Going Nowhere!

I have been mostly home sick today, which is frustrating because I was mostly home not sick yesterday. If I had known I would be sick today, I would have gone out and done something more fun yesterday. Anyway, given that it's mostly just two more days at home, I thought I might as well write them all at once.

Yesterday morning I stayed in and worked until lunchtime, and then I went out and continued my self-imposed discipline of trying new foods. This time, in one of the small row of restaurants under the big bookstore, I found the food that dad always talks so fondly about from his time in Manchuria: thin Asian-crepes with green onions and a salty brown sauce. Of course, it being a prosperous country in the 21st century, there was also a large pile of thin-sliced pork to make it into a real meal. But I'm almost certain it's the right thing.

It made a pleasant meal, I will say, a welcome change. Sometimes one gets tired of stir-fries and noodle soups. This was more restrained, with discrete ingredients. In the same little plaza, I saw this fish-pond.

After my nice meal, I went to Starbucks planning to get some work done. I ordered an ordinary coffee (still $1.50, but the cheapest thing on the menu). Apparently they were out. Out of normal coffee? Was Americano all right? By the time I understood this, I'd had to ask for clarification so many times that I agreed out of embarrassment. Patrons of foreign Starbucks branches: don't do this. Americano, priced at an exorbitant $2.50, is code for absolutely crappy, watery, disgusting coffee. As an American, I felt insulted, though at the same time I had to admit that it resembled certain sorts of American coffee…such as that which can be purchased at gas-stations and Dunkin Donuts. When I'm paying Starbucks prices I expect more!

I was so irritated by the bad coffee that I didn't manage to stay very long, and instead wandered home. I failed again in my ongoing quest for a grilled cheese sandwich. In case I haven't mentioned this, the pot that came with my ceramic burner is an incredibly thin piece of crap not good for anything but boiling stuff. I had bought an expensive heavy-duty new pot, but the ceramic burner seems unable to sense it and won't go on. It's useless trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich in a very thin-bottomed pot, so this time I thought I would try filling up the thin pot with water and putting the thick pot on top. This might have worked eventually, but after 10 minutes I ran out of patience, rinsed and dried the thin pot, and put my sandwich on it. Burnt to a crisp within seconds. This made me blue, and I felt to discouraged to go out and find something else to eat. Instead I cobbled together a highly miscellaneous meal, had a gloomy and unproductive evening, and went to bed.

A bad night for sleeping. Before first light, I started tossing and turning and had a very sharp stomachache. I will spare you further details except to say that something in my cobbled together meal had clearly not agreed with my guts. I considered going to my 8 AM class, but decided ducking out to the bathroom every ten minutes might attract unwanted attention. Instead I lay around drinking hot water and feeling sorry for myself. I was feeling a little better by noon, so decided to try to make it to the 12:30 class taught by my advisor here. My tutor told me that it's a traditional practice to always attend your advisor's class if you're a grad student, which I had been doing anyway, and it seemed well to make a good showing. Unfortunately, I was feeling too poorly to bike at my usual speed, and arrived 10 minutes late. YHz didn't seem to mind. The other problem was that I was feeling pretty bad, and the crowded classroom and necessity of focusing made me feel a lot worse. YHz came up to me at the break, and I apologized for being late, saying I was not feeling well. She said I should go home and rest. She also mentioned that she had some books for me! I felt bad but she said I should just call her office at a convenient time and go get them. When might you be around? I asked. I'm always there! she said, and we had a laugh. Then I skipped the second half of the class and wobbled home on my bike.

The whole afternoon was a complete waste because I wasn't feeling well enough to do anything. I started to wonder if maybe it was some kind of flu? If it was food, my major suspects were either pumpkin juice (who knows if they pasteurize juice here) or milk. By evening, I was feeling a little better and very hungry. I had slowly eaten a small pot of rice through the day, and a bowl of instant noodles, all fine. I carefully avoided both milk and pumpkin juice. But I did have a very small wedge of the brie I had been so happy to find at the supermarket. It was perfectly clean, well-packaged, imported brie, but I suspect it was that which made me sick because not very long after I ate it I started feeling much worse again. I don't get it--it's not like it was really sharp smelly brie. It was gentle, well-refrigerated brie. Anyway, brie can go without being refrigerated. But I don't see what else might have made me worse again, as I didn't eat anything else I'd had the day before. Unless it be the Nutella I've been carefully nursing for the last month and a half? But with Nutella you can usually tell when it's going off, and this Nutella is relatively young. I've eaten much more venerable and dubious Nutella with no ill-effects. I suppose I should throw out the entire contents of my refrigerator and start over. I suppose I should just eat dirty street-food as it's clearly safer! I am disgruntled and annoyed.

I also have to sadly report that not only am I not feeling well, but the little turtles aren't either. It has been colder outside, though still mostly mid-70s in my room (if my little thermometer is accurate). I have been keeping the windows closed, and giving the turtles a really nice warm basking lamp all day, but at night I do have to turn the lamp off. They have become increasingly sluggish and don't hop into the water in terror when I peer at them. I have not seen them go after food either. For a while, only Queequeg was really sluggish, but now Yojo is too. He's probably caught whatever Queequeg has, but I didn't have the heart to quarantine Queequeg, because it seemed like giving up on him. They just sleep all day and all night unless I push them off into the water, and then they sluggish crawl back out.

Begin rationalization here: this is a land where turtles are sold in grocery stores (for eating), so I don't need to feel horribly guilty for my failures in turtle husbandry. For that matter, there is a here certain amount of scandal involved with a pet much closer to most people's heart: dogs. Dogs are sold from baskets in street corners, I'm told by various ex-pats. The problem is that they're so highly inbred that many have heart defects. One guy I met at a party said he'd inquired about it from a puppy-vendor and the fellow had agreed, saying cheerfully that, "yes, these are temporary dogs."

None of this rationalizing really makes me feel any better about my possibly temporary turtles. But here's another: Colin says, maybe turtles have a short life-span. They don't! I contradicted. They can live up to twenty years in the wild, and even forty years in captivity. Colin argues that that's assuming any given turtle has the potential to live that long. Maybe they have a wide variation of potential life-span! I actually found this rather comforting--some websites do say that some very small turtles just seem to die for no reason. Young turtle mortality in general is pretty high, which is why they lay so many at a time. This still doesn't cure my nagging suspicion that I'm doing something wrong. I have been cleaning their tank very faithfully, and have offered them at least some variety of healthful foods in addition to turtle pellets. But it's a cruel world for little turtles, so I wanted to write and prepare you for the worst.