Shanghaied in Chinese Monopoly

Well to begin at the end I was just playing Monopoly at Clark's apartment with Rachael from CIEE and a couple of Chinese girls. They went to some party, apparently there are few enough expats that when one throws a party it's just THE party and people from different parts of the city know about it. My stomach has been upset again all day so I decided a night of drinking isn't probably the best idea. Chinese Monopoly is similar to US Monopoly with three differences: it's in Chinese, the board is really small, and I'm sure they're not paying Hasbro any royalties. We played for a while with the Chinese girls translating as best they could and the rest of us just recognizing cads, hint if the police are dragging you away by your pants it;s "go to jail, do no pass go, do not collect $200." Where I was shanghaied was when I traded Rachel 2 orange properties, for her to complete a monopoly, for one purple, the cheapest monopoly, and a bunch of cash. The cunning strategy here was to quickly put hotels on both the cheap purple properties, where I get screwed was a turn later when Clark realized one of the properties was from another section of the board and the colors just looked really similar, so I in fact had no monopoly. And in Chinese Monopoly that's just the cost of doing business, so much for a workers paradise.

Earlier today I had been trying to use my "working" dryer which heats the cloths so little that it seems to work on the property of spin them around and hope the cloths magically decide to dry themselves. I think I'm just going to have to bit the bullet and by a thing to hang my wet cloths on, though I don't even have anywhere in the sun to put them. All of the sudden I heard counting coming form outside, which is quite a feat to hear from the 14th floor. I rushed to my window and saw the freshmen doing a little more advanced marching around the campus. For some reason though a group of them weren't wearing any uniforms and one was carrying an umbrella. They also still weren't exactly all in the same step. I eventually made my way down town and to the video store again. I think that by the time I get back I'm going to have 200 movies. For about $35 I bought 9 movies (The Other Bolyen Girl, Once Upon a Time in the West, Rock Star, Into the Wild, About Schmidt, The Shawshank Redemption, Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A season of Twin Peaks, and 2 seasons of Dexter) Butch Cassidy took some doing as I had to try and write it down the guy went to look it up in the computer then hunted around the store until he found it. I'd like to end this post with a salute to Pepto Bismol the greatest stuff ever invented.