Have you ever wondered what the inside of a Chinese fire extinguisher looks like? After the events of last night, I no longer have to. One of my classmates, not in the soberest of conditions, decided to see what would happen when he pulled the pin out - the result being a fierce discharge of light pink powder ALL OVER the fourth floor hallway. I was in my room at the time, and heard a noise like steam being let out of a pipe - I opened my door, only to discover I couldn't see across the hallway due to the intense pink powdery fog in front of me. I quickly shut my door, but not before getting a nice light powdery coating all on the floor of my room. I was annoyed.
I was even more annoyed ten minutes later, when I opened my door again to find that the pink fog had settled down into a fairly even coating of the hallway. The custodian from downstairs arrived on the scene, and was indescribably unhappy - I only wish I had understood the words he used. He went to go call the university police, and I decided the best thing to do was to go downstairs and start cleaning the mess up before the investigators started arriving. It took ten students more than an hour to get all the powdered dust swept up and thrown into trash cans. We were sweeping up inch-high piles about a foot in diameter, and then using a beat-up aluminum dust pan that somebody scavenged from somewhere to try and collect it all. After the initial collecting, we went on mop detail. The final touch was using washcloths to wipe down the walls, (you could write your name in the dust), and we finished just as two policemen arrived. I was mopping the stairs down to the third floor as they were walking up, and you could just see their confusion, as they arrived to absolutely no mess at all (oh, but you should have seen it before!!!) They stood there for a while, watched us put the mops away, and then told us not to do anything like that again. The hall was almost back to normal this morning, though there's still a light pink tinge on the wall. All in all, yet another good reason to stay away from the baijiu...
My roommate and the roommate next door pulled together an amazing last-minute trip to go play paintball this morning, which turned out to be a lot of fun - we piled into a bus at 8:00 this morning, and arrived at a provincial park in what seemed like the middle of nowhere about two hours later. The place is a ski area in winter - notable was the fact that this was the first ski area I've been here where the chairlift actually goes over the snowmaking pond on its way up the mountain. This naturally implies that you have to ski over the snowmaking pond to access the chairlift, which just goes to show you how cold it gets here in winter - you just naturally assume that the pond is always going to be frozen.
After we got all our gear (some of the pants fit better than others), we headed up the hill to start playing. One team would hide in a random maze of old tires, wood fences, and an abandoned car (basically, your typical West Virginia backyard), while the other team would charge up the hill and try and track people down. As much as the thought of shooting at your classmates and Chinese roommates is kind of disturbing, the disturbing part wore off pretty fast, and it was just kind of fun to try and hit people with bright red dots of paint. I wound up camping out behind a fence with my next-door neighbor for awhile, and it was just cool to look around and see everyone yelling at eachother in random mixes of Chinese and English. Everyone learned the words for "behind", "in front", and "My gun is broken" (the equipment was kind of sketchy). I think everyone had a pretty good time, though, even though there weren't nearly enough paintballs, and I had to listen about a billion times to people saying how many more you get in the US, and how much cheaper they are, and what happens when you freeze them, and one time, this guy got hit, and... etc. etc. etc. I think every American guy has some kind of story regarding getting injured playing paintball... fortunately, we all made it out okay!
speaking of making it out, I need to leave the internet bar right now and start doing reading for class before I fall asleep. more tomorrow!
