Show notes #1,237

Hello wonderful people inside of the internet, and welcome to the end of another week on planet earth. This week has been characterised by a gentle rise in the amount of activity per day, culminating in now, the start of a short but worthwhile holiday. As i write this i am sitting in a hundred-year-old hotel, and i can hear the bustle of an unhelpfully narrow street outside. I will write more about Xiamen in another post. For now, i will focus on the rest of the week just happened.

Because i have no classes on monday, i made the probably poor decision not to leave the house, instead getting back into reading snow crash in the morning, and continuing my digital spring clean in the afternoon. Many files have been deduplicated and moved, and much of the result has found its way onto this very website that you are reading right now. A variety of old posts from past blogs are now available for your perusal, and a variety of slightly mouldy half-written drafts have been rinsed off and gently arranged in my drafts directory, ready to be sent out into the world. It’s amazing how much my own views can change in only a few years; completed posts are provided without edit, but i will be making changes to anything new to reflect what i currently think, because i don’t want to try and continue writing something that i no longer feel.

A short while ago, a friend of mine suggested that i sign up to be a volunteer helper for an exchange programme with Monash University, which unfortunately does not mean i get to travel to australia, but rather that i get to meet australian students travelling here. Of all the stereotypes of all the countries in the world, i find that those given to australian people ring most universally true, which is likely down to the fact that they are mostly positive. These students, and their teachers, were totally jubilant, and characteristically foul-mouthed. On top of that, they were unreasonably good at ink wash painting and i had a great time jealously watching as a variety of clearly identifiable scenes appeared on every occupied desk.

This week we also headed to Shanghai’s postal service museum, which is one of those museums that doesn’t sound on paper as interesting as it was in real life. This one was like a bingo card for museum styles: there was a dramatic audiovisual tour through history, a collection of old letters in boxes, a room full of random junk tangentially related to figures tangentially related to the subject matter, and some dark rooms with exhibits in glass cases, underlit in ultraviolet while ambient music played in the background. The best part was that it was free, so i highly encourage anyone in the area to pop along and learn all about postage stamps.

Another great outing was to a restaurant which sold exclusively burger patties and broccoli, which you cooked yourself on a tiny grill in front of your seat. In my spelunk into my older writings, i found some thoughts on how i would run a restaurant, so it was delightful to see that someone else had taken at least a few of those ideas to heart: i don’t have to choose something off the menu! Even better was that the broccoli came with unlimited refills. Whenever you ate what was on your grill, a member of staff would come around and give you a few more pieces. I highly approve. Vegetables are good for you!

That brings us to now, and i am sitting in bed. Last night we were woken in the middle of the night by a screaming cat. I hope that it will not happen again tonight. Halloween has passed, and now is the festive season. Christmas songs have made themselves at home in my head, and i like it.

Until next time, stay wonderful