This is the lovely visitor I found on the floor last night. I shooed him out, but he scuttled right back in. The dark door crack appealed to him. Finally, I got him to the hallway, where I found this frog, before meeting the giant moth in the bathroom. The insects of this place are quite exotic to my Alaskan sensibilities.
He's small, but he's there:
This bugger was big:
A miniature horror landed on the pool table the other night— probably seven inches long, including the jaws, about 1.5 inches, which creaked loudly by squeaking its wings (It’s not all horror though, the butterflies are perfectly splendid). Abel took many pictures, perhaps I can send away for one, and maybe I can capture some shots before I leave.
The tickets aren’t purchased, but I plan to leave Yangshuo this weekend. I think I’ve seen pretty much all there is to see, and most of the people I knew (even the some of the students) are gone. My next stop is Lijiang. There I have another volunteer opportunity,— interacting with foreign customers at a small guesthouse. That in itself doesn’t interest me, but the place has a small, unused, café which I can apparently bend to my will, even to point of making money if stuff actually sells. They have an oven too, the first I’ve encountered since landing in China! How I long to bake some bread, the selection in stores here is absolutely unbearable. Even bread from bakeries seems a bit off.
There’s not much of note to mention. I played Go with a Chinese man in the park the other day. He was good, very near my own level, hard to tell if slightly above or below, but he lost in the end. The game was awesome though, I tried and tried to kill his shapes, but never succeeded. Still, I used the threats to dictate the flow of play and squashed his territory, thereby minimizing his points to a fatal degree. Much fun was had, hands were shaken, he complimented me (you play like a Chinese), and we both took us off, late, to our respective dinners.
I probably owe the structure of that last sentence to “The Worm Ouroboros,” an early book of fantasy written in Jacobean prose. I finished it the other day, but the odd turns of phrase have yet to dissipate from my brain. It was an excellent book: curious, in that the names, both of places and people, were bizarrely uncreative (for the places), and weirdly inconsistent (the people), but possessed of an uncommon elegance in illustration. Normally I hardly scan, or abide, lengthy, overwrought, descriptive passages. But the author of this book, though his sentences trailed on for clause after clause, paced things so well, and chose words so carefully, that every spellbinding fragment seemed at once clear, important, and poetic. The villains were villainous; the heroes, heroic. It read like a Greek epic cast in Fairy Land.
As it happens, I just read the Wikipedia entry on the book and found this explanation for the names:
'Many people (including J.R.R. Tolkien) have wondered at and criticized Eddison's curious names for his characters (e.g. La Fireez, Fax Fay Faz), places and nations. According to Thomas, the answer appears to be that these names originated in the mind of a young boy, and Eddison could not, or would not, change them thirty years later when he wrote the stories down.'
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