a few stories about dogs in china:

1. the first day me and kevin went into town to try to buy a dog we had to ask people where they sold them.

me: excuse me, i wanna buy a dog
random vendor: alive or dead?
me: what?
random vendor: pet or meat?
me: begins to cry

2. xujun, our cook, volunteered to adopt the puppy that kevin had received for his bday this past sunday, since he already has a full grown dog. when the puppy, a male, was introduced to the other dog, also a male, he mistook it for his mother and in trying to find his/her nipples for milk, he bit the other dog on the nuts. like fark would say, hilarity ensued.

3. a couple days ago kevin was on the MAIN STREET in town when he looked in the middle of the road and saw two dogs stuck to each other. unfortunately he was buying cookies from a bakery on the MAIN STREET in town at the time, so he couldn't go in for a closer look, but they were somehow joined at the hip at an approximately 90 degree angle and frantically trying to pull away. while he was watching, a third dog approached the stuck dogs and began to violate one of them, periodically pausing and resuming. while this was happening, a fourth dog approached the three dogs and sat down to watch, occasionally shouting encouragement. kevin appeared to be the only human who paid any special attention to this incident. what a weirdo.


about a month and a half ago, nicky's mom mailed her an american football. one day one of the high school gym teachers saw us throwing it around and asked us if we could teach the students how to play and coach some teams. we agreed, and today we had our first practice. about 20 kids showed up, some of them surprisingly large for this town, and me and kevin ran them through some throwing and catching drills.

i don't know anything about football! the most experience i have is playing street football with the neighborhood kids in junior high. after i bought madden 01 on sale for $10 i never even tried playing it cause it looked so confusing. also, who is our team gonna play? i'm pretty sure we're the first high school (american) football team in xiangxi prefecture. at least there definitely won't be any parents suing about injuries and stuff (since we are playing without pads - i pushed for two hand-touch or flag football, but the gym teacher wanted full contact, so we're working out a compromise at the moment).

as you can probably tell, i alternate between feeling excited and feeling in over my head about the team. i suppose everything'll sort itself out eventually, like most things do here.