A humorous adventure

Hello all! I will resume my Kickin' It Laowai Style story later this week, but for now I have a different - and hopefully amusing - story to tell you all about something that happened to me just yesterday.

After I finished with my classes the other day, I figured I should go and get a new mattress for my bed as well as get something to eat. Let me first explain about why I needed a new mattress so very much. At the world-class institution that is Suzhou University, the administration here believes that people need to be hardened in order to face the harsh realities of life. Therefore, they give every foreign student a bed without a mattress, sheets, blankets or even a pillow, and expect you to go out and purchase these fine items yourself. While this may just seem like a dirty and underhanded way to save money and milk the foreign students for all they're worth, it is really about teaching you life lessons.

Before you ask why I didn't already purchase I mattress, I already had purchased a mattress, sheets, blankets and a pillow on the first day I came here, but, like most things that are made in China, they were not the highest of quality. My so-called mattress is so thin there might as not be any there at all, and the thought of sleeping on it became something akin to a nightmare. Sleeping on my bed was so painful, in fact, that it was literally giving me back pain. Despite the fact I brought an ample supply of codeine with me from Canada, I realized the only real answer to this problem was to "bite the bullet" and purchase another mattress.

I'm a lot like Ebeneezer Scrooge - pre-spirit visit - when it comes to my money

Thus, I set off post-haste to find something to eat and then go and buy a mattress. I felt like having baozi (包子 "bao-tzu" Chinese buns that are filled with ingredients, usually meat and vegetables), so I headed off to an area where I had last purchased baozi, just outside of the university, several days ago.  I got to the area very quickly, but horror of horrors, they were nowhere to be found!

No baozi for me!

I then realized that I was also near the area where I ate that strange soup that I mentioned in Kickin' It LaowaiStyle, Part 1 (I realize now it is called malatang 麻辣烫), and decided to go there once again. The owner recognized me instantly, as I am apparently the only foreigner who has ever gone there, much less twice. I took some more mystery meat (this time I picked these white, meaty balls that were probably fish!) and sat down after ordering a bottle of water. The owner made my food, and then - remembering i was Canadian in the short conversation I had with him before - proceeded to talk to me about how the Canadian Prime Minster, Steven Harper, had just been in China. This strange "conversation" of sorts ended up including not only the owner, but also his wife (who spoke even faster than her hapless husband did), and some random female customer who came in after me. It literally got to the point where they were all essentially talking at me and leaving me no room to respond, and which was, of course, impossible for me to understand. On a side note, this reminded me of the way my late grandfather used to talk to everyone, that is, if he was multiplied by three, and spoke Chinese.

This is my grandfather, note the fact that he is not Chinese in any conceivable way

I ate my meal as quick as possible, and 18 RMB later I was out the door and headed back to my university. The fun, however, didn't stop there! I'm not sure whether I was just not paying attention, or the vast Chinese pantheon of deities (I'm looking at you, SunWukong) decided to play a dirty trick on me, but I missed the alleyway turn off I needed to take to get back to the university. For whatever reason, I was feeling strangely adventurous that day, so I ended up walking to the point where the road simply turned into this enormous and daunting-looking crosswalk, which was constantly criss-crossed with more cars than I could count.

This picture accurately shows the number of cars that were driving across this street

Suzhou University's southern campus where I study is, luckily, only located on one gigantic city block, so I simply turned to the left and continued down this big, ugly road, called Donghuan Lu (东环路), which was entirely covered by an overpass that looked like it had seen better days in the 1950s. After about five minutes of walking down this depressing street, I located what was the main entrance to the university, which turns out is exceptionally close to the foreign student building where I have my classes.

This airbrushed photo is what the entrance to the university might look like if it were actually cleaned once every 40 years

I felt fatigued, and decided to head back to my dorm; however, I suddenly felt this twinge of pain in my back, and remembered that I needed go and buy another mattress. I walked to the university's general store where I dramatically swung open the dirty-looking plastic flaps that shields the place from the outside world in a fashion not dissimilar to Aragorn opening up the doors to the King Theoden's chamber in Helms Deep in the film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

At least, that's how it felt to me

My overly-dramatic entrance apparently caught the attention of everyone in the store, because a bunch of the folks inside the place looked directly at me and froze. There was even this one mother who pulled her child out of the way of where she thought I might step, which looked very humorous.

Scratch the Aragorn idea, it felt more like this

I stomped over to the section with the mattresses, looked them over, and grabbed one, and brought it over to the register. The lady looked at me and asked in Chinese: "How long have you been here for, and why haven't you bought a mattress already?" to which I answered, in a big, booming voice, "One week, and this is my second mattress, the beds here are horrendously uncomfortable! You folks at Suzhou don't know what "comfort" means." She and the other Chinese clerks chuckled nervously, and 70 RMB later, I had my new mattress. I left the store with a triumphant look on my face that seemingly scared the young Chinese students enough to steer clear of me as I returned to my dorm room.

I thought this whole turn of events was a pretty amusing romp, so I wished to share it with all of you for an entertaining - and rambling - read. Please enjoy the appropriate music below.