With Heels, Come Balance

Valentine's Day. A day where couples everywhere are somewhat guilted into buying things for one another to proclaim their love, regardless of how long they've been together. The day that reminds you that if you survive it, your reward is discounted chocolate. So when you're in a country that has not one, but three different versions of this holiday, you're single, and it's the tail-end of Chinese New Year, there's only one thing you can do. Get some friends and go to a night club.

In reality, it's quite rare for me to go to a nightclub. I don't like being touched by people I don't know, nor do I like feeling like a piece of meat. But that night, I wanted to dance and see friends and simply have a good time. So I put on a black outfit donned some makeup, and a pair of heels. Pay attention to the heels. They're actually part of this story later.

That night, my friends and I went to three clubs and danced the night away. I, myself, realized just how shy I really was when out of the three men at approached me that night, only one of them I was comfortable with talking to. In fact, I was so unused to the attention that when one person invited me to dance, I grabbed one of my friends and had them come with me cause I wasn't sure what was happening. On the plus side, it was quite the confidence boost. So kudos to the confident men that kinda freaked me out at first!

Moral of the story: Learn not to be so shy.

But wait! Why did I say to remember the heels? They weren't brought up again to this seemingly pointless story. Well, here's the reason.

With decent parties come alcohol. With thirst-quenching, comes bladder release. With bladder-release in China comes one of the funnest games to play, especially when you're a little buzzed. Squat or No Squat? The game is actually pretty simple. When you go to the bathroom and look for a door, make a mental guess in your head if it's a Western Toilet or a Squatty Potty. Then when there's a stall free, you go in to see if your guess was right. I've never actually played this game with other people, so I'm curious to see how well this would play out as a drinking game, but I'm getting off-topic.

There I was, staring in the stall, mentally cursing cause I'd guessed wrong. My feet were already starting to hurt from the heels as I stared down at the porcelain hole. I already sucked at keeping a good balance when I squatted cause I tend to be on my toes. If I ever found myself at a squatty, I'd need to literally hold on to the walls because my balance sucked. And now here I was about to do this again, slightly buzzed and in heels.

In the two years that I've been in China, that was the first time I didn't have to hold on to the walls for balance. The heels actually helped. For the first time, heels had a real purpose in my life.

Moral of this story: Learn to keep my feet in heels so I can go out more often. But man, did it feel good to finally take them off once I got to my apartment.

Chinese New Year Behind the Great Firewall

On a normal Chinese New Year, I'd be traveling. I'd probably be exploring wherever I was at, taking as many pictures as I could then coming up with a witty name for the photo album on Facebook. I'd pick only the best pictures and post them while bugging whatever hometown friends who've kept WeChat to scan Facebook and like those same pictures.

This year though, I planned on a quieter Chinese New Year. This time around, I didn't really travel. Instead, I found myself curious on what Beijing looked like after the Great Migration. Was it really like a mini-hibernation? Or was I just talking out of my ass? I'd heard stories about how the whole city shuts down on Chinese New Year. Nothing's open. Buy your food the week before the holiday so you have something to eat during the holiday. While to an extent, that is true, staying in Beijing on Chinese New Year turned out to be not bad at all.

Except for when it came to technology. I found myself in two battles with technology. The first one I'll affectionately call the Battle of the VPN. The other one, the Battle of the Computer.

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The Battle of the VPN

At some point, on this side of the Great Firewall, when I turned on my VPN, which will remain nameless for now, I'd had a notice right when I signed on saying that it was temporarily out of order. The Great Firewall had found out about it, and had slammed its fiery you-know-what on it. If I read the notice correctly, they were blaming journalists and said that it'd be fixed after the holiday. My slight Facebook addiction got the better of me. And, well, there are only three people back in the States that talk to me without the use of Facebook. So like it or not, I kinda need my Facebook at the moment. Fortunately, things have been okay with that, but it ended up being a short, but annoying battle for a holiday.

Lesson I learned from this battle: Get more people from home to add you on WeChat.

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The Battle of the Computer

Exactly one month ago, my computer started slowing way down. To the point that in the middle of videos it would stop, and I would have to completely restart my computer. One day, my computer didn't even load, and I found myself running out to SanLiTun to figure out what was going on. Without my computer, I had no way of really contacting anyone back home.

The downside of going to the Apple Store is all the waiting. It's no one's fault. In fact, the service I received was wonderful. The problem is that everyone is very busy. In Chinese culture, even if there's someone helping you, it's very normal for people to just interrupt so they get serviced. As a downside, it takes longer for you to get helped because the people working feel obligated to help someone that's interrupting your service. As I said before, I don't consider it bad service. This is culture. And when they've got your attention, the service is wonderful.

After many many hours, we realized what the problem was. Turns out, my hard drive was taking a crap. So after attempting to save whatever I could on a tiny external hard drive, I saved what I could, which wasn't much, if anything at all.

When I got my computer back, it seemed okay. It was running faster, but there was still the pesky problem of it beach balling at times. It would still freeze a little at random points. Two nights ago, my computer started restarting on its own every five minutes until it stopped restarting all together. Back to the Apple Store!

Was it my hard drive? No. This time, there was a cable next to the hard drive the broke. It probably broke when my hard drive died, but it wasn't caught right away.

Lesson: Back everything up. Because of this, I lost a lot of pictures and music. :( Not to mention  I'll have to find a copy of my book just so I can retype it and put it in my computer.

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Despite the random battles, the Chinese New Year break wasn't bad. I bought so many books so that I could get back to reading. I didn't go out as much as I liked, but as I said, with all the reading I managed to get done this time around, I'm not butthurt about it at all.

Not only that, the one plus side to having the Great Firewall sometimes slam down on your VPN is that copyright in China is on a meh level. So it's surprisingly easy to catch up on any TV shows that you missed while you were in America. (I now know the joys of PC Principal, for starters).

This Chinese New Year was a lot more toned down than my last one, but it was still a decent Chinese New Year. :)