China after dark

Man this place can be lonely sometimes. Today can only be highlighted by an attempt at teaching 40 19 year old girls how to sing "My Heart Will Go On" (it was requested, heavily). I was asked, after playing the song five times (like I didn't hear enough in the 90's) and singing with the entire class once, to come back some other day and actually teach the song. Ummm.

The day died around 7:15 tonight. That's too early to go to bed, so I guess I will stay up and read a book or surf pointless web pages for a couple of hours. Tonight is a great night to call by the way, although everyone will read this after the fact.

It seems that when the whether cools off and it rains a little bit, the Chinese go inside about six o'clock and don't come out for the rest night. I went walking up and down the street outside of our university and it was deserted, well about as deserted as anything can be in a country of 1.4 billion people. Which brings up another interesting point which I have been meaning to write about.

I know I've heard two or three people say that Americans are loud. If you are travelling abroad you can always tell who the Americans are because they're ten times louder than everyone else and are callously indifferent to the polite silence of other countries. I now know that the word "abroad" in that opinion means "Europe" , because Americans have nothing on the Chinese.

Everything is loud over here. Everything. Whenever we went to a speech competition about a month ago, the speakers were loud enough to cause long term hearing damage. In fact, whenever someone uses audio equipment the volume is turned up so much the music can hardly be heard over the fuzz caused by speakers being pushed past their limits. The car horn is the favorite form of communication. The Chinese use it for its original purpose: to inform people of your presence. So if a driver has slightest inclination that you are not aware of his two ton gravel truck driving down the middle of the street, he will honk. And it's loud. People set off fireworks at the most random times in the most random places. A construction company is dynamiting the hills next to my school. There was that random air-raid siren from about three weeks back. I'm pretty sure the cell-phones don't even come with a vibrate setting, and when one starts ringing at the most inappropriate time it's not considered rude.

So walking the street tonight was nice, because for the first time in a while, my apartment wasn't the only place in the city that was quiet. I'm hoping (and it's pretty rude of me to hope) that the cold will keep people inside past the hours of six. But I'm guessing it won't. With the rain and the changing whether, it was a good day to stay inside and drink hot chocolate. If they had hot chocolate here.

"I'll see you in the morning if nothing happens."