Rebecca A. Foster

Well, this has been quite a week. I guess what happens when you actually start having fun in China is that you lose the time to write about it. It's Saturday night here and I am blissfully staying home and going to bed early. It was a great holiday week, but super-busy. I'm glad for a night off from the fun and frivolity. So many parts of my Chinese life that were different and unexpected are now normal to me, to the extent that I forget to write about them!  But here's one I was reminded of today: in a public bathroom with multiple stalls, instead of waiting at the head of the stall line for the next available stall, you have to go stand in front of a stall and wait for it to become empty. And it seems like I always choose the wrong stall and have to wait longer than someone who came in behind me. I have bad bathroom stall karma! There must be some secret to determining which stall will be empty next, but I have yet to figure it out. Maybe by the time I go home next year...

I'm been slacking lately on taking pictures, so I planned to take some photos of our excursion today. I went with friends to the special market to buy oh-so-rare-and-precious salami, cheese, fresh basil and western style salty bread to make panini sandwiches for dinner. This is how we are celebrating our holiday: eating stuff we'd never think twice about back in America, but is a real treat for us here. (One of them was cooking when we took this picture.) But after we made them, I forgot to make pictures before we scarfed them down. We were just that hungry and excited to be eating them.  It was the first time I've felt really full all week. (Insert joke about Chinese food here.) Afterward, we played Uno, watched old-school rap videos and hung out chatting. Some other friends came over later, they drank wine, more chatting. This is my life in China.

Othello is my favorite board game AND my favorite Shakespearean play, but this post is about the board game.  If you've never played Othello, it sounds easy: you and a partner each choose a color (black or white) then attempt to turn all the wafers on the board to your color. You do this by taking turns placing wafers on the board and trying to surround your opponent's wafers with one of your own color at either end; a wafer is flipped to be the color of the most recent tiles surrounding it.  I learned to play it at around age 7, with my grandpa; it's a great game for kids to play with adults because it has simple rules and requires few verbal skills, but can help kids sharpen logic and strategy skills. It's a visual logic game, not a game of chance. And it's not a game you "master"; ideally, you continue to play against a partner that matches your skill level and continues to challenge you. Try it! You might like it. 

At dinner the other night, conversation turned to 'personal' items, specifically when you misplace them at home and guests inadvertently find them. Awkward! We decided the easiest-to-lose are Love Dice (a friend gave me some for Valentine's Day and yeah, I hardly ever know where they are), which somehow morphed into taking pictures of our dice while on vacation at famous landmarks and posting them in a Facebook group, a la the traveling gnome. No competition, just something to make each other laugh. I think I'm going to invest in glow-in-the-dark dice. Imagine the possibilities! (If you want to participate, search for the group Traveling Love Dice.)