Rejuvenated

I'm sitting at the end of my sixth week. This has been a tremendous experience. Both professionally and personally. I have had many wonderful times that will be hard to forget. I must admit though, up until this weekend I had been harboring a growing resentment of this place. I started out strong and immune but then in the last couple of weeks the accumulation of the things I've seen here began to weigh on me. I suddenly found myself constantly annoyed. Sick of smelling refuse in the streets, tired of stepping in unseen puddles. Tired of taxi drivers. Of the guy sitting next to me in a restaurant spitting pork bones onto the table that ricochet against my elbow. That lady who feeds her two and three year old out of the trashcan on the corner everyday. The cockroaches in my apartment, The damn washing machine that floods every time I use it, and the sink that clogs every time I turn on the faucet, The old Chinese guy that sits on an over pass and as soon as he sees you walking towards him he starts wailing and sobbing. Kowtowing for change and when you pass he stops crying all at once. The people that fill your glass after every sip of tea. the ceaseless stares. Could you at least throw in a smile with that? Hearing people talk Chinese. The same three damn commercials on tv over and over again. No I don't have dengue fever and I don't care about Hong Kong's no smoking ban in 2009. Racist Australians. Tsing Tao and Carlsberg beer. Security guards for everything, everyone with a sash and epaulets on their shoulders. Why? So you can make sure I don't steal those parking cones you're standing next to?

Maybe it's the down time, or the complete 180 that is Chinese mentality, that conflicts with everything in your understanding of common sense. Perhaps it's the influence of my reading Steinbeck, Abbey, and Krackauer, and Hemmingway. Reading about the great wilds of the west. Alaska to the Grand Canyon, the Keys and all points in between. Fiending for those landscapes. For family and friends and the comforts of home.

But then at some point over this last weekend that whole rotten cloud that showed up a week or two ago, lifted. Some where between sitting in Daisy's cramped car, to driving to the Olympics site this morning it went away. Seeing the city waking up this morning reminded me of a line I had recently heard. It played over and over in my head as we drove."There's hardly anything more beautiful than a Sunday morning." last night at LeNest I was in one of the most unbelievably coolest places I've ever been to and then this morning I saw an elderly couple greeting the day with tai chi. Tonight I had a dinner of pork bellies, steamed shrimp, abalone, seared greens, and sweet pork buns washed down with the most wonderful of teas.

I realized that my time here is coming to an end. I want to make sure to enjoy it as much as possible. and to do so you have to take all the bad with the good. TIC as I've been told. This is China.