Smurf Cartel

This is the insanity that was yesterday's 2009 Riff Raff Kickball tournament, hosted by Candice Lee, center of the above picture. Six teams and about 100 people showed up. Standard kickball rules from grade school apply: Must have beer in hand at all time, all disputes solved by a beer chugging contest, two handed catches of fly-balls are allowed, but you have to hold your beer in your mouth. Also, every team must have a costume. We attempted to go as Smurfs, but ended up looking more like Colombian Drug Lords. Ace pulled off a good Smurfette.



The tournament itself was fun enough, but some obvious contributing factors led to a few inevitable problems.

Factors:

1. Eight kegs of beer. We finished them all and the heat from the day left a lot of people drunker than maybe they normally would be.
2. No one really remembers how to play kickball. We've all played it at one point, but rules are subject to debate.
3. Most people were more interested in beer than kickball.

Problems:

1. Every game was argued pretty intensely. There were some pretty heated emotions and sometimes tended toward no longer being fun.
2. The huge amount of beer and vague understanding of the rules led to some fights. Nothing serious, and everyone ended up friendly again, but it was just kinda lame.
3. Wrestling.

We must have been quite a spectacle. Locals came and gathered around to watch the crazy foreigners drink beer and yell at each other. The fields are surrounded by a chain link fence, so we literally felt like animals inside a cage, being watched and studied. They took pictures and little kids tried to get our attention. My favorite game was to get a bunch of us lined up and just stare back, wordless.

Cute kids.

Our captains, Jim and Joe, comteplating what to do with our bottle of Vodka. They did not drink it, which was the correct decision.


Keg on the field.

Oh, and we finally put a deposit down on a new apartment. We ended up passing on the one in the hutong; it ended up being too much trouble to sort out. Plus, we found a place in the original apartment complex we wanted, and just decided to take the plunge. We'll move in this week. Yay!

~Kev

Spring Cleaning

China declared winter was over on March 15th. Since then, we had two miserable weeks of cold. The central heat was turned off at work so by the end of the day, your core body temp had dropped. All your joints and extremities ache. Your knees and ankles don't want to work. Your hands and wrists feel brittle and you fear tripping, lest you'd have to catch yourself and risk serious injury. All this happens so slowly throughout the day, that you don't realize how cold you are until it's too late. It take hours for the cold to leave your body.

So that was last week. This weekend, spring arrived. We are now smack in the middle of, dare i say, perfect weather. (Ok, a little rain would be nice...)

Couple that weather with a three day weekend, and it feels like spring is really here. Monday was Tomb Sweeping Day, a national holiday in China:

"Chinese visit their family graves to tend to any underbrush that has grown. Weeds are pulled, and dirt swept away, and the family will set out offerings of food and spirit money. "

I did not sweep any graves, but Ace and i continued (and probably completed!) our apartment search. That itself feels like a form of spring cleaning: making a fresh start in a new year, creating a new life, taking new roots in the city. We are close to settling on a nice hutong location, walking distance from some of our favorite hangouts. It's biking distance to work for her, and about 40 minutes for me. We'll have fruits, vegetables, meats, dry and baked goods, and liquor available just outside our door. All at separate little hutong stores. Down the street are two coffee shops and two different subway stops. Our little balcony faces east and catches the morning sun for breakfast and coffee, while looking out over the hutongs. It's a pretty charming, 98 sqm, 2 bedroom, and we're getting mentally psyched for the change.

So yeah, we spent a few days enjoying the weather. It was very refreshing and this week has started off very well. It seems everyone at work is in a good mood. It's amazing what a change in the weather can do for the human spirit.

And the avian spirit too. Even the birds are happy and getting exercise. This little flock did about 50 consecutive laps around the courtyard across from our apartment.

~Kev

Construction

So there's this building next to my apartment. It's the new apartment going up in our complex. They've been working on it since long before i got here, and it's been pretty slow. Last month, they took down the bamboo scaffolding which was encasing it.

There was also a 10-ft tall brick wall in front of the work area until recently. This brick wall terrified me because it smelled like crap. My hypothesis is, it was a convenient place for the workers to relieve themselves while being sheltered from the streets view. The base of the brick wall was rotted away with a green sludge. It had slowly seeped through into the sidewalk, staining it with foul organic matter. I had to walk by this sludge everyday on the way home from work. I didn't dare walk within a 30 foot (10 meter) radius of the aforementioned sludge, so I would cross the street, even though i would have to cross back just a minute later.

Last week, the wall came down. Workers toiled for a few days in what i knew was a place of evil. The men came with no heavy machinery and used crowbars and pick-axes to tear it apart. The women loaded the debris and pedaled it away in bike carts.

Now this area is a sidewalk. It doesn't smell anymore and the sludge is buried under concrete. But it doesn't matter. I still cross the street on the way home.

~Kev