digging for nuggets

mcdonalds is having a promotion, and i'm possibly 1 box of 9 mcnuggets away from 365 boxes of free mcnuggets! everytime you buy some mcnuggets, you get a card. you win if you can make the big picture (which is only divided into 4 cards).

at first i thought, no way, too easy, what's the catch? i mean, i expected to get a ton of 1 card and maybe 1 of the other three...but now i realize that their gimmick is not giving people cards unless they ask for them. they've even stopped branding the mcnuggets boxes with the promotional picture. but you can't make me forget mcD, i've got your number! you and your nuggets are mine! of course, i'll have to share the loot with jon once i win. he's such a crybaby otherwise.

come on lower left quadrant! come to mama.

jon the giant

china nationals

we lost to beijing 8-7 in the finals. we were up 7-2 at half. they bageled us in the second half, going on a 6 point run to take home the first ever championship title.

i'm a little bit pissed, but not as much as i normally would be...most of our turns were first pass turns by handlers...one stupid upwind hammer from handler to handler (a guy in the cup got to it first)...one dropped chest-level pass...silly mistakes that had nothing to do with me. maybe this is a bad attitude, but a kdob philosophy that i take to heart = you should change the things you can change and let the rest be.

i had an almost perfect game. i think i scored 2, assisted 2, threw 1 turn (an around backhand in the redzone that floated a bit too much--i had another backhand that got caught in the wind, but i think that was against shanghai)...no drops, no one scored on me, and the girl i was covering only touched the disc once or twice (both on dump passes). i'm pretty proud of the no-one-scoring-on-me clause, considering i was constantly playing transition d. you win some you lose some. it would've been nice to be the first ever china national champs though. and it would've been nice to actually hold a lead in the finals for once.

otherwise, the fields were much nicer than i expected. we played most of our games on a super nice turf. fields were narrow, allowing more poaching on our ho stack than we would've liked...one endzone was roughly 10 yards shorter than the other--very noticeable b/c the turf was striped lightgreen-darkgreen like a football field (one endzone had 3 stripes, the other 4). personally, i need to work on catching. i couldn't get my hands to close fast enough on saturday, prolly cuz of sleep dep, but i used to be able to catch without sleep (or it could be bad karma from commenting on yelena's blog about catching). i think i had 3-4 drops in the first two games on saturday, 0 on sunday (yay for sleep!). something else to work on: i'm much better at triangulating with a flick force than a backhand force.

food was pretty good, i ate lots and lots of baozi (a type of dumpling). saturday night, we snubbed the tourney buffet and found a restaurant built inside of a temple. there were buddhas everywhere (some headless), they even had a donation box. a donation box in front of an altar inside of a restaurant. we ordered too much food for the table (the plates wouldn't fit). i think we got 7 or 8 dishes for the 5 of us (if you count all the dumplings as 1 dish). it got to the point where waiters would bring us random food that other ppl ordered, cuz odds were, any food coming out of the kitchen should be coming to us.

anyways, there were 3 types of baozi, sweet and sour shrimp wrapped in crispy noodles, pot roast (chinese style), fish, soup noodles, and lots of veggies. when we tried to take pictures of the food (we remembered halfway thru the meal), a waiter came by to tell me pictures weren't allowed. luckily, i was the only one who understood mandarin, so jon continued snapping away (earning concerned glances from the waiter). i bargained for flashless pics, and then for pics only of the food, not of the relics (their actual concern), which i got, b/c it was pretty obvious that the foreigners were gonna do what they wanted, and this was a good face saving solution for all.

(you can even see the temple creatures in the background)

people still heckle white ppl in china, or at least in tianjin. something was even thrown out of a bus window at us (jon and i)--i'm assuming it wasn't incidental. BUT he was also the sole reason we caught our train from tianjin to beijing...the taxi wasn't licensed to drive within tianjin city limits. he took his taxi light off and made us pay before we entered tianjin. if we were asked, we should say that a friend was dropping us off. if it weren't for jon, the driver would've suspected me of "fishing", a practice wherein undercover inspectors try to trick drivers into taking them into the city, fining them for their trouble at the other end.

back to food. my favorite chinese foods are still jian bing (a crepe thing with a crunchy and an egg--still only RMB2.5!!), chinese yogurt (thick and sour), and chinese popsicles. my parents call me a peasant whenever we go back. seriously, the simple stuff's the best.


the end.

happy birthday, mr. buddha!

tomorrow is a hong kong public holiday, in honor of the venerable mr. buddha. i may have dropped my harvard buddhism class faster than a goose drops, well, droppings, but i kinda feel like instituting a public holiday may go against the tenets of buddhism. you know, the part about not having any idols and finding your own way. not that i'm complaining of course. here's to you, sid!

shuangy is coming this friday! i am veeeery (read: VEE-HEEE-EERY) excited. unfortunately (or fortunately), i'm heading to tianjin this weekend to play in the First Ever "china nationals" (can you have a nationals if you don't have a governing national body?). It's run by a bunch of college students so i'm not expecting too much, just a slice of history. and then shuangy is heading to china with her parents...so i'll probably only get to spend a weekend with her. nevertheless...better than being shuangless. AND henri is coming next monday to start her internship. soon, i will be very friendful.

and foodful:

fried milk
shrimp dumpling
lily on a rock (not for ingestion)

incidentally, i've joined the CS dragonboating team. i managed to get myself noticed last week (by sitting behind someone who sucked even worse than i do), so next week i get to move up in the boat. don't you see? it's like a mini-promotion in the one thing that i'm definitely good at: dabbling in sports.

competency

work is getting stressful. i'm hitting the 1Y barrier at which i'm required to be more than just pretty and enthusiastic. add to this that we're short staffed by 2 (leaving brian and me to do the pricing and philipp to do the managing), and well, my days are not happy. i keep reminding myself that banking is a windfall for me, and it isn't the rest of my life, not necessarily, so if i screw up and get fired, meh. i'll just go back and...what? get a masters? go to law school? go to MED SCHOOL?! ha, fat chance. i'm not freaking out, just taking a step back. gosh.

its funny the things that keep you sane. i'm only 22, i've still got options. i feel like i'll be saying that well into my 50s, but that's ok.

korea

last last weekend, i sojourned with a cast of nine to jeju, korea, the land of wind, rocks, and women (seriously, that's what it says on all the brochures). poor jon was so disappointed when he found out that women didn't necessarily refer to hot women, just female women (many of whom were as old and as wrinkly as the seaweed they sold). our team, love parade, gathered from all over asia, and we had sweet jerseys to match our sweet temperaments. our cheer was a group hug and a proclamation of LOOOOOOVVVVEEE. sometimes we would sing it at people in nine part cacophony.

korea is a 9's tournament--limited rosters, 6 guys, 3 girls. it caused lots of drama in cities that had to cut ppl. skill always trumped commitment. yeah politics.

i really enjoyed the enforced PT. it helps that we managed to keep our games short, forcing fast turns at the other teams endzones with our female cup. the fields were the best fields i'd ever played on...world cup practice fields. i even laid out in our last game for a one handed catch in the endzone. it was totally unexpected. the thrower zipped the disc right past me, and all i remember is annoyance that he couldn't throw it better. actually, i wasn't expecting the throw at all. my teammates were pretty surprised cuz i'd played in perth with some of them and they never saw me layout, even after lots of heckling. i think my catch was our last score...we lost to shanghai 15-13, which earned us $50 a piece for coming in second and all the soju (sp?) anyone could ever drink. this may be the best asian tournament of the year (jazzfest will be better, of course).


brian's squeezing jim out of his ass. jim got so drunk that he used his body to stop balls in the batting cage. both front and back. boy had red welts all over his torso...one ball came pretty close to his balls, but did he flinch? no sir, he did not. this is the type of person who can own a furniture store in beijing. go give him some business.

mmm...korean bbq...

jon and i stayed an extra day to explore. apparently, i'm pretty good at shooting clay discs (50% hit rate!--jon didn't get any, but he was much better at the pistol. we've decided that if we're attacked by terrorists, he'd shoot the stationary ones with a pistol and i'd shoot the moving ones with a rifle). spycard, chaching!





he didn't want to lie in the hay, but i made him, cuz i wear the pants.

deep fried hot dog! no, not a corn dog, the dough is gooey and ricier. yum!

the joke that jon's enjoying is...these are NAVELS...haha...ha. besides setting an extraordinary number of korean dramas, jeju is also famous for its tangerines, as displayed here in the tangerine museum (unfortunately, we didn't learn of jeju's sex museum until it was too late to go).

and this is sunrise peak, a volcano. we woke up at four to try to catch the sunrise, but it was cloudy. all we saw was a dumb rabbit and a bunch of chinese tourists.

ah, and of course, the pig rock.

jeju is pretty and nature-y. the end.