The great escalator haunting

Messages like these get me motivated. For the past few months every time I have opened this blog I have done little more than try to get idiot blogspot to format the fucking photos as I like them on the page, just before giving up a little bit later. Messages like these reminds me that there are other things I could be doing with my time and posts.
I wonder what exactly being 'idiosyncratic' means.
The fact of the matter is that I am actually rather bored in China. And this isn't the fault of China as a place so much as the fact that I am mostly just a boring person. Being such, I pretty much do anything to constantly distract myself, like signing up for a 10 week long course on grammar theory geared towards teaching grammar. It's nice, and it makes the time go by. But after having a particularly trying week for a number of reasons (I won't get into them) I found myself trying to get the work for this class done as quickly as possible before a midnight deadline. I got momentarily fed up with the assignment and decided that I would do a better job of it if I had cake.
Now, when I do things like this it does not mean that I will take the five minutes it takes to go get cake and not think about my assignment, but rather that I will continue to think about the assignment as I walk towards and back from cake.
The point is that my mind is generally occupied by other things, so I wasn't paying much attention when I damn near toppled down the escalator. I made a grab for the hand rail in time, and was pulled back to the landing I had just come from right before I ate a step.
I guess the fault was my own, as I really wasn't paying much attention, but after years of doing everything in automatic one hopes you can do something as easy as going down some escalators without much of a problem.
And then I saw what the problem was; someone had switched the direction of the escalators. The right escalator now came up, and the left now went down.
The next day, they had been switched back.
Now that is really not the kind of thing that should bother a person, but I tend to obsess. And so I spent the passing days observing the escalators, looking for patterns, trying to understand their behavior , and trying to see if there was a why.
I'm pretty sure their isn't. One day the elevators more one way, the next they may be the same, only to swap a day later. It's like looking at a string of binary code, really. Each day could be a one or a zero, but you never really know which.

In both of these pictures I am going down the escalators.

And it pisses me off every time I use the damn thing. And it still trips me up. But there is a saving grace to this whole stupid thing, and that is the fact that it trips everyone up. So every now and again I get to watch a puzzled native hurriedly get on the wrong elevator and damn near trip over themselves doing so. And while this gives me a chuckle, I still fall for the trap pretty damn regularly.

xixi wetlands

Despite a previous commitment not to, I will have to go back on my word and do a few more photo dumps. I found these photos on my hard drive and decided that I should do something with them.
All of them are from my trip to the xixi wetlands, a natural reserve close to my place of work. I went there when I was still living in the hotel near my work place, the first week in Hangzhou.
Frankly, I was not terribly impressed with the wetlands. I sort of felt that as far as natural reserves went, this was a bit too built up. In fact, it has plenty of roads, buildings, and construction sites, like everything else in Hangzhou.

Weird Realizations in China #1; Promised Dysentery

Months prior to leaving for China I was beset with the usual tiny paranoias that plague anyone travelling to a new country; I should do such and such thing before I go, because it will difficult/impossible to do it when I get there. At the top of my list was clothes shopping, as I am a rather large person and find it to buy clothes anywhere. I assumed China would be even worse regarding this, as the common conception is that Chinese people are as a rule pretty small. But I figured before I do any of this I should focus on losing some weight, for the sake of vanity and having clothes that will fit on me nicer than the ones I currently have.

Well, whenever you are getting ready to leave a country everyone you know, even those people that you have not seen in months, decide that they want to take you out to a nice meal, just to spite your best intentions. And so you don’t lose any weight whatsoever.

But stubborn as I am I insisted. One person I insisted to was my then boss, who really wanted to take me out. ‘Relax dude!’ he told me. ‘You’re going to lose plenty of weight in China. In the first few months alone you’ll have some much dysentery that you’re going to shed pounds whether you like it or not. 10-20 lbs guaranteed’

And so you say ‘fuck it’, pig out with your buddies, and decided to leave the weight loss job to Chinese food poisoning.

Except now you have been in China for more than two months and realize that despite some sudden and urgent trips to the restroom, the promised dysentery and resulting weight loss have completely failed to materialize. So you look yourself in the mirror one morning and realize that shit, you haven’t lost any weight and where the fuck is that dysentery I was promised?

And then you realize what thought just passed through your head. It’s really not normal to have thoughts such as these.