Oriental Newsletter 4 - Attack of the Various Things

Nimen hao!

(That is the last piece of cutesy foreign-speak you will ever see transcribed here, faithful reader, and rest assured that I personally hunt down and punch every white blogger who ends pure english sentences with "ne").

It's hard to believe I've only been here about a week - it's like being a child, the sheer density of new information everywhere I look makes it seem like so much more time has passed. We've been in Jin Nan a few days now, and I've been shown off to a great big bunch of family members like some kind of prize dog - but a prize dog that's been remarkably well fed, so that's good.

The first thing I noticed about Jin Nan is the fog. On Friday it was serious super-fog, we're talking early nineties first-person shooter Turok fog where you can't see more than twenty meters ahead of you (because the computers back then couldn't actually render many objects, every hard-bitten save-the-world hero spent most of his time battling an impenetrable pea-soup whose job was to prevent the computer having a heart attack or the player from seeing where he was going).

But if Friday was video game fog, Saturday was horror movie fog, real look out the window and "Where has the world gone?" time. I was expecting the phone lines to be cut and hotel guest to start turning up with interesting collections of knife-marks, forcing me to use my one unique skill that seemed irrelevant earlier to outwit the killer (in this case, the skill being so pale that if I take off my clothes I can blend invisibly into the mist coverage, until I dramatically leap out of the smog and blind the killer with my direct whiteness).

I was distracted from hunting atmospheric-moisture-cloaked-killers by introduction to a large swathe of Xin's extended family. I was ushered into a room full of hyper-keen, super friendly small people who I could not understand and god help me but the only image I saw was of C3PO and the Ewoks, except I'm shining white instead of shining gold. Xin punched me pretty hard when I told her. (And if you're pointing out that C3PO could in fact understand those things, then screw your hyper-nerd pedantry for trying to ruin a perfect image).

The food was great, in a way that I'm getting dangerously used to, and then the food after that was great too. There was also beer that was actually moderately decent tasting, though not one single person in all of China knows how to pour a beer with less than 60% head, Xin has started intercepting waiters with assurances that "she wants to pour for me", tactfully avoiding the fact we both find their method of pouring heretical and evil.

Actually running out the door for food and even more family members: The Revenge, so time to put my best smiley face and tall posture on.