June 25th: Saturday cookie dough and final club night

Day 282

Woke, had a productive morning writing and uploading the endless array of student pictures. In the afternoon, I took another box of winter stuff to the post office to mail back. By the time the stuff reaches America, it will be cold enough to wear again,and since I will be living out of my suitcase for the next three weeks or so, it would be smart to streamline its contents into only what is necessary.

The post office affair took about an hour since they were adamant about mailing Heather's card that had a music chip in it. So, Heather opened the envelope, tore out the chip and gave it back to them to reseal. I pantomimed using tape but they shook their heads, tried to fold over the tear and use watery glue. After a few minutes of this, they had the bright idea to use tape. "Wow! Glad SOMEONE thought of that!" I will not miss this about China.

Following some tree dumplings we entertained the idea of walking around town and taking pictures, but the weather was insufferable. Hazy, humid, thick air, like sludging through a gelatin dessert someone had left on a sunny picnic top. All you wanted to do was hide in the air conditioning and eat popsicles.

I made it over to Times and bought a shirt for my cousin's baby girl. Maddie had no name for over a week and I had seen this funny shirt which declared "I like my name" so I got it. A while later, Heather, Jeni, and I braved the humid sludge for DVDs in a last ditch gold rush. I scored two more Stephen Chow films and a Tom and Jerry box set. I can't get enough of a cat and mouse beating the holy hell out of one another. It reminds me of watching cartoons with my brother after school, eating oatmeal creme pies, cackling with glee.

Darkness fell and the sludge lifted a little. We ate quesadillas from the tortillas Mike had left for us (cheers, pal) and then whipped up the sugar cookie dough from Barb Willis's legendary Christmas box. Since we had no oven, we ate spoonfuls of teh raw dough, sprinkling the themed confections on each bite ("jingle mix" and "holly berries"). It was a very college moment, all of us on the rug eating our ghetto cookie dough like stoners.

The plan of the evening was to hit the club, then leave after the floorshow started, then visit Mr. Yeah at the tents on the far side of town. We rode to the club, secured a table on the mezzanine level by the stairs. I took a picture with my lighting dude, grabbed Jackie and brought him back to the table. He shrugged off an offer of beer, showed me a particularly infected tooth, poor guy. We explained that even though we were going back to America, Rhys and Jeni were staying and in September there would be four new wai guo ren, two from Australia. That's the way the expat abroad game works: a constant rotating panel of people coming and going.

The floorshow started and midway through Jackie dedicated a song to us, belted out a familiar tune that's sung by the Chinese Peter Gabriel. It was touching. The sentiment was killed by the next act: a female who was going to pierce her arms with nailsand hang buckets off of them and spin around or something. Heather had seen it before, and it didn't sound like a good time and the beer was warm and awful, so we fled.

We rode up to the far tents, but Mr.Yeah was nowhere in sight. We were told we had just missed him and that he worked at the markets now. Nuts. We rode back to our own tents, promising we'd track him down tomorrow. Had some cold beer and a fried sausage, then rode back, uploaded more photos, watched a bit of "A Touch of Frost" (an Aussie detective show) crashed out of consciousness.