Chinky

08/15/06

"China Part 9"

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Day 9
Day 9 was our last full day in China. We head back to Kunming to visit THE place to go in Kunming, the "rock forest." The rock forest is exactly as you would think it would be. There are lots of rocks, and occasionally there are some caves and such you can walk in and around. But the most important thing about this place is that they sell rice patty hats. You know the rice patty hats, they are wide conic hats that stereotypical Chinese people wear. They are also called "Raiden hats" after the character Raiden from Mortal Kombat.

Usually one would haggle for prices of everything in China. Everything. I didn’t care. As soon as I saw a place that sold them I asked for one, asked how much, and started throwing money at them. I didn’t care how much it costs I just wanted one and when I got one I was going to pimp it so hard back home...

My enthusiasm didn’t escape the attention of the group of kids I affectionally call the "brat pack." In the beginning it was only a pair of brother and sister that would annoy me but now that the other kids had a chance to get to know each other better they started teaming up to annoy me. In my head I have given them all nicknames and there are, "Yap Yap," "The Queen B," "Celeron," "Jailbait," and "Will Smith." If you spent 5 minutes with these characters you would know why I gave them these names.

Queen B and Will Smith are the siblings that have been annoying me since the beginning of the trip but Yap Yap has made it her goal it seems to annoy me the entire rest of the trip. It’s the type of anti authority "I want to prove that I’m cool" that little kids who haven’t been broken yet tend to have. I had decided that at the beginning of the trip that I would not be the one to break them and so I did my best not to. No matter how many times they begged for an ass whoopin’. And believe me, it was quite a lot. Yap Yap and Queen B decided to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to get my hat. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to not break their little wrist.

We go back to the bus and go shopping again. I willingly let my new chinky hat off my head for the first time since I bought it and during that break I missed it horribly. This particular place sold silk. They had demonstrations on how tough silk was and how hard it was to process it. There were times when you could try to tear a silk cocoon in twain and pierce a sheet of silk with your thumb. If you did either of these you would get a free silk something or other. I tried both, it didn’t work. I’ll be damned if silk wasn’t stronger than I give it credit for.

The restaurant was downstairs and to the right of the store so we went and ate. This kept me away from my new chinky hat so I didn’t really care what we ate. Every meal we had in China so far had some pork thing, some bean thing and some potato thing and two different types of soups. At the end we were given watermelon slices. It was always made a different way but I was really getting tired of eating pork. The last couple of days I only had a piece here and there to try it and then proceed to just eat veggies and rice. The fact that I had become fatter over this trip had also not escaped my notice which was another reason for the rice and veggie diet.

As the day ended I placed my hat next to my two other beloved things I brought on this trip, my digital camera and my laptop. I interneted a little bit and went to bed sleeping in the shadow casted from my new chinky hat and my laptop’s pulsing sleep button.