our neighborhood

Sally (my sister) gave me some good prodding about posting more here. I think I've been in a state of constant grok over the past few days. In my defense, our internet just got hooked up about fifteen minutes ago in our apartment, so prior to today posting wasn't very easy.

Also, I had this theory that I think my friend Jason would approve of, that I tested with our internet service guy this morning. I packed our modem, our router, and all of our connection cables in my luggage. I knew that the DSL would be "turned on" today, so this morning I woke up and gathered together every appliance adapter we own and proceeded to hook up everything. I figured that a tech-guy working for an internet company, regardless of country, would be able to visually recognize that everything was connected and we wouldn't even need to talk about it (which would be impossible, me not speaking Mandarin). The guy walked in, I pointed to a few things, showed him where the phone jack was connected, and he sat down, typed a few things, set a password, and was out of the apartment in about 10 minutes. Every interaction I have where I can actually communicate something to someone is becoming a sort of victory for me. In any case, on to the fun stuff!

I took a few photos and movies of our apartment and neighborhood:









This last movie I made after it rained pretty heavily. In it are two guys across the alley/courtyard area from us who are sweeping the standing water left after the storm into the gutter. Close to the spot where these guys are sweeping, there are a couple of older Chinese men who have adopted several stray cats in the neighborhood. I like to watch these guys feed their cats and (I assume) debate their relative merits from our kitchen window while I'm cooking dinner. My next blogging goal is to get some decent pictures of these guys with the cats.