Rottface the Pirate and the Blustery Day

Halloween has come, and gone. But oh, the memories, they’ll linger on. Well… sort of. H-Day, as I’m sure you’ll recall, was last Saturday. Saturday being my busiest work day… so, yuck. Nevertheless, mid-afternoon I got a call from my darling Nancy saying that she had bought some kind of costume for me… and from what I could discern, it was a “full set” of something to do with “the ocean.” So maybe I was going to be a mer-man.

This, however, was not to be. She had bought me a Pirate set, complete with kickass Cap’n’s hat, eyepatch, huge gold hoop earring, and red bandana. The rest, though, was up to me. Fortunately, I have considerable experience in making workable costumes, McGuyver-style. I’d “borrowed” a clown-face paint set from my work (which no one had really used), and had then hunted down a 24-color watercolor paint kit from the local RT-Mart… which turned out to be infinitely more useful. From my closet, I pulled a pair of dark khaki pants, a white button up shirt, and my black leather jacket, and then got down to work.

The result was better than I’d expected. Cap’n Rottface came to life… or rather, back to life… and he and his beautiful masqued companion (aka Nancy) hit the unsuspecting town. There was a party at some dance bar (M2, I believe was the name), where Nancy’s friends had insisted we join them. The place was utterly packed. There was barely room to stand, much less actually dance. That, and periodically, the bouncers would do their best to clear out a section of the bar so that performances could take place, which only made things even more congested. Granted, the dancers were quite good (one of their sets was an homage to MJ), but it still was not very well thought-out by the promoters of the gig. At one point I got into a bilingual argument with one of the bouncers, because he was trying to get me to back away from the side of the stage (where our table was), and I was telling him that I literally could not move, and where the hell could/should I go. He didn’t have an answer, so I stayed put. Still, loud, hot, overpriced (50 kuai for a beer… yuck) and overcrowded, Nancy and I agreed to leave early and head home. Especially since I had work early early early the next day.

November hit with a vengeance. A massive cold front pushed the temperature down almost 10-15 degrees C (so… about 50-60F) from the previously balmy upper 20’s (High 70’s-mid 80’s) down to the single digits (low 40’s and below). And this was all in the span of 2 days. Suddenly, you really couldn’t go outside without a jacket, hat, and even scarf. The wind was fierce, and stripped off another few dozen degrees of heat… yuck. Fortunately, as quickly as it had come, the cold front has now moved past us into the Pacific, and the temp is set to steadily rise into the mid-20’s again throughout the week. But November is definitely here to stay. My thoughts: It’s about damn time.

Yesterday I had to make a trek out to the Pudong Entry-Exit Bureau, so some greenhorn college student on part-time staff at Longman – named “Elfin” - could try to shunt her job onto Nancy because she didn’t want to speak English to me… ugh. Longman’s track record with Chinese hires continues it’s steady downhill slide… Anyway, I made the 40 min, 50 kuai taxi ride out so she could tell me that – Surprise! – she didn’t actually have my Expert Certificate yet (since the company had taken their sweet damn time in letting me know that they needed X and Y as originals, and that scans would not be acceptable… for whatever reason… even after specifically telling me that scans would, in fact, be just fine)… and so I was there to simply ask the Deputy Chief to extend my expiring visa through Saturday so they could actually get their asses in gear and get the paperwork... Fortunately, it was a very simple process. It’s just annoying at how very inefficient and, dare I say, Chinese this supposedly foreign business is currently being run. And believe me, this situation is only the latest in a long line of headaches throughout my 2+ month tenure…

One almost begins to miss Wenzhou with all this crap going on. At least they had their shit together… and there was La Luna, with it’s community of us Laowai, rather than the perpetually faceless, community-less mass of foreigners you never meet at all…


(CS) TAW Out.

the only international field marshal