Keep your black cowboy boots and stripey underpants under wraps lady!

Time for catching up on a lack of loquaciousness in recent months. Last night, after classes were over and errands had been run, I found myself with an empty Friday evening. What better way to presumably fill such a chunk of time than with a movie or two for my local dvd family. I hadn’t been there in quite a time and so there were so many new films to choose from. I ended up with 5….A movie with Antonio Banderas where he plays a ballroom dancing teacher who teaches detention students in NY how to dance, Goal, The Pink Panther, Match Point…a Woody Allen film with Scarlett Johanassen, and Spanglish. I watched two last night…..the one with Antonio Banderas and Spanglish and I really liked both and I think part of the draw is that are movies that mum and I would love and Dad and Adam and any other male specimen would absolutely abhor.

After a Nyquil knock-out sleep I arose and went out for a run. 5 minutes into the run as I was going up a hill I hear “Kristen Kristen Kristen!” Now this is seriously peculiar seeing as no one who knows me as anything other than “Ms. Nelson” lives in my neighborhood. It was my friend Xiaosha and some of her teaching colleagues. They were going for their now weekly trek through the hills and mini-mountains of Shenzhen. Xiaosha thinks it will make her slim (she’s 45 and looks perfect to me, just FYI). Well she begs me to join them since our mutual friend Qingling couldn’t go this morning and she wanted a friend to talk to. I agree, thinking we will following the major road up the hill, go down by the reservoir and be done. Oh how I was wrong. We make a sharp right at off the beaten trail and don’t turn back from there. We climbed up steep orifices, walked under some serious sets of high tension wires skirting the side of the mountain, and went down near-90 degree drops by only holding on to trees. We ended up inside Fairy Lake Park after jumping down off a 15-foot ledge. Xiaosha and I spent some time tramping up and down the manicured hills of the park before we headed home. The park was beautiful; I had never been there before. It’s one of the main tourist attractions of the city and costs 20 kuai to get in. I have just been frequenting all of the free parks lately. However, because of our sneaky death-defying manner of trekking earlier….we ended up inside the parks gates without having to pay….we cheated ( and all I had to do was risk my life). It was a nice surprise for a Saturday morning.

I went down to the tailor today to pick up a shirt and a dress that had to be altered after the initial fitting. I am hoping to wear the dress to Easter church tomorrow, if the temp. Doesn’t continue to fall towards freezing (this is after 7 consecutive days of 80+ degree weather with 90%+ humidity). When I got to Molly’s shop there was a lady inside being loud and obnoxious and throwing clothes everywhere. She was there to pick up clothes as well, except she refused to put on the garments behind the cloth in the corner that is the makeshift dressing room. Instead she was taking skirts and pants on and off in front of a large glass window that 100s of people walk by every 5 minutes, not to mention the other tailors sitting outside their shops waiting for business that were very much distracted by an overly-fake-tanned foreigner in black cowboy boots and stripy underpants who could seriously benefit from a daily regiment of crunches. I took a breath and walked into this madness and told Molly’s son Tarly I was here to pick up two things and Miss Cowboy-boots proceeds to spit out to me that “I’m going to be awhile dear….sit down and wait awhile.” I coughed…ok. I sat outside for maybe 5 minutes and listened to the other tailors a) talk about me and b) talk about the crazy lady in the underpants in Molly’s shop and then Tarly came out and had my clothes to try on. Luckily they fit perfectly this time and there wasn’t a need for a refitting that would have cut into Miss Fake-and-bake’s private fitting time.