Today my room-mate, Fan Tien, came into my room with a handful of invoices and a pencil. It was time to pay the bills. There was a phone and Internet bill, an electricity bill, and some sort of water bill or sewage. He showed me where he had done the math dividing out the month that I hadn't been there, looked good. So I added the three numbers up, 542 kuai, walked over to my wallet pulled out a multi-colored bill and some coins out of my "change jar" and gave him the exact amount. Then I thought to myself 542 move the decimal over 2 places = 5.42 times 3 = USD$16.26 for my half of one month's utilities. OK that's not the exact exchange rate, but who cares? If it wasn't already overly warm here I might start smelting aluminum in my room and selling it on eBay.

I'd like to correct an earlier entry about Mosquitoes that I'd never seen. Today I saw plenty in service trying to land on me and giving me that I-swear-I-can-feel-bugs-landing-on-me feeling for the rest of the afternoon. At one point I made a little scene expressing my concern about the myriads of maybe imaginary bugs that I thought I felt landing on me. But that may have been more because I couldn't express my mosquito concerns verbally in Chinese to the charming young Korean sister standing there at the time. I was awarded with a smirk of either disdain or understanding, which satisfied my need for attention at the time (edit 292) Permalink