No Worry Be Busy.

Present location: The Bookworm Cafe (Expat heaven) in Sanlitur: listening to Feist, drinking cold water (a rare find in China), and getting ready to dig into a beautiful plate of salmon I bought for under 8 US dollars. I've been buying or just sitting and reading (and not buying) books-- usually memoirs about people my age in China. I just finished Candy by Mian Mian, which I will talk about later. Reading and running are my stress coping-mechanisms.

(Title is a slogan plastered on lots of billboards around Beijing... I think it's for a shopping center though so I have yet to have sense of the English translation). There are a lot of funny mistakes made translating into English or just phrases that sound funny.

So somewhere between Japan and China and the Japanese man giving me his umbrella when it was raining because I looked so pathetic with all my baggage trekking to Narita in the rain at 6am, I lost my hairbrush. For weeks I've been scouring supermarkets, hair salons and shopping malls to no avail. I've been able to find combs but that's a mere short term solution for my very headstrong German hair. I bet you'd have to put in a lot of extra effort to get dreadlocks if you had Asian hair. It's so straight and smooth-- humidity resistant! Today after class I decided enough was enough- I was going to go to a nice western salon I'd researched online and buy a hairbrush and maybe get a deep conditioning treatment while I was there. So, taxi drivers in China often don't know where they're going but they want the job so they won't admit to not knowing how to get there. Mine rolled down the window a few times to ask where the address I provided for him (in characters) was and even stopped the car to walk down the street asking people--- with the meter running. Uggh. After that, I realized we weren't going to find it and I was just going to lose more money. I paid him $42 kuai (a lot) and got out of the cab. I walked around trying to find somewhere that looked like it might sell hairbrushes (not combs) and I asked anyone that looked well-groomed. I finally found a salon where ten eager employees told me to sit down and they could help me. They tried to sell my a used hairbrush (with hair in it!!) to me for 100 kuai!! After that I got into another cab and headed to Sanlitur, another 18 kuai, but I was determined to detangle my locks. I asked around and asked around and finally found a new hairbrush for 10 kuai. Zenme shou (how do you say)-- "Thank God." I've come to the conclusion that living in a developing country will take patience and extra time for everything. Once in a while a guilty run to Jenny Lou's (overpriced and well-stocked Western grocery store chain in Beijing) is in order for some comfort food. Yesterday I went with my friend Ben (another long walking adventure) where he found Poptarts and I got some Wheetabix and Laughing Cow Cheese. Legitimate milk and milk products seem to be a hard thing to find in China. And I think there's just something about Western breakfast. I've tried baozi and eggs fried/ baked a number of ways, noodles and soups but I still seem to crave oatmeal. I wonder if there's any logic to what foods we like and crave- is it just habit? Would I learn to crave Baozi? Does my western body need different nutrients? My hair certainly needs different care. Hmmmm. I remember the first time I traveled abroad when I was in middle school I was so disappointed when I found out that Europe wasn't nearly as different from America as I had anticipated. When I travel I keep asking myself what the differences are-- are the differences all merely superficial? Where does culture and history and perspective fit it? How different can people across the world be?

More later.

M