There's no such thing as a free meal; the price of half price

I felt a certain homely comfort walking back into our apartment in Rongchang. The trip was fantastic, but after 50 days I really missed the communal feel that comes from living in one place for a long time. Spending so little time in each place made it impossible to truly engage and assimiliate to each culture. Blogging enables me to talk about each destination as though I am a seasoned anthropologist, but my actual cultural knowledge really only scratches the surface. I’ve now been back in Rongchang for three eventful months. I’m excited to write more from a residential perspective than a tourist one.

I’ll start with the abismal news first. Kassy and I are the Patrons of doom. Our favorite baozi restraunt has closed as well as our favorite Sushi spot that refused to accept full payment, if any payment at all. Heaven and Hell, the local bar that I would enter like I was from the cast of Cheers has changed ownership. Stores and restaurants in China Kum and Go, just like the cars at that gas station. Even though rapid business change is extremely common, I still feel like I am Arthur Miller’s “Death to a Salesman” seeing as how three staple go-to establishments all closed within a week. If someone did the market research, they might conclude that it would be more fiscally beneficial to bar me from their business than to welcome me with enormous discounts. What I care most about now, is keeping my favorite “Shao Kao” BBQ in business. I think I am paying full price, but the cost is so cheap that I can’t really tell. There’s no way that they would accept a tip, but I am so afraid that they might close, I think about discretly tossing money behind their counter so it looks like they just dropped it.

Although my patronage doesn’t seem to boost business revenue, my sponsorship has been highly sought out. Kassy and I are on the market (no, our relationship is doing great). I mean our pictures are strewn all over town. Our faces are even advertised as teachers at a grade school we don’t even teach at, how the school got our photos still remains in question. My favorite advertisement we did was for a do-it-yourself photography store for a friend named Cindy. The idea is brilliant, give people a wide selection of custumes and a remote to snap pictures with then allow them to go wild by themselves for an hour in a private room. You have the intimacy of a photo booth with the space of a dance studio. The store will also print you photos on T-shirts, pillow cases, calendars, ect. Kassy and I wanted to do mug shots then print them on coffee mugs, but prisoner outfits were the only costume they didn’t have.

Just like last semester, our college classroom attendance is dwindling. Upcoming finals and 80 degree weather have taken priority to our optional oral English class, although there are still a couple of die hards. That being said, Kassy and I are definitely working more this semester. Kassy has been tutoring a 9-year-old sweetheart twice a week and I have started working at three other schools. A proper teacher assessment would probably show that I am under qualified and over paid for all of them, but no one is complaining. On the contrary, having a foreinger teach at their school has yielded tremendous results for their attendance and notoriety. All of them have locked me up for teaching next year already, one of them even wants to pay me to teach the children over skype this summer, only kidding.

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