super-sock saves vagina

i always seem to be leaving beijing. doesn't matter where in the world i am or what i'm doing, i close my eyes for one second and the next thing i know i'm leaving the big B. in a few days i'm doing it yet again.
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my past is a novel i read once and then forgot. the present is intensely so. one day does not seem to be related to the next, and last week may well have been someone else's life. i couldn't have hoped for more. not long ago i found myself lying on a table at midnight with a blind lady giving me a full-body massage (to think what some people can do with their elbows!). but the point is: it took me 48 hours and two and a half packets of oreos to get home after that. i live for that sort of thing.
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when i moved into my apartment several weeks ago, it was the definition of squalor. an inch of dust covered every surface, my bedroom door had no handle, cigarette butts and empty beer bottles littered the floor in every room, and the bathroom and kitchen were covered in matted hair and slime. nursing the grandmother of all hangovers, i scrubbed the sweet baby jesus out of every surface, removed truckloads of garbage, and neutralised all suspicious stains and viscous substances.
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the following day, two chinese girls moved into the apartment's two other rooms. one is really nice, but the other housemate never speaks, so i don't even know her name. i suspect she doesn't have one. how do you say cretin in chinese? there are at least two other voices i hear in the house on a regular basis, but have never seen the bodies they should be attached to. bodyless entities. perhaps they are the souls of the discarded clumps of matted hair seeking their former vessels. it's china after all.
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to get the apartment i brokered a deal with an evil pseudo-landlord middleman who goes by the new name of 'the fat prick'. on one occasion i returned home to find that everything i owned had disappeared, and a group of nameless and faceless people were milling about inside the house. days after that fiasco, after a handle and lock set was installed on my door and my things returned, i found the fat prick inside my locked room going through my things, demanding to see my beijing residents' card. i don't have anything of value to steal, but what a wanker. the saga continues.
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let's talk about the weather. the first two weeks that i was here were FREEZING. some days the maximum temperature only just got above zero. as a long-term tourist with a mobility problem, i try to keep my pack light, so i only have one pair of shoes, one pair of pants, one jumper...you get the picture. as a result, i had to wear everything i owned on every single day. whenever i washed my clothes at night, i had to wait the following morning in my sleeping bag until everything had dried so i could put it back on. but this isn't really a problem: beijing is the driest place in the universe. any water particles are hunted down and eliminated as soon as they enter the city limits, often sent to far-off country areas in the south west for re-education. so much moisture has been sucked out of my own body that i have been reduced to a mere concept. of interest, the concept that i have become is that of the unforseeable circumstance, in its plurality. i am unforseeable circumstances. which concept would you become after beijing had sucked you dry?
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i have been studying and not-so-studying. i have taken to night-time wanderings, oreos dipped in hot chocolate and giving myself up to the mysteries of human nature. i have taken up residence in a cafe that serves vegetable sandwiches you would kill for. i have developed a strong affinity for my slavic brothers and easy games of sudoku. i have a chinese teacher obsessed with blood groups, have not been cleanly shaven for 3 months and have held my breath all the way to the 15th floor. i have electrocuted myself with a double-A battery. i have disturbing palpitations after drinking coffee, an aversion to raw onion on the side of my plate, and a pseudo-premontion that i will die at the age of 36. peace.
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pics - (1 - view from my apartment - 2 - cafe hump - 3 - haven't had a photo of bastion and i together so i thought i'd just chuck this one in - 4 - my room - 5 - dj dog)

le papillon se réveille

nimen hao!

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first, some apologies: my head detached from my shoulders at some stage last week and tumbled away, somehow defying the earth's gravitational field and assuming a geostationary orbit some 35,786km directly above the surface of the earth (at the equator). i'm doing well without it, but this entry might be a bit of a shambles.

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hong kong was something of a fairytale. has anyone heard the one about the butterfly who kissed the frog only to find that he was already a prince? or was that perhaps a queen? who knows. bottom line is: i'm returning to hong kong (with a smile on my face) at the end of the month to see what happens with this menagerie.

i spent a few hours in guangzhou where i was approached by a man who groped me aggressively in the street, claiming that china was 'open now'. he repulsed me, but he did illustrate a point: china isn't just opening its doors to new ideas, new ways and new people: it's blowing the fucking house down. let me take this opportunity to predict that china will be one of, if not the most, liberal countries in the world within the next decade or so in term of social, inter-personal acceptance. those who have been here recently will know exactly what i'm talking about: go china! the political situation i'm not qualified to comment on.

an overnight train later (a train that somehow boarded a ship and crossed a strait without my noticing it), i found myself in the bustling little city of haikou, capital of hainan island in the south china sea, where sibastian has been teaching aviation english for the last 6 months. highlights included a weekend away at a beachy resort type place to chew beetelnut and eat dogmeat, drinking lots of coconut milk straight out of the coconut, stuffing myself so full of baozi i almost died, and a watermelon crash diet that has left me spinning. the best thing about hainan, however, is bastion: rather than 42, hello_ondrej reports that being with people you love is the meaning of life. hello everyone i love.

i tomorrow sit flying machine go beijing. this is so that i can focus on my chinese for a few weeks in a place where they actually speak it. back to beejays - who would have thought? i love a life where plans change at the drop of a hat. if it were any other way i'd be reaching for my pistol.

life's just so damn big. peace.

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pics - 1 - watermelon of love, 2 - le beau grenouille se rase, 3 - get that betelnut india, 4 - bastion in paradise, 5 - sabine and i go CRAZY for dogmeat.