1) After after having dropped Tony off at school, I was proceeding in line going towards a traffic light when I got cut off by a small truck. This annoyed me so much that I kept my car beside the truck, rolled down my driver window and knocked on the passenger window of the truck so the driver could see me flip him the bird. The driver, who appeared to be of the peasant class and may have not been sophisticated enough to know what the gesture meant, just kind of raised his hand at me. When the light turned green we drove off without further incident though I did stick my hand out the window with a parting middle finger salute.
2) A young student told me she had no idea who Li Xiao Long (Bruce Lee) was. When I showed her a picture, she said that he was probably someone of whom her parents knew. I was astounded. Li Xiao Long, as I told the student, is probably the most popular Chinese person in the West. It leads me to wonder of what else the younger generation of Chinese is unaware.
3) A colleague and I were walking from our school to Sanyang Plaza. Sanyang Plaza, located in the center of Wuxi city, is a series of underground tunnels running from a hub that is underneath the intersection of Zhongshan and Renmin Roads. The tunnels lead to various downtown shopping malls and the tunnels are lined with many businesses including restaurants. It was one of these restaurants that my colleague and I witnessed receiving a food shipment. Shipments to Sanyang Plaza, evidently, have to be taken down flights of stairs. Three flights, in fact. The restaurant was receiving what looked like either frozen meat or fish. The frozen product was packed into plastic bags and was solid enough that it was in slab form. For whatever reason, these slabs of food were laying on the sidewalk at the top of a stairwell entrance to Sanyang Plaza. I saw one of the workers pick up the slabs and fling them one-by-one down the stairs. The frozen food slabs would bounce on the stairs three or four times before coming to a rest at the bottom where another of the workers would pick them up and put them on a push cart. The reaction of all the workers involved was of a great amusement which leads me to conclude that the worker flinging the slabs of food had had the package containing the packages break on him. The reaction of some of the passerbys, like this foreigner, was aghastment. I wonder what the locals witnessing this thought.
4) Chinese drivers are very impatient. It is not unusual for them to honk their horns as soon as a traffic light turns green because they want the cars in front of them "to get a move on!" Another driving tic they have is to instinctively want to swerve around anything slowing down ahead of them. One time I was arriving at the entrance to Complex Casa K and had chance to face, head on, one of these impatient drivers. The entrance area to our apartment complex, which is a T-junction, is begging for an accident to happen because the views of drivers exiting the complex are blocked by all these cars that are parked on the side of the road leading to the entrance. A cautious exiting driver cannot see traffic on the road unless he creeps out slowly onto the road to get beyond the blind spot caused by the parked vehicles. It is hazardous but it can be made all the more hazardous if there happens to be an impatient driver following. The impatient driver will try some manuever involving rapid turning of the steering wheel because he wants to pass the cautious driver whom he thinks is taking the turn too slow and not throwing caution to the wind. So, there I was approaching the entrance this one time when a cautious driver was slowly trying to make a left turn out of the complex. I was able to make my right turn into the entrance but this turned out to be a major inconvenience for the impatient driver who was following the cautious driver. He had cranked his steering wheel and was hopeing to pass the cautious driver by turning into the area that I had taken (rightly, I might add). And so my arrival made him rapidly change his course back to following the cautious driver. The scowl of impatience on this middle-aged man's face owing to a slight delay and the exertion that he was putting in to turning the steering wheel of his long black sedan were a joy for me to behold. Any opportunity I get from now, to relate this anecdote, I will have a grand time acting out this man's exertions and corresponding facial gestures because in any future conversation I have about the peculiar local driving habits,
this anecdote will be a staple.
5) I discovered that both Latvia, my country of ancestry, and China, my current country of domicile, both have teams in the KHL. The KHL is hockey league spanning Europe and Asia. It is a truly international league with teams in Latvia, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and China. The Lativan team is based in Riga. The Chinese team is based in Beijing. Beijing and Riga have played each other at least once. Sad to say, for me, Beijing won the one match I know of 3-1.
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