Black Wednesday

22 December 2010,

Today we suffered the worst loss thus far. We lost three companions today to the American-istis disease. We lost one a week ago and another yesterday. Making our death toll five. We have another in the sick bay. I doubt he'll make it through, he'll probably be a goner by tomorrow. Leaving our home land with ten fellow adventurers, today we're down to half. I wonder how the rest of our expedition will go. We received word that reinforcements are coming, but they won't arrive for a fortnight's fortnight so we'll have to make do without.

Without our musician and our drunk it has been quiet camp. The eerie silence before the climax. On top of that, to keep our mind's off our losses we've devoted ourselves to our remaining work; which has isolated ourselves from each other.

It seems a fellow Kensei is convening a Samurai Council Meeting. I must take my ado.

Daimyo 梅

On a more serious note, it was really sad saying good bye to a few friends. Like the above section mentioned, it has gotten really quite. Everyone who is left has been buckling down preparing for their finals or writing their final papers or both. Today there was definitely a different atmosphere. For half the day it felt like I was the one going home. I just had that air of excitement, like you're about to do something new - similar to the experience of the drive from the airport in Dalian to our dorms. I wonder if that's what it'll feel like when it happens for real. Eventually it'll just be me, because everyone else is going back to the US and I've opted to stay in China over break. It's late, I'm tired, good night.

SEVERE WEATHER ADVISORY

*crackle* crr crrr *crackle*

We interrupt your usual broadcast for an emergency weather announcement.

The government has issued a severe weather advisory.

There is a impeding snowfall that will take place over the course of the day.

We advise everyone to remain in their houses.

As usual, the Chinese government announced that they will not shovel the snow to the best of their abilities nor will they salt.

We repeat, they WILL NOT use salt.

If you must leave your house, we advice everyone to take precautions so you don't slip and fall or worse break your head

That is all. We now return you to your usual broadcast.

Thanksgiving with some sides.

As promised, a post on Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of sides – pun intended. We had Thanksgiving on Wednesday, so two days ahead of everyone in America. It wasn’t the most traditional Thanksgiving, but nonetheless it was a delicious one. Danny’s apartment is comparatively large for China; however it isn’t really adequate to fit 15-20 people around a dinner table. Therefore, we all ended up eating in chairs, on the sofa, or on the floor with our plates in our hand. But the food….oh how delicious American food can be sometimes. We ordered the food from some a five star restaurant that cooked a Thanksgiving meal for Americans. Even still, I wasn’t completely confident it how well the food would have turned out. So I must admit that when we saw the food – and ate it of course – it came as a surprise that the food was delicious. They had all the staple foods: turkey, mash potatoes, gravy, etc. I took some pictures. As an aside, I promise that some sort of pictures will be up later this evening. But I think that my favorite dish had to be marshmallows and sweet potatoes yummy. They were home cooked and the marshmallows came from the US of A. They were cooked by some friends of Danny’s, people from Texas – as hard to believe as that is – who have fairly good Chinese. They are actually living in China and are semi-retired.

Now to the pun. I have a bunch of random topics I’m going to throw in to this post. The order of the topics will follow from least serious to most serious.

Seeing how I was just talking about food, I’ll continue that strain of thought. Two words: Brooklyn bar. The Brooklyn bar or an American consulate as we like to call it is well…a bar, to be exact an expat bar, but it also serves American food. When we went, I ordered a cheeseburger and that burger was probably the best burger I had in like four months. I gotta say, I sure do miss American food like a lot. But of course it is an expat bar so it was damn expensive. Burger 50 Yuan, cheese 10 Yuan, milkshake 35 Yuan, a good time and some good food priceless. 95 Yuan isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things (less that 15 USD), but when you usually get dinner for 5 Yuan, that’s a lot of money.

What I want to move to next is the weather in Dalian. It is freaking cold here…like really cold…like negative degrees cold…in Celsius of course. At the time of this writing, it is -3 degrees here, so like 26 degrees Fahrenheit. But what’s worse is the wind, recorded at 18 mph at this current writing. It was so bad, that walking back from dinner was difficult, we were having trouble putting one foot in front of the other and walking straight. Ugh, on another aside, I think that my main light just died.

This post has taken me a lot longer to write than expected because of work constraints, so I’m going to stop here. However, I would eventually like to cover North Korea and the wiki leaks debacle.