice colors on it to notify which branches to put where. These colors have long since faded and one now has to guess based on where they were put back into the box from the year before or based on the size of the branches which go where. Even the coffee stores are celebrating the coming of Christmas with their special Eggnog and Peppermint coffees. It's starting to get cold and people like my cousin Allie are beginning to question their parents for when it's going to snow. But it hasn't fallen yet here in Virginia, although other places like Chicago have already gotten hit pretty hard. Ice has been out for a little while though as I went out to my car yesterday morning to find a nice sheen of it on the windshield. Although I haven't yet had to use the ice scraper my father bought for my trip.

"There's a Wiccan store down the street."
"Yeah, that's pretty awesome. I wanted to go there today. Are there many Wiccans around here?"
"I don't know. Toe is but she is just because they opened the store."
"Yeah, I was trying to find the philosophical reason for why she chose Wiccan."
"But she doesn't have one. That's one of the things I miss about Denison."
"All of the questions of 'why'"

It's true, I've been missing the way Denison people always have to have a reason for things and aren't especially interested in people just doing things for the hell of it. Unlike the Chinese people who are perfectly content to not have a reason for everything, we Denisonians and other Westerners enjoy questioning things. I think that's why the people that are silent bug me sometimes. I'm too used to people questioning everything and trying their best to find debates about everything to be content with the silence in strange and new places. I should probably get used to it.

I've found the past couple of days really sweet, I miss hanging out with people who are so relaxed about everything. I'm currently sitting here with my legs wide open supporting the laptop so I can write as comfortably as possible. There's an open package of pads and panty-liners on my right from my awesome girl friend Sarah I'm here in Harrisonburg to see. Her boyfriend is sitting on my left playing computer games with no problems with anything that I'm doing. He woke me up from a half-sleep for me to drool that it was ok for him to come in. He asked me what I wanted for breakfast and we shared a nice pan of pancakes. Unlike Cam who would have insisted that I couldn't look like that or been so casual in front of a guy that I've truly only spent some quality time with in the past two days. It's pretty sweet that it's so natural here.

Last night Sarah and I went to a Japanese Steakhouse for dinner. It was an interesting place where you sat around a big huge flat stove special for the cooking of a particular kind of Japanese food. After a little while of salad and soup a cook came up and did a nice display of trying to amuse the customers by juggling with his spatula and fork which he threw at me accidentally once as well as fake mustard which he pretended to put on my plate. It was quite a strange little display which clearly they were paid to do every time as I saw the other waiter doing the same. Turns out he was Nicaraguan, which I had guessed by his accent but kind of killed Sarah's mood for the place a little bit. He asked me where I was from and I told him I was living in China. Turns out one of the waitresses was also from China. I talked to her for a little bit and after mentioning Dalian she told me her mother lived in Zhongshan Square (right down the road from me). She was actually from Dalian! I thought that was amazing! I had spent so much time not talking to anyone in Chinese and then the first person I talk to is from Dalian!

After dinner Sarah and I went back to the apartment and we sat around playing Apples to Apples, a really sweet game where you try to find the best match of nouns to a particular adjective for a particular person at the table. For example the adjective is "Hopeless" and two noun cards thrown down were "AIDS" and "The End of the World."

For some reason it's really cool here to have tapestries, wallpaper, and other things with Chinese characters on them. I've said this before. But not all of these characters are real - sometimes it's cool to take the characters and turn them upside down or sideways or look at them through funky mirrors to form different characters that aren't really characters in any language. Kind of strange

---