I am finally starting to feel like myself again as I slowly recover from last week’s bout of China Blues, and as such, I have made a series of decisions that have been both good and bad.  I will start with a bad one. Country Strong.  Okay, I have a game that I call Punch.  Essentially, you get a pass to punch five people in the world that annoy, irritate, grate on you… you get the point.  Now, you actually don’t get to physically touch this person.  That would be assault.  However, the idea is that you could approach this…

“With enough courage you can do without a reputation.” That is one of my favorite lines from ‘Gone with the Wind’ and it doesn’t hurt that Rhett Butler delivered it. I thought about that line when I was thinking of chopping off my locks.  For anyone that knows me well, I am pretty vain about my hair.  I get it done regularly; it’s the one thing a person wears every day.  So why not take good care of it?  Kind of like your teeth in that sense. Speaking of teeth, I had the most ridiculous toothache of my life this…

Okay, look. China is kicking my you-know-what right now. It’s spring break for me and this should be a joyous occasion. Right? Instead, it’s become a comedy of errors that was topped off by a blinding toothache last night. Just to put it into a nutshell, it was a weekend of miscommunications, friends going through some major rough patches, air pollution so bad that I could drink it (burning eyes included), late buses, missed taxis, broken wallets, mean waitresses, ruined Chole (fake) sunglasses, shaky internet, rude children in a coffee house, and two bad mochas. And it’s only Monday. It…

I went to pay the taxi driver tonight and realized I have four currencies in my wallet: China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore.  I got home and there is no food in the fridge, my place is a mess, and I need to unpack. My passport needs a nap.

$1,650 Hong Kong dollars (HKD) on the line.  My hands are sweating.  Bobby Lee couldn’t even watch.  He was smart enough to get up from the table and pace – I just sat there, legs shaking, about to pull my fingers off from the stress. By the way, $1,650HKD is about $215US and that was just the beginning. When I told people that my friend Bobby Lee was coming to town and we were going to Macau; everyone said I should gamble and that I was going to love the food there.  They got half right. As far as the…