我喜欢吃蝎子！

I want to eat Scorpions! So, yesterday was a field trip in an attempt to eat Scorpions. Unfortunately, with Spring Festival approaching, China is increasing unpredictable and erratic. Everyone is traveling to be with their families.

How erratic? Well, you can read about the online system receiving more than 1bn clicks daily (and crashing, though the article fails to mention that '_^ ).  You can also get a sense of the problem of resale/scalpers in China by reading this short entry about the implementation of a real ID requirement for tickets. Or you can take the anecdotal account of my friend who waited in line for over two hours to buy one ticket. Let's just say, travelling at this time of the year... sucks. Nobody denies this. In the news, there was even a story about police escorting motorcyclists to help ensure their safety due to the crazy traffic.

But I digress, I want to eat scorpions and drink scorpion vodka at the same time! However, in China, the scorpion vodka probably requires a prescription so I am willing to settle for just eating a scorpion. With that in mind, I ventured to one of the more vibrant markets in the city.

Being well aware of the axiom : "Buy today, for tomorrow it may be gone forever." I took time to consider some alternative purchases. First up was an adorable cat that could possibly accent my home and make it feel more welcoming.

Lovely isn't she? Truly she captures the essence of tranquility. I imagine she lived a life of comfort given her full coat. Most likely, she enjoyed scampering about the city on adventures with her friends 'sweater dog' and 'bilingual bird'. Her full knowing eyes, suggest she lived a long healthy life which ended one peaceful night when she finally welcomed Death.

As much as I wanted to buy this wonderful piece, I ultimately felt it would be wrong to keep her from other's so I demurred from asking for a price and continued on my quest.

Next up, I came across three packs of notecards pre-printed with Hanzi, English, and Pinyin. A brilliant find! In true China fashion, these three dusty boxes were only 18 RMB. So, I scooped them up and enjoyed sorting them last night.

Observe that the first photo is the combined stack of all the cards. The second photo shows the sorted stacks as more or less being equal. I certainly could make excuses, like the first stack contains about thirty cards for animals or random objects, but they are both important. So, I look forward to having it dwindle to a single stack soon.


What of the Scorpion eating? Well, unfortunately, they were nowhere to be found yesterday. I will certainly return another day. But, in the meantime, it is back to studying.