Dropping Bombs

I have been living with Matt's host family for about 2 weeks now, and there are a number of "truth-bombs" that I need to drop on them before I leave.

1. Blue/Red 3-d goggles will not protect your eyes from an eclipsed sun.
2. The picture you cross-stiched, yeah, that's Jesus.
3. The air-conditioner in my room, that's a humidifier.

1. On July 21, 2009, central China experienced the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century. Matt and I woke up early to go see if we could catch a glimpse of it in the Country's capital, Beijing. As we step out of the threshold of their siheyuan (四合院, courtyard house) and into the hutong (胡同, old beijing alleyway) Matt's host mom stops us and hands us a floppy old pair of plastic blue/red 3-d glasses. Mama told us that whenever Sun Wenhao, their son, would go look at eclipses, she would always make him wear these glasses. Sun Wenhao has terrible eyesight; I can only imagine that watching eclipses in super-awesome 3-d vision can account for some of that.

2. Chinese people are way into cross-stitching. It's the knitting of the east. It takes patience and time, but not much skill - you just have to knit little x's in a color-by-number fashion. The first one Mama did was a kitten. It is a cute kitten. She was very proud of that kitten and began a new one. This time she would choose to cross-stitch an image more close to her heart (not really): a sheep farmer from Xinjiang. This sheep farmer, my friends, is Jesus, but Matt has not had the heart to tell her yet.

3. Beijing summers get reaaally hot. Sometimes a fan works, but sometimes it just doesn't cut it. One night I walked in to my room to find my fan replaced with a humidifier-looking box machine thing. Mama opened up the bottom container where water would normally be put into on a humidifier and stuck a plastic bag of frozen ice inside. The machine began to make an awful grinding sound, to which she responded "Oh, I know, I forgot to put the water in." When I awoke, after a relatively sleepless night, I was hotter and sweatier than I normally was. In essence, I was put into a room with a fan blowing on an ice cube... like in a cartoon.

You'll learn one day, China.