Too hot to trot (Marcus)

First and foremost, please please please keep on voting if you can get a moment!

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We are getting trumped by a few other photos with a lot more votes(which I am sure is the same people over and over and over) so...if you get a moment, please pump the 5 star on the above 2 links and i PROMISE we will send you kudos vibes!

As Courtney posted earlier, it has been absolutely stinking hot here lately. Wuxi - or rather this whole area is known to be almost unbearably hot during the months of July and August and well, as soon as it ticked over to July, bam, the heat came with it.

It's interestingly seasonal here - I have never seen such specific seasonal changes. When it ticked over from Winter to Spring there was an actual instant rise in temperature and the whole place began an almost instantaneous transform of growth. Summer ticked over and suddenly the amount of rain that came down went considerably up. And then finally the last two months of Summer...Man I do not know how we're going to travel in it - but thank GOD there is air conditioning in our hostels - it just better work!!!

Our sole activity today involved catching the bus to Decalathon - a huge outdoors store and bought ourselves rucksacks for travel. We will likely either ship these home at a later stage or ship the suitcases home - all in good time.

We've been hibernating indoors as even a short walk to the supermarket and back and we're just hot and stuffed. On the weekend we will possibly go into the expat bar Blue Bar and see if we can watch the Wimbledon final on their cable TV. There's actually a channel I had never heard of before, called the Australia Channel, which seems to broadcast a lot of football games and the like. Has been kinda cool watching an AFL game while in there - despite not really caring anymore(my carefactor directly proportional to how bad Essendon is sucking nowadays).

There's not really much else to tell. We both had a chuckle last night in between killing 40 million mosquitoes. Laughing about the hothouse bathroom with it's dripping brown rust gunk, fruit flies all through the kitchen, wall to wall mosquitoes, temperatures so hot you could bake a cake by just walking around with cake mix in a bowl, the fact you cant walk around indoors without slippers on unless you actually like having the souls of your feet black. Ahhh it's just hilarious in semi-hindsight. I just know we'll look back on everything and laugh; hell, we already do!

I guess that's the most important thing about being able to live in China; a sense of humor. Sure you need to be adapable and patient and any number of other virtues, but if you can't just take it all in stride and have a laugh about it, you're basically stuffed.

I think this whole adventure has really shown that we can deal with things that beforehand we possibly thought would have sent us packing. We have never come apart and kicked into war mode but have always banded together and come through shining. While we are both looking forward to returning to Australia early next year, there are things that we will undoubtedly miss.

Every second day the feeling of being a rock star gets incredibly old. Some days when we walk into town the starefest just gets too much, yet on others, bleh, it simply is. We were walking home from town the other afternoon and were talking about it - about how bad it would be being someone like Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie - some days would be normal, others you'd just crave your own privacy - your own anononimity. Well here we actually; unbelievably, experience almost the same thing they would - though without all the perks of having millions of dollars.

I can't even remember what it's like to drive down to the shops, wander around with no-ones company other than my own. No-one is looking at me, no-one cares what I am wearing or what I am buying or what I am doing - man I am looking forward to that again. Here it's just nuts how many people look at us - but it's not just looks. They will nudge each other, we'll hear them drop the chinese word for American on their mobile phones to whoever they might be talking to. Little kids will call us Americans and laugh in joy at how alien we look. It's unbelievable.

I guess the fact we live in an area of Wuxi that really wouldn't see many whities expotentially increases it - but we've got this far, we'll get to the end. It will actually nice to just kick into tourist mode for the next 4 weeks - at least we'll feel like tourists then. Here we're not tourists but we're also not locals - we're just here.

Of course living in a local area has its perks - just take a look at the following photos:

One of the most ..I don't know what you'd even call it - we were both amazed and stunned at the same time. Take a close look at the size of the child in the back of this truck. We were eating in our regular coffee shop steakhouse haunt when it rolled up to the lights. That kid, just standing out in the open, couldn't possibly be more than 5 or so years old - yet here it is in the tray of a truck....unbelievably there was even room in the cabin - only the driver seat was occupied. Different value of life? Yes!

Check out this jalopy. You should hear the engines on these things - they must have been worked and reworked and worked again and reworked and worked and so on and so on since the early 40's or something. I remember seeing a line of these in an old looking chinese community thinking they were just wrecks - OH NOOo - there's not really such a thing as wrecks around here - if it has wheels and can carry stuff, it can hold a motor and it WILL drive.

Once again it's movie time on the pavement. The local mobile phone shop puts up a TV out front and the crowd gathers for a bit of free cinema. We have written about this once before. This time we made the stupid mistake of walking in front of the crowd - hello instant 50 pairs of eyes following us - yeah that's a good feeling for two absolutely drama-confident and outgoing people such as we!

And on a final and unrelated note - a glimpse of the wilderbeast migration that occurs every day at precisely 11:45am. The school has the uncanny ability of going from ghost town to jam-packed crowd mass within minutes.