Look at Me, I'm an Idiot.

So today, our weekend CET program activity was to visit Harbin's ice and snow sculpture festival, which is, of course, the world's largest. Above is me and my roomie, kickin' it in front of an ice kingdom while standing on an ice kingdom, and below is me, kickin' it in front of ice Notre Dame. The place was enormous and had more ice than your eyes have room for- all lighted from the inside mind you- and it was definitely a wonderful affair.

Nice huh. Moving past admiration though, allow me to remind you that at 8:00 PM tonight it was a balmy -2 degrees Fahrenheit on the outskirts of this lovely city, and we were at the festival for about an hour. This is not why I am an idiot, but I did learn two things: that I have a real and valid fear of frostbite, and that ice art deserves a place only in your dessert bowl, in a sort of I-can-swirl-the-chocolate-sauce-into-the-vanilla-with-sprinkles-and-prop-it-all-up-with-this-whipped-cream sort of way.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, and moving towards the reason I am a suspected idiot, we all went out to eat hot pot afterwards. In case you don't know, hot pot is a type of dining that involves one big bowl of boiling goodness in the middle of each table in which you cook meat, noodles, veggies, and anything else nearby that isn't nailed down. The trouble is, once the delicious food goes IN to the hot pot, you have to manage to get it back OUT again and onto your plate before you can eat it. This becomes a sort of peer-judged test of your chopsticking ability.

Well, you know how when your hands get really really cold, you sort of lose that fine motor control? And you know how my hands are notoriously cold and don't have the ability to warm themselves up? Well, that hot pot restaurant was about a fifteen minute bus ride from the ice festival.

For the first fifteen minutes of the meal, I was literally incapable of feeding myself. I could not even make the chopsticks meet, let alone apply enough pressure to successfully fish myself some food. People, when you're a blonde with sucky-ass Chinese at a Chinese restaurant in China, even people that know you don't assume your hands are unnaturally cold, they assume you're a culturally ignorant, completely incompetent American idiot, and a hungry one at that.

This episode was two parts funny, one part desperately concerned. Thought you should know.

Wo xihuan da pigu wo bu keyi shuo pian (I like big butts and I cannot lie),
China-Cat