China Randoms Pt. Deux

- While the Chinese may have math and badminton on lock, they're not too hot on guessing nationality, and this applies to literally all of the foreign teachers working at my school, not just me. Since coming here I have been called American, British, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Singaporean. I was listening to a class of little kids talk about me in Chinese a month ago and the conversation went something like this:

Kid 1: "What country is the teacher from?"

Kid 2: "Isn't he Chinese?"

Kid 3: "The teacher's American."

Kid 2: "No, that's impossible!"

Kid 4: "Yes, all Americans have gold (i.e. blond) hair and their skin is very, very white."

Apparently, this misinformation continues for a while. I was talking to a girl at a bar who told me that "my appearance was Chinese" but finally convinced her that there are in fact millions of blacks, Hispanic and Asian people who live in America and are also American.

- Earlier this week I went on a date with a girl who I hadn't seen in quite some time, mainly because she only gets four days off a month and because I'm a negligent dick. We went to a nice restaurant that she knew but I then made the mistake of letting her order whatever she wanted, which included three awesome dishes as well as chicken's feet and some sort of fish/donut combination. About halfway through dinner, she started to make gagging noises and I briefly considered getting another to-go box for the hairball which seemed imminent. Apparently she had choked on a fish bone and died shortly thereafter. Only kidding, she did in fact live through the fish bone ordeal but I have since devoted my spare time to figuring out a fool-proof way to eat fish that has all the bones left in it.

- I have been here more than six months and they are still playing reruns of the Beijing Olympics. This wouldn't be so bad if they played interesting matches, but so far it has been limited to weightlifting and some gymnastics. If they're really starved for stuff to put on sports TV, they could at least play American football, as the whole world should. As an aside, they do play classic boxing matches (we're talking Jack Johnson from the early 20th century), which is neat.

- While I was out a few weeks ago, I became thoroughly convinced by the end of the night that my hands had shrunk. I'm normally not a fun drunk, but I was particularly aloof this time, seeing as I was staring down at my hands at a club. The point here is that people need to stop putting roofies in my Singapore slings.