12.13.2007

as outraged as always

did you know (not that you care) that i can only see my credit card history for the past 60 days? anything beyond that, i have to pay HKD30 per month (!!). isn't that bordering on criminal? don't i have a right to my credit history? this is almost as bad as when i found out we have to pay for water. man, was i outraged. doesn't water seem like something one should get for free? just for being and breathing and living? the pre-germ theory me sure thought so (i mean, it doesn't grow from trees, but it sure does fall from the sky). anyways.

2 weeks till christmas! jon and i are going to lijiang, china. we're gonna ride horses, pick tea, and eat yak milk, all at the base of snow mountains. maybe we'll even see some tibetan monks (altho i'm told they're an endangered species). we're also spending a day in shangri la. (speaking of lovely things: i'm eating falafel and it is de-li-cious. my breath will no doubt smell of onions for the rest of the day, but i'm willing to make the sacrifice. how devoted are you to your falafel?).

what else...we got the wii mod'd so now we can play downloaded games. jon surreptitiously bought me ddr (dance! dance! revolution!!!) and pads, but i found him out. downside: no xmas surprise. upside: DDR!! hurrah for immediate gratification. (i can see the end of the falafel, and i'm sad about the upcoming dearth).

oh, and last weekend, i saw pink dolphins. they're actually called chinese white dolphins, but their blood circulation makes them pink. the wwf guide defended the name by saying they turn white after death. as in, they've found carcasses and the carcasses are white. oh my, how macabre. i wonder if the same naming mechanism applies to (white) people. ahem. we actually saw quite a few dolphins, and they swam right up to the boat--mommas with their babies (which are gray), friends swimming side by side, lone dolphins chasing fishing boats. i was very pleasantly surprised, since at the beginning of the journey, there's all this hedging talk about "we don't guarantee that we'll see any dolphins, pls keep all your eyes peeled, etc etc" (there goes the last falafel...sigh. remember that scene in ice age where the last female taekwondodo fell off the edge? that was awesome. TAE KWON DO DO!).

enough randomness for one day. now back to your regular scheduled programming.

5 comments:

minimousetrap said...

I don't say 'bloody hell'. I only think 'bloody hell'. and I like thinking 'bloody hell' because it amuses me to replay English accents in my mind. It gives me something to think and crack up about when I am working at the vineyard.

Mina said...

My bank threatened to charge me for a record of my bank account transactions older than 60 days, too. As if they don't charge me enough for the pleasure of depositing my money with them! The pirates may have had the right idea - converting all their money to gold and burying it =P

Erika said...

Lijiang is the name of one of the cities I was excited to find on the Chinese map (in characters) in order to relate it to a geologic map in English. The only reason I knew jiang was because it occurred 3 times in the title of the map, which luckily was also printed in English.

lily said...

ohhh, what cool geological tidbits can you tell me about lijiang?

Erika said...

umm, not much. I wasn't actually looking at the geology unless it was a young igneous rock, in which case I colored it red. I thought Lijiang was a tiny little place in the middle of the jungle. I guess it's kinda near a big shear zone where everything got squeezed out of the way when India collided with Eurasia, though. I'm not sure how exciting that is.