China Day 2: DAMN YOU RICE COOKER!!!!!

My coach has made a bigger deal about bringing and cooking my own food in China than anything else all year. So, I listened, and spent a significant amount of time and money planning out 20 days of food that I could pack into one suitcase with all my clothes for a 14 day stage race along with a rice cooker. The first meal in China would be oatmeal and fruit with maple syrup, not bad!! I plug in my voltage converter, plug in the rice cooker, turn it on, and it explodes.

I mean, it didn’t shoot shrapnel, but it did sound like a firecracker. DAMNIT. DAMNIT AGAIN. ALL THAT WORK. SON OF A…

I’m so mad about that. And I slept like crap on this bed, which Dave pointed out is more like a WWF wrestling mat, here is a selfie I just took. I was sitting on it but I had to give my butt a rest.

Pretty sure that box spring is redundant… also, check the sleepy face on that guy!

So, here’s a thing: At breakfast this morning, which I will now be eating despite 30 pounds of food in my suitcase, there was no rice to be found. They did have French fries and ketchup, which would have been a first for me at breakfast. I guess its not far off from hash browns, so I wont look into that too much, but I still protested. No rice?! Of all the things I thought I could count on it was not understanding people at all (check!) and rice EVERYWHERE. Ok ok ok, there was rice at lunch, and dinner, I feel in the future I will be shocked that I could ever complain of the lack of rice at a meal (Reading this 3 weeks later, the answer to that is fully and completely YES), considering it is all I have eaten since.

Something that is giving me great joy in China is the things that get lost in translation, for example:

Or the welcome text in the book here at our psudo-hotel:

Rapid operation between heaven and earth space… classic.

And countless others. I should not complain, however, because it is a treat to have even the slightest insight to what something means or what is written or what someone is saying. I talked to our translator about how when he talks I hear NOTHING resembling communication, and he tried to convince me that English is harder, to which I, with no basis of fact, dismissed him.

Things being lost in translation may be the main reason so many things we do here are insane, or at least lack even a weak explanation to excuse the insanity. So, instead of having a staff member come to the opening ceremony rehearsal at 6:30pm tonight, they figured “why bother, lets have a rider come instead.” So, naturally, I volunteered like an IDIOT, and at 10:15pm when I got back from two 45 minute bus rides, just to stand around by this girl who I figure is about 12 years old:

To walk across a stage behind her one time waving at an empty stadium, I was something other than thrilled. Three and a half hours? Can I complain? Nope, nobody knows what I’m saying. Im just a stupid American who thought he was going to get to sit down tonight. I got back to the room, exhausted, jet lagged, and for some reason a backstreet boys song was stuck in my head keeping me awake. They are lucky there is a Pacific Ocean in-between us, because I wanted to find them and destroy them all last night for doing that to me. Sigh. On to day 3!