DATELINE:DONGXING

Yesterday was our first full day in May's hometown. We slept in a little late, went out to get a phonecard, then met her brother and his little group for some lunch (wontons). After that May and I hopped on his motorscooter with him, for a quick ride to the sidewalk beside the river/Vietnam border, where we sat under an umbrella and ate peanuts, pumpkin (i think) seeds, ice cream, lychee, and drank beer and smoked. This was very interesting, as you could see long thin (1-man) barges running up and down the river all the while, bringing all the leftover crap from other countries to sell at local markets in China and Viet Nam. You know all those old CRT monitors and Televisions that everyone in the US got rid of when they wanted to upgrade to flatscreens and LCD? This is where they all go! You'd see barges full of nothing but TVs, not joking. Many barges full of old clothes wrapped up in bags. Barges full of rubber tubes for bicycle tires or bundles of car tires - it's very weird to just see huge piles of them being ferried back and forth. May's brother said he'd seen barges filled with old Playstations once in awhile...

After a couple of hours of that, her bro gave us a ride to visit her childhood friend who'd just recently had a baby. In Chinese tradition, Mother and Child are confined to the home for the entire first month following the baby's birth, so we had to go to her place to visit her. Her Baby's Daddy was at the office, so we just visited with her and some of her in-laws. Then got picked up for another crazy motorscooter ride with May's bro Ken to head back to his place (which is the same apartment May lived in from age 11-19) to gather the troops for dinner.

The motorscooter rides are pretty wild. I had never been on a motorcycle before, I assume it's pretty similar. In China you just hop on in a pile of people and hold on for all you're worth, as the rider slips and slides in and out of traffic (auto traffic and pedestrian traffic, simultanerously). Since I am a white guy in a city where I have not seen a SINGLE OTHER WHITE PERSON, at all, I get a lot of stares, it is pretty weird. A lot of the double-take look "huh, is that..?"

We had dinner, a lot of seafood (jellyfish, shrimp, crab soup and some ocean fish) and some chicken and beef and sweet and sour pork (and more beer, and of course smoking). Man yesterday was just a ton fo drinking beer all day, I didn't know what I was in for. May's little cousin (7 yrs old) was very cute, she loves seafood. She kept clamoring to eat the eyeballs out of the fish... We retired back at the family's house afterwards, then it was off to meet some of May's old buddies from elementary school at a Karaoke bar.

The bar was alright, they cordon you off into individual rooms and have three monitors ("the mommy, the daddy, and the baby monitor") showing pics of supermodels while remixes of USA and Chinese pop music play. There's plates of fruit, spicy cucumbers, nuts and beef sit interspersed with shot glasses and a seemingly endless supply of beercans. The dudes (salarymen) were sitting there, playing rock-paper-scissors (drinking version) and Poker. They have a dice game called "bluffing" which they sucked me in to, i got pretty good at it - but as i drank more, I got shittier at it. The guys were cool but the game made us all get pretty competetive. Man, at that point I was really wishing I had not been drinking booze all day (I had no idea what I was in for!) Fortunately I was able to keep it together, and as it was only beer, I didn't have to worry about getting shitfaced..