In Between

I think some one at the hotel is playing games with me. After about a week of colder weather here it's just gotten hotter and hotter every day. After a few days of this they finally started turning the air conditioning back on in the hotel so it wasn't 90 degrees in all the rooms. But here's the fun part, while they keep the air on during the day they shut it off at about 10 or 11 o'clock every night. So that by the time I want to go to bed it gets nice and warm inside my room. I can open the windows but the air outside isn't really any cooler. There's also the fact that Changzhou seems to never, ever, get to less then 80% humidity. Also despite the fact that I'm on the 14th floor it actually get quite loud out there in the morning so I can't sleep with my window open. The Chinese students sleep on basically mats on top of wood and don't have air, heating, or window shades, so they pretty much get up at 6 no matter what. Some asked me what time I went to bed and I gave the pretty conservative estimate of 12 or 1 and they were all shocked that I could stay up so late. But my whining about hotel aside the weather is really remarkable here. For a place where I think it snows occasionally it's about 85 degrees every day in the middle of October. The students on the other hand dress pretty much like it is cold with jackets in the morning and long pants every day. Even the shops, a lot of which have air, don't really turn it on meaning that it was really stuffy in Wal-mart today. I did my usualy Saturday shopping to get more American things including shaving cream, which I think they don't use here considering how hard it is to find. I finally found it but it ended up being RMB 48 which is really expensive for here. I think I spent more money on 2 bottles of shaving cream then on 2 bottles of ketchup, 2 bottle of jelly, 1 jar of peanut butter, 4 packs of popcorn, and 2 loafs of bread combined.