second day in 镇江
so it turns out I can just plug western plugs into the weird sockets here. devon didn't tell me that. :) and then just as I was about to set the time zone, he takes over my comp to play games. yeah, he has his own laptop here, but he wanted to play a kde game. :)
after that I didn't get time to write anything... we went out to dinner and I met chad and.. his partner, I forget her name. interesting people. me devon and ashi walked through the night market after that. then ashi left, I went to the music store devon had wandered into, and I guess tonight I'll have to go again. :) so at that point me and devon went for a massage. it was quite nice, and cheap too. by hte end I was almost falling asleep... we bought some food and headed home.
during the night my stomach was feeling a little icky, and jetlag kept me awake for a while at 5am, but eventually I managed a bit more sleep, and now I just feel tired as opposed to exhausted ;)
when I went to plug in the laptop to start typing, I got a bit of a surprise. heard nasty crackling noises and yanked the plug out fast. then saw an ant running over the plug. :P I guess the crackling noise was other ants getting fried. yuck. I'm running on battery right now. and wishing I'd thought to bring a surge protector.and... I think I'll go check that all my food is out of reach of those damn ants.
the city here is quite interesting. all the traffic lights have countdown timers shown, which would be incredibly useful if anyone actually paid attention to lights. the streets were more busy at night, but still not terribly crowded. the air is visibly dirty, though, and cigarette smoke still sends me into a coughing fit. :(
the lack of wireless access is hard to adjust to, though. I was just about to google the lyrics of the song I'm listening to... and yesterday the first thing I did after getting the comp back from devon was to head for irc.
the most annoying thing is that I highly doubt any internet cafe would let me connect my laptop - it would probaly bypass the software calculating how much I owe. this means I don't get to update my rss feeds or grab all my email at once. wish there was some way of having programs spit out a list of commands to run that would grab the data they need... heh, but even then it'd probably only work linux-to-linux. I know almost nothing about dos batch scripting... just that it's no match for bash.
little bits of nature survive despite the city's best efforts ;) there were a lot of birds twittering at dawn - I just saw a sparrow on the power lines outside the kitchen window - and I think I saw a bunch of bonsai plants on someone else's balcony. there are bushes and trees in this area, too, although I don't remember seeing any green on the main streets.
I really need to practice my chinese, though. can hardly remember tones on anyhting, and I keep seeing characters I'm supposed to know and can't quite remember. last night I actually had to look up 样 in my dictionary. there was a sign that said "1元2样"
wait.. what the... I'm online? ...aw fuck, I made the mistake of touching knetworkmanager and lost my connection. ...I might have got it back now. *crosses fingers*