Jenna went to the dentist yesterday for a cavity and an abcess. A Chinese dentist. With Novakane! (intentional misspelling) It started hurting on her way back from Korea and by yesterday she said it felt like a wrecking ball had hit the side of her face. I refrained from saying, "Cool! An abcess! Those totally eat through your maxilla." Well, I didn't say "cool" or "maxilla", anyway. Poor girl grew up on non-flouridated well water. Anyway, I have only seen abcesses on dead people, but they do look really cool. As seh sat there in pre-dentist pain, she asked me what a lot of you have probably been wondering. With this causing so much pain, how did people survive before the days of modern dentistry? My theory has always highlighted the importance of alcohol. And the use of nearby plants to make numbing agents. I have seen some teeth that imply ridiculous amounts of pain, with teeth almost rotted away down to the gums (or where the gums would have been) and a huge abcess that has eaten through the bone so you can see into the root of the tooth. I imagine the pain from the infection must have been unbearable, though in the cases where the abcess had eaten through the side of the maxilla, a hole could have been made in the tissue to allow it to drain, which would have reduced the pain from the pressure and slowed the progress of the abcess, but there would still be nerve pain in the root of the tooth. Then I've seen some that were so bad, a person could have died from them. Where the abcess eats through the bone up into the (lower) sinus cavity, which (if it continues to progress) could go to the upper sinus cavity and into the brain. But that fossa right under the zygomatic arch contains one of the most sensitive nerve bundles, I think, so perhaps the pain would be so great that a person would not wait to be killed. Dunno. But potential readers of this site do, so feel free to chime in. I'll post any interesting responses. Right. People read this.
And for those of you who thought that Zunyi was a little rinky-dink town in a poor province in southwest China, I'm here to prove you wrong. We have our very own SARS case! Apparently there is someone in Zunyi hospital with SARS. Jenna wasn't quite as excited as I was, perhaps understandably, as she had dental work done there, yesterday. But really, we probably won't die. They're moving the person to some other location (probably Guiyang). Speaking of Guiyang, they have two SARS cases. And, no, we didn't get this info off the China evening news.
So, we leave for Xinjiang in 5 days. I can't wait. The Silk Road should be awesome. I will include some links to related websites at the end of this entry.
I went hiking on Phoenix "Mountain" Park today. I was walking up a path and arrived at an intersection with another path that led up to two peaks. There was a group of people there and they stared at me as usual. I hiked up the right peak and came down maybe 15 minutes later. More staring. Then I went up the left trail. It was getting a bit late at this point. I spent about 1/2 an hour hiking up and back down. It was about 4:45 by the time I made it back to the intersection and everyone had left except four people who looked ready to go, but were hanging around. So, I came hiking down the hill, they saw that I was still alive and they went home. I said, "zai jian" (bye) and they said, "hello" and "good morning." They had obviously been waiting there to make sure I made it back, which was nice of them. Plus, no one wants a dead foreigner. It's a funny place.
Soooo.... what have you missed? There was that whole, "I will destroy you!" thing. That was pretty cool. Jenna's on her way back from Korea now. She went there for a week and a half to visit a college friend. And, lucky bastard that she is, she got Pizza Hut. Laugh all you want. It's slim pickin's in poor SW China. Uyghur food should be interesting. Things like goats' heads. I ate duck's brain in Beijing.
Here are some random clips from e-mails recently sent out:
"...Then we went to southern Sichuan and visited the Bo Hanging Coffins. The Bo people lived about AD 1000 or so, I think. They put their coffins on wooden posts driven into holes (that they drilled) in the cliff face and in small caves. It's all very high up, the lowest being 100 feet and the highest being 300 feet, I think. Jenna was wondering (as do many people), why they would bury their dead so high off the ground. I was like, "Should they have left the coffins by the side of the road with a sign that said, 'Take a bone and a grave good!'?" And the plan worked reasonably well. There are still several coffins up there. Then there are cliff faces that are just covered with square hole where the supporting beams were. It was all fascinating. There are also cave paintings. We couldn't get into the caves, but there were a couple that we were able to see from the ground."
"... So, we have WinMX on the computer and when we take our mid-class break, Jenna and I sometimes listen to it. The other night I was listening and my kids came over to see what I was listening to, so I put on 50 Cent's P.I.M.P., which they liked a lot. That says a lot, because they don't like most music we play. I think the calypso beat nicely offsets the lyrics. They asked me to sing along, so I sang, "...I don't know what you heard about me, but a ----- can't get a dollar out of me... I'm a ------------ P.I.M.P." They said it was "beautiful." Indeed."
So, there you go. I had a conversation the other day with a person here and she was talking about the US and China. She is one of the ones who get's her news from the internet and knows about the Chinese "news" service. More on that later. It's late. Did I mention that Julian saw "family planning" vans outside of one of the municipal buildings in Guiyang. You did all get that that was "forced abortion", right? Scary stuff. I would condemn their actions, but they have "most favored nation" trading status. You know how it goes.
Below are the links:
Found out the internet problems are a school problem. Damn them. All you have to do to keep me happy is give me good internet access (and a few other things). Is that so hard? So, no government conspiracy. Or rather, no *government* conspiracy. If you know what I mean. Really, it's probably just incompetence on the part of a certain someone.
News: I'm going to Xinjiang in a week. Can't wait to go.
The smoke is killing me, so I'm going to go.
Dudes, this just saved. Now I'm ------- pissed off. What the hell is wrong with the school? Uh, right, so let's just apologize to China for all those conspiracy theories. They were good, though. And entertaining, I hope. Okay, so the truth just isn't that fun. Shall we stick with the lies?
Argh.