Did I really break the faucet?

Hello everyone, decided to get an update in over my lunch break, I have class in an hour so I don't know if I'll finish in time.  Regardless I'll get 'yall up to speed.  But let me first make note of the weather in Liuzhou today, the weather today is awesome.  It's 63 degrees and SUNNY.  Sunny is a big deal because ever since I have arrived here it has been rainy, and when its not raining its cloudy.   Yesterday was sunny for a few hours, but then around noon the clouds rolled in... Today on the otherhand, there is not a cloud in the sky and it's awesome.  It's one of those days where you walk outside and you finally know that winter is over and spring and warmer weather has arrived.  Hopefully it can stay this way for a while and not race to being too hot where I can't go running.

Back to the day-to-day updates, there hasn't been too much to report.  I'm working, how exciting can work really get?  I do have a few stories.  So leaving off from last tuesday... Wednesday really is the only night of too much significance.  Wednesday night Stephen calls me and tells me that Edison and William (teachers at another school) were coming over to hang out.  So we're hanging out drinking some beer in his room and it gets to about 1am and I decide that I probably should head to bed since, unlike stephen and laura, I have lessons on thursdays.  So I'm brushing my teeth and I was getting annoyed with our faucet because it was leaking and it didn't hang over the sink all the way so half of the water ended up on the counter, making a mess.  I know this probably doesn't make sense but when I say faucet I mean more like a spigot.  So I try seeing if I could twist the spigot over the sink (it screwed into the pipes).  So I give it a little twist and then all of a sudden THE FAUCET BREAKS OFF.  Water starts spraying everywhere and I rush back to stephens room and say "uhhhh Stephen, we have a problem"  we rush out and start trying to figure out where the shut off valve is as well as trying to direct the water down the drain.  Of course there is no shut off valve so we call our coordinator who lives two floors above us.  She comes down in her pajamas and calls Mr Li, the maintenance guy he says there is an emergency shut off valve in the bathroom, but there wasn't.  So he told us to go outside to the master water valve and to turn off the water to our entire complex and that he would come fix it in the morning. So after about 45 minutes of running around like a chicken with its head cut off the water finally stopped, to much relief.  Mr Li, comes the next morning and installs a new faucet to my sink, everything is fine.  I was going to take a picture of the spigot to show how thin the metal was where it was broken, about 1mm thick.

So after all the craziness, that weekend Laura and I went to go explore a different part of the city.  Laura really wanted to go to this park where supposedly there is an indoor climbing wall.  So we take the bus to the complete opposite side of the town and walked around the park for a couple of hours, and never found said wall.  BUT we did find out that liuzhou has a "country club" whose golf facilities are a driving range (but it did sport a pretty posh clubhouse).  Then in the park we climbed up one of the mountain, karst things and got a really interesting view of the city.  We found out that this park will soon have a massive water park, filled with water slides and wave pool. But we could also see the surrounding city quite well.  We were close to the industrial part of town and it was crazy seeing how massive some of these factories are.  Lastly, we happened across and outdoor roller rink, that had several obstacles in it.  Later that night Jimmy (music teacher at my school) calls me saying that he's meeting some friends.  I had nothing going on so I decided to join him.  We started off at this lounge type of place but then his friends wanted to go get food.  So we walk down the street to a very typical chinese restaurant.  Of course outside they had Gou Rou (dog) and Tu Rou (rabbit).  And obviously they got the dog meat.  So we sit down and his friends start telling me that they got the rabbit, when I clearly saw them take the dog meat and start cutting it up.  So it was finally served and I just had to do a "when in Rome" kind of thing.  Dog meat, isn't too bad.  It's just a very tender red meat.  I won't go out of my way to eat it again but if it's served I'll eat some.  Now as I finish reporting on this weekend I remember why it was not very exciting, I had a pretty nasty cold, probably from all the rain we had.

So this past week was a pretty good week.  On monday I found out that grades 1 and 2 have exams on thursday and friday so we wouldn't have to teach lessons then.  LONG WEEKEND!  I was thinking of going to Yangshuo and surprising everyone there but after talking to them, they wanted me to come the next weekend, so theres no sense in going to the same place two weekends in a row.  So wednesday Edison said he could get some cheap tickets to the cinema in town and that he wanted us to come see a movie with him.  Sounded good to me so wednesday night I saw Battle of LA.  Movie was okay, if you're in the mood for a big loud action movie, with not too much plot you'd enjoy it.  So after the movie Stephen and Xiao Liao went home, so Edison, William and I went to Time Bar for some beers, after hanging out there for a bit Edison wen't home and William and I went to Soho for a while, and then later to Music Box.  I have to say William is on a whole different level than me.

So after a very late night, I crashed at Williams apartment because he lives about 10 minutes away walking from the city center, and I didn't feel like taking a cab back to my place.  I woke up and walked along the river for a while, eventually catching the bus back to my apartment.  For the most part I took this weekend pretty easy.  Friday night, Laura and I went into town, meeting up with Edison, William and Edison's co-worker CC.  We all hung out at Time Bar for a while and then made our way to Soho.  For whatever reason, at around 1am I got this terrible headache and got really tired so that kinda put a damper on things, but regardless I still had a good time.

Sunday Laura and I went to town to check out this gondola thing that we see every day when we take the bus to town.  It goes up one of the largest Mountain/Karst thing in Liuzhou.  So we went to the ticket booth to check it out and it was 40 Kuai to go up and 50 down, way more than I was willing to pay.  So we just explored the park some more.  It was really interesting seeing how parks in China really are the social centers for many people.  There were dozens of people playing traditional instruments and dancing.  I found another sign of the death of communism in China, there was this walkway in the park that had the logos of pretty much every major car manufacturer in the world made out of stones.  So after walking around the park we crossed the river and happened upon one of the old city gates from the city wall.  We paid our 2 kuai to go walk around on the wall.  The wall was really old, built in the 1300's.  I think Liuzhou is even older, its unfortunate that there aren't more artifacts like this around town... well, that I've seen thus far.  Finally after making our way home I sat down at my computer for about 30 minutes and I get a call from Jimmy asking if I wanted to go to his friends house for dinner.  I agree, because I hopefully could learn some more chinese, and have a pretty good meal.  Dinner was pretty fun, It was in one of the nicest apartments that I've been in while in Liuzhou and the food was good, Pork.  After dinner I came home to go for a night run in Longtian park because when I tried earlier in the day the place was packed.

So backing up to friday, I was searching around the internet and found a half marathon that I could do in Singapore on May 28th.  It looked really cool because you got to run at night.  I looked up flights to Singapore from Hong Kong (one night train away) and they're only 120 dollars.  I couldn't believe it so I got really excited.  The next day I went to go register and found out that the race was full.  I sent the race director an e-mail trying to pull the "i'm kinda fast card" but this morning I got a reply, no dice.  But I did find several other races in the general area.  One race is in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia on May 1st. Looking up flights this one is do-able but on the expensive side (320 dollars).  There also is a race in Kuala Lumpur, on June 26th.  Flights are pretty cheap for that one. So I'll likely do that one.  But I need your imput, should I try for the race in Kota Kinabalu?  I would really like to run in it but 320 dollars is just over half of my monthly salary.  Anyone want to contribute to the fund?????