No. 7

Date: April 29, 2016

Status: Learning to do everything on a bicycle

              I've always liked riding my bicycle. And I suppose that's lucky because I do an awful lot of cycling around Yangzhou, China. It's a wonderful way to travel. You get to see everything at a brisk, yet manageable, pace. You have time to take in the smell of the sweet potato man's furnace/cart. You get to smile at the staring children packed onto the back of mommy's e-bike. And you can take a moment to laugh at the Fedex man's precarious load. 

Here we see the wild parcel-delivery man, retrieving a
lost parcel, saving it from an uncertain fate.

The parcel-delivery man replaces the young parcel.
Both will live to see another day.

               And I've certainly gotten better at biking overall. I've gotten faster, and I can now overtake my coworker Angelo's little e-bike without too much effort. Having reached a satisfactory level of actual cycling skill, I've also developed some related skills.

              Following is a list of things I can now do on a bicycle: 

No. 6

Pink-tailed demon.

Date: April 15, 2016

Status: Thinking about home

              Having lived in China since September of 2015, I seem to alternate between days of habit and days of: "Where the heck am I, and what the heck am I doing?" Today was a weird day. It started off feeling like habit: go to the teachers' workshop meeting, chat with coworkers, and teach my evening class. But the day felt like anything but habit when I went to KFC for dinner. I was met with a Chinese line. (Some would call it a writhing mass of pushing people.) An older gent pushed ahead of me when I was clearly next. And while I ate, a fluffy dog with a pink tail ate fries off of a nearby table with its owners looking on.
               This sudden shift in the tone of my day has gotten me thinking about the habits I'll most likely drop upon returning to the ol' US of A. So here are my top ten China habits: