Guo bao made a new doggie friend.  

In China there is no such thing as eating too late.  Many restaurants are at full capacity at midnight, and if restaurant seating is full, why not just eat under the street bridge?  When the Chinese talk about midnight snacks, they don't mean milk and cookies.  A late-night snack in Changsha is not complete unless there is a bowl of spicy crawfish, stuffed grilled oysters, and bottles Tsingdao shared amongst friends gathered round a round table.

At the end of the street I live on is the antique/calligraphy district.  Every Friday people lay out books, stationary, Mao portraits, little red books of Chinese Communism, herbal medicines, stamps, coins, pottery, and so many other interestingly random souvenirs.  It's the same childhood glee of spreading out all your treasure for everyone to see, and in this case, to buy.

A rooftop party on a warm summer night just two buildings down from my apartment- this is what I call a chill night.  Though I could do without the mosquito bites!

In Changsha most sickness is treated with an IV.  I took a guy to the hospital last week to get his swollen, bug-bitten foot treated.  A two-pint bag of liquid hormones and antibiotic treatment takes about an hour to drip-by-drip flow into a person's veins.  In Chinese hospitals you first buy a ticket to see the doctor, then the doctor writes you a prescription (most likely an IV prescription), then you walk to the medicine counter to purchase your IV fluids, which you then bring to a large open room where you sit and wait for a nurse to inject a IV needle and tube into a vein on the top of your hand.  All the while, there are the family and friends waiting patiently along the side.   

Bored of sitting at home?  Take a walk along the 湘 江 and find life teeming along the boardwalk and even in the waters!  Just a little wading in the waters, swimming in the waters, rowing boats in the waters, eating fish on a restaurant on a boat in the waters, and/or all of the above/or make up your own water activity in the waters.  There's nothing you can't do here... well except check blogs and facebook and ... 


No worries mom, no infectious water diseases for me.


Just foot sores and water rashes.


I am completely joking.

You experience the multitudes of people in China when waiting at the train station.  People people everywhere.  Now imagine hundreds, maybe thousands of people flooding the entrance gate towards the train platform without any regard for waiting in line.  That is what I call MASSive transit and squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle.  When wandering about the city, personal space is actually space belonging to everyone.  I guess I'm learning to share space in a new way.


In China, you breathe people.

Trains in China are separated into four different classes: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, soft sleeper... and then there is also standing room if you do not get a seat.  Let's just say you don't want a standing ticket for a trip from Changsha to Beijing.  In this picture to the left is my little train-riding friend on my 2 hr hard seat ride (which was not as hard as I thought it'd be) to Heng Yang city in Hunan.  I was imagining hard wooden benches like the subways in Moscow with flickering lights as the carts rattle along the tracks.  Wrong city, wrong country.  I'm in China now.  Hello China trains.  Bring me to the treasures of your land. 

These are my new friends around the corner from my apartment across the street from the school.  See the dog playing with the fabric of the blue and white striped chair?  His name is 国 宝, which translates to mean a national treasure.  China's national treasure is the panda.  This man's treasure is his dog Guo Bao.  Guo Bao has panda eyes.  The cutest puppy I've ever seen, if you ask me, and a bundle of joy everyday.  Not only that, they sell a yummy green-bean iced drink here.


Oh, and check out the trash lady's reflective umbrella hat.  Pretty awesome.

How can one write about China and not write about food?  On my morning walk, I came across a food stand frying dough balls of similar shape to creme puffs.  They were not creme puffs, and they were far from being of dessert quality.  What I'm holding in my hand is four fried dough balls with bits of radish in them, topped with strips of dried seaweed and a sweet and salty clear glaze.  Sounds strange?  It is actually one of the most delicious snacks I have discovered yet.


Oh, and the box has little shapes that you can poke out to make a smiley face to house your snack.  Oh, the fun to be had

When standing in front of a very tall building, you are suddenly reminded just how small you are.  This is one of the more interesting tall buildings I've seen in Changsha.  It has a other-worldly look to it during a wet, drizzly evening.


An interesting fact I learned about China the other day- the country has the largest cloud-seeding system in the world.  I guess Changsha's hot weather prompted some cloud-seeding action, which involved sending a plane into the atmosphere to shoot silver iodide into the nearest front of rain-making clouds.  It worked; for a whole five days it worked.  We had gray and rain, and also 70 degree weather.

If you have a craving for lotus seed, July is the time to get them.  You'll find people walking around with baskets full of lotus seed, like this man.  How do you eat them?  You pick out the little round green seeds, pick off the covering and eat the soft white seed inside.  It's a bit bland and tasteless, but locals here will argue otherwise.  I still need to develop a more colorful spectrum of taste on my palette, my tongue palette.

What do they place in fancy glass display cases/cabinets and sell on the street corners in China?  Cigarettes and liquor.  The diamonds of China?  What a strange thought.

Walking the streets of Changsha, you realize nobody stops unless they really have to (which is usually determined by a ticketed traffic camera rather than following traffic laws).  Vehicles, electric bikes, bicyclists, pedestrians just keep on moving.  Weaving in and out of traffic is norm.  Even people on foot are unafraid of dodging buses, taxis, and mopeds.  Traffic lights and walking lights are used as "advice" rather than "rule".  This is simply the movement and flow of the city streets here.  It's like millions of fish in a river, and I'm one tiny fish caught in the torrent of movement.  That's what it feels like.  I have never seen a fish stop swimming, so I guess, me being a fish, you can say I am trying to keep moving like everyone else.  And let me say, this kind of traffic makes for an interesting run.

The parks are teeming with people at all hours of the day.  There are many beautiful parks where you can enjoy a game of chess or mahjong.  You can sleep in a hammock and not be badgered by park security.  You can dance, do aerobics and martial arts with crowds of people in the morning and night.  You can watch teenage skateboarders spinning crazy tricks in the air while parents, children, couples, individual onlookers spectate and enjoy.  Some parks have stairs with pathways next to them that are covered in smooth round pebbles which you can walk barefoot to massage your feet.  The parks here are a haven for rest and leisure.