sounds of donghu

went for a night stroll around donghu with a glass of instant coffee in hand because god knows what else to do around here at night. walked to the playground near the gym - was disappointed to find that there are no swings there. there were some africans nearby playing drums on the grass. this may sound stereotypical, but the africans are always playing drums. in the expo, it's commonplace to hear their radical drumming thundering throughout the grounds. they always whip out their drums at angola parties on thursday nights. i can still hear the drumming now from inside my room. i like it. i walked by building 15. there was a kazakh, it may have been the nice one who gave me his seat on the bus, but it was too dark to tell from a sidelong glance, outside yelling into his phone in russian. что ты не помнишь? i think he said. or was it что! ты не помнишь!? but that may be wrong still. i like standing on my balcony with the river view and daring myself to look straight down eleven stories for as long as i can until i feel too weak and fearful to go on.

я чуть не

If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.

make-believe blog

Kære Valerie
Jeg kender ikke ordet "blomstringsfestival", kun ordet "blomsterfestival". Det er ofte svært at afgøre, om der skal være s eller ej, men jeg ville også sige "blomstringsfestival", men som sagt kender jeg ikke ordet.
Mange hilsener og jeg sender dig en cc snart.
Mikael

showboat

just watched judy's performance of ol' man river for the first time and it gave me chills. what a great singer. what a great song

miguelin dreams of gender equality

the spain pavilion is creative and interesting and beautiful the way i wish all the pavilions would be

It looks like this enormous, contorted, textured basket. The exterior is really awesome and there are signs all over it saying not to smoke near it, aka please don't burn down our pavilion. It looks like it would go up in flames in seconds.

Inside, the walls are this sort of pliable rubber material and all the Chinese people freak out when they lean against it. The walls are not flat, more topographical and following the roly-polyness of the basket's exterior. The room is really dark and cavernous and I thought I was going to blindly kick over some kid. On the walls they project this awesome humungus movie accompanied by some amazing beats avant-garde-type music. The movie is of like galloping horses and sort of amorphous stuff. And then this collection of bones descends from the ceiling and just hang there. Then a flamenco girl (real one, not movie) comes out and does some really sexy dancing in front of the projections. At the end of the film, they show footage of some famous Spanish tennis player I didn't recognize. Every time he hit the ball, it caused a huge crack of thunder and lightning would flash through this room.

In the next room there were screens arranged in cool slanty panels and they showed lots of antique photos of Spanish couples and people. Lots of assorted footage, but all quite cool-looking.

The last room, the most famous, is the giant baby. You walk into this huge room, and there's just this huge fucking baby. It's animatronic and stands like, I don't know how big things actually are, but I would say 50 feet as a bad guess? It's made out of some really skin-like material and it doesn't emit any sound, it just sits there and moves its face like it's going to cry. The way the eyelids rumple is really convincing. No one knows why this baby is there, but I'm guessing the basket structure is some womb metaphor, which is funny because Japan's pavilion is also supposed to be a womb (theirs looks like some sort of sea creature.) The baby just sits and distorts its face and all these bubbles fall down around it.

corpse mode

i got a massage today (hands down my favorite activity). even though i'd been speaking to the masseuses in mandarin, they still asked catherine what i was and remarked that i could be singaporean or malaysian...or indian. the masseuses were migrant worker girls who would chatter away at each other in hushed but clearly audible tones about gossip at work, their children (plural - don't know how they managed to defy the one-child policy), husbands, sex lives, and us, the curios of the west. "her neck is very bad." "it's because they sit in front of the computer all day." throughout i felt like a corpse deaf and dumb or a kobe beef cow being rubbed and marbled. my masseuse kept telling her masseuse friend about how flexible i am and then to demonstrate she would start bending my arms and legs backwards as if i were gumby.

havfrue

there was definitely someone swimming with the mermaid yesterday before the expo opened

She has been beheaded twice and has had her arm cut off, but The Little Mermaid has never left her spot on Langelinie pier since 1913. Until now.

look at this creature look at its habit

The depths of my depravity: I'm homesick for my Old Apartment. The one I lived in for three weeks. That I have replaced with an identical, or rather, identical but superior apartment.

old apartment

new apartment

Right now, I am seeking asylum in Old Apartment. The main reason is that New Apartment does not receive our wireless reception, which is a grievous offense indeed, one that I have yet to resolve. But internet aside, I can't deny the feeling of relief and contentment that I feel in this white bed surrounded by Old Apartment and the feeling of quiet anxiety I feel in the white bed of New Apartment.

Redemption of New Apartment

I have a sliver of river view

it's cool. i don't know what that igloo structure is. something expo, presumably.

i don't know what kind of sham smirnoff they sell in china, but it almost completely froze in the freezer and it gives me a headache. sham sham sham

tom-esque

i do not receive the interwebs in my new apartment. this is a huge, neurosis-inducing problem.

donghu 14B1104

It's fate. I'm moving in across from the Danes. There are like femten bycykler in my new building.

face deco

oakleyway just became a ponsorsay. so we all have to wear these space-aged things every day and look oucheyday.

ten am rabid tropical climate

this seriously sucks

r&r

screw exploring the city

on my day off i eat tim tams in bed

letters from home

Dearest Valerie.
My heart aches daily for you. I spend my days trapped, as if i were a caged bird, hopelessly beating my wings against the bars. Alas, i miss you.

In less gay words, we need to fucking skype!

letters from home

My friend Ian (who lives in Beijing) wanted to make it his mission to teach the Chinese how to queue- but he gave up because NO ONE knows what lines are for and why you stand in them.

It is VERY frustrating BUT I understand it. With 1.5 BILLION people, if you waited your turn for everything, you would die