Sino-psis

just went on a pleasant trip on a breezy afternoon through the local neighborhood. i had spent most of today doing nothing, cleaning around the pad, eating random things, taking cat naps and listening to shuffled music. then i went for a walk with a friend. went out the gate, straight on til dusk. first stop was a nearby cd dvd peddler, got some neptunes and a cd of krishna chants that i'm listening to currently. pocketed those puppies and kept on. crossed a long bridge called "long bridge" where there was no sidewalk to speak of except for a bit in the middle so you can stop and look at the sludge flowing beneath. made me want to hop a barge and get outta town, but kept walking. we got to a very poor industrial part of town where walls were made of newspaper and every other building looked to be used primarily for garbage storage. graffiti on every wall with phone numbers for who knows what. everything and everyone looked like they were just waiting around to be displaced, moved, torn down or reconstructed. a pensive silence to the place that was drowned out by the busy flow of traffic cramming its way through the area.
i've found that i haven't yet gotten used to the noise in this city, it's pervasive and constant. every conversation that jena and i had on our walk would have long pauses as we waited for beeping trucks to go by or yelling construction workers to quit yelling. jena however has been here a year, so she says she is used to the noise. i already have pretty bad hearing, and in a land where i need all of my faculties to be in tip top condition so i can communicate effectively, it doesn't help one bit that i only catch fragments of a sentence.
so we walked back across the bridge, bikes and trucks dodging and beeping at us as we walked, and then went a little further down the crossroad. every road here is littered with little baozi shops, cel phone/drink shops, and fruit sellers. eventually we came to one fruit shop that caught our attention and the lady selling saw us eyeing one in particular and shoved it as us to eat. "haochi haochi" she said and unwrapped and gave it to jena. indeed, it did taste good. so we bought ten quai worth. the fruit is called a yezi and i'm still not sure what it is. hold on, let me see if my dictionary has it. hmm, well, the only yezi i can find means leaf. so maybe she was referring to the little natural packaging the small orange apple tasting fruit came in, kind of a popcorn shell. unwrap and pop. tasted right good. i have some more in the fridge for lata
so then we kept walking, the sun having set while on the bridge and now the moon out in (almost) full swing. it being the time around zhongqiujie, mid autumn moon festival, the yuebing (moon cakes) are out and about and the moon looks especially large and nice. we walked around and around, cutting through back alleys and seeing small children doing cute things. we realized that the road we had been on kind of slanted more to the south than we had wished, and so found ourselved way far away from school.
ok, so, on the way back, we must have passed a good ten "hair salons" with at least five girls sitting in there waiting for, something. what a neighborhood to live in. does this one neighborhood really need All of these salons? i hope not. and it doesn't make me want to get my hair cut any time soon. too many vocab words i haven't learned yet
ok, time for dinner, i'll finish talking about the walk at a later time. it's just really nice to get out there and experience instead of just read about a culture. i'm looking forward to next weekend, going to gansu province for a week. that'll be a trip.