Chilled Out Sunday – Watermelon vs. Ice Cream

Had a very chilled out Sunday, which was nice.  Woke up this morning, paid bills, had lunch… then went and got a rockin hair wash/massage (not sure why these are connected here, but apparently people go to get their hair washed/styled at the saloon, and you get a head/neck/arm massage at the same time).  The woman who was washing my hair/massaging me did this awesome thing were she started by squeezing my fingers, moved up my hand, squeezed my thumb, and then moved “everything” (blood? energy?) up from my hand into my forearm and held it there, on a pressure point.  I completely couldn’t move my hand… it was weird, but so fricking relaxing afterwards.  She released the pressure point after about 30 seconds, then feeling gradually came back.  Really good stuff.

Then off to shopping for a bit… bought a couple of shirts at Parksons (apparently the Saks Fifth Avenue of Yueyang… high class for our city), then off to a nice, relaxing walk in the state park.  Then dinner (dumplings again, yum), bad ice cream and then home.  I’ve officially given up on getting real ice cream here in China, for whatever reason, it just hasn’t taken off.  Watermelon is the desert of choice… the ice cream we’ve had (two different occasions) has been delivered on a bed of watermelon both times.  Guess the moral of the story is, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.  If you’re looking for desert in China (at least in the remote parts of China), get watermelon, not ice cream.

Pretty chilled out day, which I needed, we’ve been so frickin’ busy it was good to get some down time.  The walk in the park was nice, I took some photos of the scenery… which… damnit… I’m going to try and get up online tomorrow *sigh*.  I have this bad feeling that photos might not get online until i get back home, but we’ll see.  We’ll go with optimism over realism for now.  Anyway, the photos do the park more justice than I can with words.  I can write “the bamboo was beautiful”, and “the view from the top of the temple was very green and scenic”, but this is definitely one of those times where communicating via picture is a far better medium.  Alright, time to lesson prep, want the last week of lessons to go well.