Stephen

Ramblings of a seriously bored person in Hainan, China

Ridin Around

 Mista "P"

I decided to get my lazy carcass up and go for a bus ride around town. I decided to go and check out our new train station first. The station has been opened for business for about a year but has just recently started to transport passengers to the mainland - Guangzhou that is. I guess they wanted to make sure that if something terrible was to happen, the only loss would be freight cars and not hundreds of people drowning in the ocean. Good idea! The station itself is really nice and seems to be easy to get around should I ever decide to use it.  Down side to my short visit is that I wasn't able  to find a way to see the train. I wanted to take a few photos but  no such luck. I've been told the ride to Guangzhou takes about 15 hours! So we now have a train, planes and ships to get us to and from the mainland.

After that, I decided to hang out at Holiday Beach for awhile. I had no sooner began to walk through the entrance when a group of girls began to holler at me. Can we have your picture? I don't know if I will ever understand what the fascination is with having your picture taken with a foreigner. Anyway, I decided to have a little fun this time and said, "sure, if you give me 100 RMB!"

Man, I wish I had taken their picture! They were so caught off guard with that remark. Now I wasn't trying to be sarcastic and I was smiling when I said it. After spending a few minutes of convincing them that I was just kidding, I was surrounded by four cuties to have my picture taken. Then they left! Didn't ask my name, if I lived here or anything - they just left! So what do they tell their friends?

So for all of you still trying to survive the winter and the miserable weather that comes with it - we're swimming and it's in the mid-80's! Come to Hainan!!!

Then I went to a new pizza place for a very late lunch. A really nice place and very clean. The pizza I had, a supreme, was great. There was another foreign family there eating as well. I don't know what it is, but most of the other foreigners I've encountered while living here seem to have a problem - a friendly problem. You would think, like I do anyway, finally another foreigner I can talk to. But no, nada, nil, no way Jose...etc.  This bunch, just like the others I ran into at the beach and at other places over the last few days, won't give you the time of day. I walked by them twice - once to the table, said hello, no response, then back and forth to the bathroom, said hey  and still no response! What's up with us when we can't even be friendly to one another. It's hard enough to live here without that kinda attitude!

Finished eating (was hoping they would ask me to join them since they were there first) and headed out for the bus. I decided to walk several blocks to another bus station so I could shake that large pizza down (I ate the whole thing).  Got home and hit the couch!

Another day of homie in haikou

posted by: stephenthegreat at 20:31 | link | comments (1) |

From Boredom To Business

 Wow, now i'm wishing I could go back to the bored state I was in last week, 'cuz this week sure has been busy..

We had a new couple, nice people, come in about two weeks ago..  we've showed them around town a lot, (now don't get me wrong, i'm not complainin cuz it's been fun) and i've been taking them to the hospital for the past week.. so that's kept me a little busy. On top of that I started school again this week, which takes up my whole mornings, and then i'm going to Qiong Hai to show friends around, and.. and.. well,, i think that's it for now.

Some of you might have heard of this guy I play basketball with a time or two, the one who broke someone's nose and arms all in the same month becuase he plays like a madman, well, today, he proved his ignorancy.. this man has.. nice moves, he plays ok, but he, doesn't know very much about basketball, to the extent of him having to ask, "what is organized basketball", and "what is double dribble." None of us could contain our laughter, it was quite the funny day..

Well, I need to go eat, and soak my feet in nice hot water, i'm 15 going on 16 and I already have to soak my feet after every time i play ball.. isn't that terrible?

oh yeah, would you please leave a comment on whether you like this layout. :P i don't know, if i was not so lazy i could easily make my own layout, but what do you think?

-stephen

posted by: stephenthegreat at 19:48 | link | comments (1) |

My Chinese New Year

 Mr. "P"

This year I spent the holiday with blog homie, his mom and the Du family. I gotta tell ya, I had a great time and man can Mama Du cook! I swear I think she should open up a restaurant. Yeah, I know, another one, but if you had the opportunity to eat some of her cooking you'd say the same thing. If you do come to Haikou, email me and I'll get her to cook a meal for you and then you'll understand why. You probably aren't that interested in all of the details of the meal but we did have jiaozi  (both fried and steamed). If you aren't familiar with this, it's basically a filled dumpling that has meat or vegetables inside of it. We had two kinds of chicken, a lamb dish, a beef dish, rice (of course) vegetables and a cake cooked by homie's mom. Man it was good!

Papa Du made the comment that I looked too serious because I wasn't smiling. I responded by saying that I was too busy to smile. Why? Cramming my face full of mama's cooking. I didn't have time to talk, smile or pass gas because I was hungry. No...starving! My wife is in the States and I'm not a very good cook. Yes, I could go to a restaurant and eat, but that's boring to eat alone. Besides, the waitress might misunderstand me if I call her xiao jie (waitress). And Haikou has some very pretty waitresses so I don't want to strike a match if  I can't light the fire. And of course...I love my wife (she's really good with a sharp knife and carving - eunch style).

After awhile, well, when I finally looked up from the rice bowl, everyone else had stopped eating. So here I am, still eating! Now I'm embarrassed. Ever since I've been here, folks will continually encourage you to eat. eat...eat...eat. Well, this time I did and I felt compelled to apologize to eveyone for wallowing in the trough. I  guess you could say I committed the sin of gluttony. So to repent, the next day I made two meals out of the care package mama Du gave me to take home. The Du family are such great people.

After the meal - I watched them play mah-joong. I'm still not quite up to the task yet, but soon. I did play rook. I think homie and his mom have the "give me a sign" thing down pat because they smoked me and Jesse. And of course we watched the New Year celebration on t.v. I still haven't figured out why they had mini-robots in one part of it though. But it was pretty good despite the language barrier.

Got home, got a coke and went out on the balcony to watch the best part - fireworks. I've never been in a war or a gun battle but man at the noise. A great light show. The next best thing was watching several of the neighbors run out to turn their car alarms off. No sooner than one guy left, he'd be right back again. Windows shaking, glasses rattling...good stuff. The Chinese know how to celebrate!

And no, I missed the Super Bowl. I can't believe I did that. But there is a ray of hope, redemption if you will, for my over site and it's called - Bittorrent! Now if I could just find a bittorrent site that has a NASCAR fan!

posted by: stephenthegreat at 01:05 | link | comments |

Boredom....

 Well has it been boring around here.

I take back everything I said about the empty campus being nice and fun. I don't think i've ever been so bored in all my life. I sometimes consider going out to play ball, (that's even out of the question now considering we have a long rain spell coming through) but even when i do go out, there's NOBODY THERE! What loads of fun.. my two sources of entertainment now are my trusty ps2 and this computer...

I have these few weeks off from school because of the Chinese New Year, which I believe is on the 9th of this month, and it's quite funny, for as mista p said, it's the widow year, and yes, there are a heck of a lot of people getting married, I mean A LOT! I saw 7 in 3 hours going downtown today... they must take this stuff really seriously!! I wonder if there have ever been this many people married in Hainan in January ever before... becuase i surely haven't seen this many before..

Due to nothing happening, there's nothing to say. So off I go.. to ESPN NBA 2005! =D

Stephen

posted by: stephenthegreat at 14:22 | link | comments (1) |