In a similar fashion the last few weeks have been quite difficult on me. It has truely become summer and temperatures have soared to sometimes already 32 degrees Celsius. Hot weather like that can really drain all the energy out of someone. I’ve tried all kinds of home remedies that people were recommending. ‘Drink hot tea’, one said. ‘Eat spicy food’, was another. The one that came closest to working was: ‘Eat ice-cream until you get a brainfreeze.’ That last one is nice because it has the added bonus of eating ice-cream. None of them worked well enough though and my fatigue dragged on. I thought it was just going to be something I would have to deal with until the holidays.

But it was getting worse it seemed. I was walking around half-dazed, like a zombie on the look-out for some nice brains to eat. The fatigue turned into almost daily headaches for which I had almost no explanation.

But last night the epiphany came.

I was desperately trying to make some coffee to regain some energy to do something instead of just being a couch patato all evening. It was then when I looked at the coffee I have been buying for the last few weeks and looked my horrible mistake right in its gruesome face. There, in French, it was. ‘Decafeiné’. No caffeine! I couldn’t believe it at first but started to realize that it would explain a lot. I was suprised I didn’t taste it.

This morning I got up and the first thing I did was grind up some coffee beans of another coffee I had lying around. The transformation was instantaneous. As I felt my caffeine-reservoir refilling and the dial turned slowly towards ‘full’ I felt a cloudyness of mind disappearing and my strenght returning as if drinking a magical elixir.

So with this rather personal, biased, and unscientific piece of research I can with certainty say that there is no placebo effect. It’s all big bull. All this time I believed I was drinking real coffee yet it failed to provide me with any benefits. Myth busted.

The proof? The first time I’ve felt energised enough to write anything in almost a month. Sorry.

The other day during a little of close-to-home exploring me and my boyfriend stumbled upon an open-air food market. It was a market with business as usual. Chickens being beheaded on one side, watermelons being sold on the other, and inside a shop people getting their hair cut. People fixing clothes, making fresh dumplings from scratch and all other kinds of activities. It’s always fascinating to see how skilled these people are in their work and how quickly they can sometimes do or make something.

While looking into various little stores we peeked inside one and it was curiously white and bright. At first glance it looked like a place where they were making curtains. But upon closer inspection it turned out they were all noodles hanging out to dry. All I could think was that I really wanted to take some pictures, but I didn’t have a camera with me. We asked when they would actually make the noodles. Ten o’clock at night was what they said. So a few hours later we came back bearing a tripod and my camera and starting shooting. They seemed oddly uninterested. Most Chinese would be calling the whole neighbourhood if they had a white guy taking pictures in their shop

I’ll try and describe the process as best as I saw it. They just had a big, big supply of the dough mixture which they scooped into the first machine. This machine turned it into sheets which actually looked more like paper than noodles at that point. It rolled it up into a nice wheel-shape, which was they moved to the next machine. This one cut the noodles into the shapes they wanted. When they were long enough they picked them up on a stick and cut them off from the sheet without ever stopping the machine. After just the 20 or so minutes we were there they had already created more noodles than I could eat in a lifetime. Here are some of the pictures.

Perhaps you will think me crazy. It’s nice and warm outside so why would you choose to stay inside, right? Well, warmth is nice when you are on a holiday, but while working, trying to sleep and just doing the day to day things it becomes uncomfortable. It saps you of energy like nothing else and will make you unbearably tired even before noon. During the week, it is the enemy. But in the weekends, when trips to the swimming pool or beach are options it is a luxury to have a climate like this.

It also applies to blog posts. You start to write something and you’re very happy with the first paragraph, but then the drowsiness and sleepyness takes over and it goes downhill faster than, uh… See! Now I can’t even finish that and it could have been really funny.

Another thing that I have been doing a lot recently is listening to Chinese music and radio. There are a lot of lovely songs on it in my opinion (although on some level all rather similar in genre and style, but perhaps because the music-scene here is rather young and generally people are not that diverse in musical tastes). Anyway, here is one of my favourites at the moment (it may take you a long time to buffer).

Anyway, click HERE for some pictures.

Faced with these increasing temperatures I thought it might be nice to go swimming. So we went to the top of Eros’ building in Guangzhou (to the 30th floor) and looked around his neighbourhood to see if there was a swimming pool anywhere. We spotted a big one not too far away and decided that was the one we would go explore. So we grab our things and see if we can get there.

After some asking around we find the place, but it turned out that it was a military/police base and everyone was walking around in uniform. ‘They’re never going to let me in here’, I thought. We walk up to the entrance and a guard asks what we’re there for. Swimming, of course. And just like that he lets us in. The changing rooms looked absolutely disgusting on the inside, with mold practically everywhere. I at least got some practise holding my breath before we even started swimming. The pool itself looked quite alright though (and water checks here are actually very frequent and thorough).

We buy a ticket and after some hassle with a locker key we change our clothes and head towards the pool. Just as we’re about to dive into the outdoor pool someone tells us we need to put on a ‘maozi’, or hat. So we buy one of those icky condom-like things for your head and think ‘finally, good to go!’. Then someone comes up to me and says ‘You need to change into your swimclothes’. I inform him these are my swimclothes and we tell him that it’s not quite in the European fashion anymore to show your bikini line. For men, that is. I saw him check me over once more and he was probably thinking whether he should tell me to get a whole body suit to cover up all my leg, chest and arm hair as well?

And after one man telling me that it’s not allowed for a foreigner to swim here and Eros telling him off (got to love that) I finally jump in the water.

It was absolutely bloody freezing.

Inside is a man, eating an apple.

Now, in most circumstances this would not immediately cause sympathy. But, it’s an older man. He takes a bite from his apple. Then, with a volume that would make the jet-engines on a Boeing 747 green with envy, he starts to chew.

Chomp, chomp, chomp. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Mnam, nom, nom. It would be considerably more pleasant to take a knitting needle at this point and put them right through my eardrums. But unfortunately I don’t carry knitting needles around on a regular basis. For a full seven floors it lasts until I virtually rip the door open and run until I don’t hear it anymore. Thankfully, I don’t meet this apple-eating-elevator-man often, or I would have to start taking the stairs.

And the worst part of it is, apple-eating-elevator-man is not even aware of the torment he is putting me through. Even if I did feel it is within my right to speak to this person and ask him to stop he probably would not even understand why. But fortunately not everyone is like this nowadays. The children in my kindergarten are not allowed to spit anywhere and have to chew with their mouth closed. Also, they’re not allowed to talk with their mouth full. And I have to keep an eye on this also. I’d never expected to turn into my mother quite so suddenly though.

But I try to do my part to educate the adults here also. Not in English but in manners. Today I let a woman in the supermarket go in front of me at the cash register and she looked so utterly grateful that it made me feel like a veritable mother Theresa. I hold elevators and doors for other people although that favour is never returned. But who knows. It ten years there might be a statue of me that says: ‘Paul Franken, the man that taught the Chinese manners’.

(I’m terribly sorry if this story doesn’t make much sense. It’s possible I’ve enjoyed this red wine too much.)

That said, after nearly eleven months in China things are starting to get a little more routine-like and as I have said before things that once absolutely shocked, fascinated or appaled you now are just part of the day. A few things are still a bit odd though. Parents here enjoy using their children as improvised water-pistols when they need to pee. They just hoist them up in the air, pull down their pants and aim them at the nearest bush. Remind me never to get into a water fight here. It is an absolutely atrocious habit and it has left me with a phobia of unexplained puddles of water.

Last weekend was sort of interesting as well. Me and the mister were walking around in Guangzhou’s pearl river area on Saturday evening enjoying the lovely spring weather and the waterside when in the distance we saw a bar. It looked nice and close enough so we decided to walk to it. After zig-zagging, criss-crossing and tally-wagging through streets, over bridges and under underpasses we suddenly find ourselves in an absolutely huge fish-market in the middle of the city. It smelled surprisingly clean, actually. They were selling everything from turtles – which was to my absolute dismay, I wanted to buy them and set them all free – to things such as crocodiles, crabs, crustaceans and lobsters. I just always love how something like a fish market can almost jump out and surprise you in the middle of a city here.

I must admit that this is all I have for now. It is nearing bedtime and there are things to be done still. Soon I shall have a bit more for you, as I want to do like a review of the last year in China soon. Also, the anniversary of this ‘blog’ has come and gone already. It was started a bit over a year ago in February 2009. If you’ve got nothing to do, and I mean absolutely, absolutely nothing, have a look back at some of the things I’ve written in the past.