DIC

I have a friend here who is Chinese but has lived in the US for many years, and he has a saying - "Dude, its China!" to explain or exemplify many things about life here.  It fits for weird, funny, frustrating, basically anything that we exclaim about life here!  Here are a few things from the past week which seem to fit this label:

Eating chicken feet at the hotpot restaurant this weekend.  Apparently you spit out the toenails.

Chicken feet.  Me.  Eating. ??! 

I was cleaning my apartment this weekend and closed the sink drain so I could clean it...only to discover there is no lever to open it!  3 hours and 2 people later, after unhooking the drainage pipe and working from below with a knife and chopstick, we finally got the drain back open.

The knife sticking out of the drain from below.  You've no idea
how relieved I was when we finally got it!

They are really into decorating their buildings here...with moving, colorful lights.  Many of them are in geometric patterns; this was the first one I have seen with an actual picture - was a guy jumping rope in multi-color with trees in the background.  I think ;)

An office building at night with a guy jumping rope in neon lights.

And finally, no picture for this one, but Adam and I were asked last week if we would be willing to give 1 lecture a month to the  Chinese medical students here about medical school/healthcare systems in the US.  We could only say yes, so I prepped over the weekend and presented for 30 minutes yesterday on medical school in the US.  I was met by dead silence during the question period (which apparently is normal in China, one does not ask questions) and then afterwards, we found out that it was not all medical students we are lecturing to, but the student members of the Communist Party!  DIC!