Your World As I See It

This morning I attached my little buddy (an amazingly small Sony RX0) to the old scooter to give you guys a look at a typical Saturday trip to the nearest legitimate supermarket. Relatively speaking, it isn't a long trip, and one that isn't difficult to accomplish by foot. I prefer to scoot there and back because carrying groceries over an extended distance is a pain. And then the return trip. Here I take the main road back, for comparison purposes. I do not enjoy this more direct route, though it is a bit quicker. It is also noisier, marginally more polluted, and obviously somewhat riskier. So...SUCCESS! Groceries were acquired, and now I have plenty of time to prepare my "famous" chicken curry.

I have put this off for a little while now, but I guess now is as good a time as any to tell the story of the night I broke my arm and embarked on a lengthy stay in a Chinese hospital... Life was going quite nicely; I had acclimated myself to my routine as a teacher in Wuhan, and felt in high spirits that warm evening at the beginning of the school year. We had been celebrating the return of a fellow teacher at one of our favorite little dive restaurants (unimaginatively referred to as "Lamb," as lamb skewers happens to be the main draw, though certainly they offered a full range of grilled delicacies, from eggplant to mushrooms, and little plastic cups to go with some near-novelty beer globe towers). I was feeling pretty good about my scooter skills having zipped on over to dinner through traffic and via a highway shoulder. And so, armed with a largely unjustified confidence in my motoring abilities and a belly full of that tasty repast, I punched up my return route in...