snow anthem

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What a terrible night: some dude started yelling for the maid at about 1 am and woke me up. I listened to that shit for a couple of minutes, then I burst out the door.

Thinking about it now, I’ve come to realize that screaming at the top of my lungs that he should just shut the fuck up maybe wasn’t such a considerate thing to do either. But I just couldn’t help it. It’s hard for me to handle my temper sometimes.

At least I didn’t say that I was going to open a can of whoop-ass on him (which I didn’t, mainly because I wasn’t so sure whether he might have been a kung-fu artist or something).

However, he kept silent and I was able to go back to sleep.

Till 3 am.

That’s when a group of drunks entered the hallway and started making a big scene before moving in a room next door. What followed sounded like a mixture of chauvinist jokes, heavy drinking, moving between rooms, and hurried sweaty drunken love.

Wrapped up in my sleeping bag, I lay there, hating them.

…

Well, after every night there comes a new morning, and today wasn’t so bad:

Everything was white again. Time to go out and challenge a friend for a snow fight:

…or stick to building snowmen instead:

I didn’t have time for all this, though, with so much to see:

A peaceful place:

Thick walls + no people = complete silence.

Then I went to a place called Susan Prison 苏三监狱:

This prison complex originally dates from the early Ming-dynasty.

The reason why it’s called Susan Prison is this lady:

Susan – a high-class cocotte that got locked up here once – on false charges. She was later set free and married by a handsome and particularly well-off hunk, and the story of her life was made into a famous opera called Yutangchun 玉堂春 a couple of centuries later.

According to legend, Susan once said: “no good people in Hongtong County 洪洞县里无好人”, a saying which is supposed to be pretty well-known.

I guess that’s just too bad for the locals and that large part of the country’s population that apparently stems from here!

…speaking of which, I walked through a small town almost completely made up of karaoke bars today:

Looks like the type of etablissement where a modern Susan might want to go looking for work today, eh?

I counted 20 of these KTV places on one street, then I stopped counting.

Guess people really like to sing songs in this little town.

Anyways, after the karaoke town it got really nasty on the highway, so I decided to walk through the fields:

There’s another video here to show you the heavy snowfall (beware, there’s not much happening in this):

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(In fact this video is so boring that my cellphone gives up and falls on its back in the end. I guess it just couldn’t handle the situation.) Walking through the fields was nice anyways.

I was originally looking for some nice snowcapped landscapes, but what I found instead was:

…lots and lots of empty oil containers.

They buy these containers from car body shops all over the region:

The buying price is 0.8rmb. Later they can resell them for 0.9rmb.

The plastic container might then go on to become a piece of furniture or something.

And some people will have earned a little money to buy stuff with.

Or maybe go sing songs?