You could hear a pin drop in here

Yeah. So. It’s been pretty quiet around here.

I honestly thought no one noticed, then I got this comment from Paul, asking if I’d given up posting to this site. *Sniff* Someone cares!

No, I haven’t given up. I’ve just been kind of blocked in the writing part of my brain lately (let’s not even mention how blocked I’ve been feeling in other parts of my body). Mainly because the time I used to use absorbing the sights, sounds, and quirks of Xiamen is now taken up by that pesky thing known as a job. Which, I suppose, is a writeable topic in itself:

Why is it that when one works in Xiamen (or is it China in general), THE BOSS, no matter who they are or where they’re from, because they pay you a salary, they own your arse? All 24 hours of your day belong to them to use as they please, it seems.

But enough about that. My more recent observations in China are a variation on things I have covered before, so I’m hesitant to waffle on much further about them. Anecdotes, I have many. Long pieces musing on living in Xiamen, I have none.

One thing I was terribly amused with this morning was watching a man dash across the street, three lanes on either side, but pausing mid-stride to hock up a big loogie and turn his head to expel it.

Thanks to Dan of The Shanghai Diaries, I now have a name for the absolutely delightful practice of blowing your nose onto the street (tissue, what’s that?) — snot rockets. The other thing to do with boogers requires testing of the following hypothesis: do Chinese people grow their fingernails long and unsightly because they think it looks good, because it’s better to pick their noses with?

There are a lot of roaches in my office. Not a day goes by without a colleague shrieking (or squeaking) about discovering a nest of little roaches chilling out in, say, an inkpot (this actually happened). There is not much food lurking around the office, so the one species of bug I hate the most in the world feeling so attracted to this one room where I spend a lot of time leads me to suspect a conspiracy of sorts.

As for conspiracies, I suspect fashion companies not only want to make consumers feel unairbrushed and desirous of retail therapy, they do the same to their employees. My colleagues seem to take delight in telling one another (I am not spared) how to dress, how to match their clothes, what shoes to wear, and so on. I did not carefully cultivate my wardrobe colour choices (all the better for getting dressed in the dark) for them tell me that I should wear [this colour and style] with [this colour and style].

One of our favourite Chinese (Sichuan) food restaurants is clearly a family business, from grandmother sitting dowager-like outside the restaurant to the little rugrat dashing about and being, well, a rat. A friend calls him ‘The Little Shitter’. That whole public defecation thing again. Just the thing to get you in the mood to tuck into some hot and spicy strips of dry-fried beef.

This morning I heard a member of a local council on the radio claiming that the state of roads in its area, potholes and damage notwithstanding, was not its responsibility — it was wholly the responsibility of the residents to watch where they were going. Try to get away with that in the US!

A bunch of us saw an unidentified flying object last week. It sure as hell wasn’t a plane, and as far as I’m aware, Xiamen is not a launchpad for the Chinese space agency. I was hoping for a missile (and wondering where Taiwan was located relative to where we were), but my imagination was dashed when I was told it was moving too slowly. Rocket? Missile? Aliens looking to outsource their production?

Um, you can go back to what you were doing now.