Food, Rain, and Massages

This morning both Carl and I woke up before 4am again, having passed out at around 6:30pm the night before, without eating dinner. By 6 or 7am we were both starving and decided to go find breakfast, which came in the form of some fried batter thing with an egg and meat, cooked streetside, of course. We returned to the room so I could talk to Hilary when she got home from work at 8 (am here, pm there), and set out again to run more errands around 10. First, back to the international office at Fudan to finish up registration and pay tuition, and then to the grocery store to buy toiletries. In the checkout line at the grocery store there was a little boy who was apparently impressed with our English-speaking abilities, and watched us the whole time as if we were putting on a show. Next we stopped in a shoe store in the mall outside the grocery store, and I bought a pair of “Qiao Dan” shoes, better known in the US as Jordans. Although I wish to wear as little as possible in this heat and humidity, all of this running around has my flip flops wearing thin fast.

I am very thankful to have a bike again, it is truly a necessity here. We need to cover literally miles to take care of all of the things we need to do, and it is tiresome to walk and expensive (relatively) to take cabs.

We had lunch at my favorite authentic Chinese restaurant, and the stomachache I had from the greasy breakfast went away and was quickly replaced with a stomachache from overeating. Having spent enough time in the heat, we returned to the room to relax in the air conditioning and watch a movie.

In the afternoon, it rained a spectacular thunderstorm, just like yesterday, and continued a soft rain with random flashes of lightning into the evening.

When I passed out again at 6pm, Carl woke me up and forced me to get up and go get dinner and a massage so that we would stay awake until a reasonable hour and help our jet lag issues. So we rode our bikes over to where we used to live and found the dark alley that we knew to be a hot spot for peddlers of “chaofan, chaomian!” (fried rice, fried noodles). We found a spot on the sidewalk with shelter from the rain and ate our meals and watched the lightning.

Full again, we went for massages. 90-minute, full-body massages. Bliss. Our umbrellas were stolen out of our bicycle baskets when we came out, but I wasn’t even mad.