Only in MacGyver's Wildest Dreams

I did laundry yesterday, and this time I did alot more than previous times. Because, as I've mentioned before, I have no access to dryers, I hang dry my clothing. This posed more of a problem than usual yesterday, however, because of the huge number of socks that I had to dry. I used all of my hangers and all of laundry clips already, and still had all the socks left. There was no room on the curtain rod or the hooks around my room.

I looked at two hooks on the two closets in my room. I looked at my desk. I had a solution.

Dental floss.



I fashioned a two-tiered, stable drying rack out the dental floss. Pay no mind to the fact that the entrance/exit to/from my room is blocked. That just gives me more time to study (read: play on the internet). I think all that time I spent building huge spiderwebs out of yarn in my basement as a child finally came into use. I barely had to think about how to do this. As an added bonus, all of my socks are going to have a minty stripe on them.

In other news, the light in my room burned out tonight when I returned from dinner. I am not looking forward to talking to the desk people about this tomorrow. I'm guessing they're going to want to charge me for the light. I'm also predicting that the man who tried to sell me the remote control when I first got here is going to be the one I deal with. So we meet again, my friend. Well, let's see whose Chinese has improved in past two months, shall we?

The question will become, however, do I know how to say "my light bulb is burnt out." It's a tough call, really. I know how to literally translate it, and I know a few ways other than that, but I don't know what the true phrasing for it is. I say, if nothing else works, saying that my light is dead, in the sense that a person or animal is dead, will get my meaning across, and then I can ask what the real phrase is. That's such a fun game to play in Chinese.

In other news still, my friend Ryan passed along an invitation to me and Donny tonight at dinner to an event this weekend. Paraphasing will not do this justice. I think what he said really speaks for itself.

"So, I'm supposed to tell you guys that Pao and a bunch of the Latinos heard about this bungee jumping place about an hour and a half outside the city, and they're planning to go this weekend. It's only 150 kuai."

Donny and I reacted violently, as I hope you can imagine. The idea of bungee jumping anywhere in China seems incredibly unsafe to me. Furthermore, if it only costs 150 kuai (roughly 17 USD), there's no chance that I can believe it's reuptable. And even furthermore, if it's an hour and a half out of the city, it's that much further away from the advanced - I use that term loosely - hospitals in Beijing when everyone dislocates vertebrae and breaks legs. Oh, what a mess that will be. We both basically yelled, "Don't go!" at Ryan.

And finally, tomorrow is my last day of midterm exams. I will touch upon this later. The exams are my reason for not posting in the last few days, however, so I thought it would be best to mention them.