Last week, I made the big visit home to Meng's mother's home in a small city in Henan province. It's always nice going back there because my sole purpose is to be fed copious amounts of delicious food and taken out to nice restaurants. It's always nice and relaxing and now that I've been there a few times, there aren't so many people who 'need' to meet me.
I won't bore you with too many of the little details of the trip. The most interesting day of the trip by far was a trip out to the lake just outside of town where one of Meng's mother's friends arranged for us to go out and tour around on a boat. Once we get out on the lake, Meng told me that some of the islands had different attractions for tourists to see, she mentioned one had monkeys and another one had birds. Neat.
First, we went to monkey island. There were lots of monkeys, I'm really not sure exactly what kind of monkeys they were, but there were a lot. We walked around the island to see if there were more, but it seemed that they were all around the little house on the island. When we came back to the little house on the island, we met a group of Chinese soldiers doing a tour of the island. As you can expect, these guys were very sensitive to the animals and treated them with the utmost respect by throwing candy at them and then having the park staff help feed the monkeys beer. ASSHOLES. I haven't decided if it's genetic or learned but there is a tendency in Chinese males to be total dickheads, someday I'll figure that one out.
So we got the hell off of that island and headed to the next island in the circuit. When we got off the boat, I asked Meng what was on this island.
'What do you call women who are really men?', she replied.
'Huh?, why do you want to know that?'
'That's what's on this island'
'NO'
Well, she was right, that's what it was. Not exactly, it was transvestites, just men who dress like women. But still, wow, just wow. Here on an island in the middle of a lake in the middle of nowhere, outside of a small city in Henan province in China, there are four trannies dancing in a tiny dance hall for tourists. Think about taking a tour of Bras D'or Lake in Cape Breton and coming across an island with dancing transvestites. Think about that for a minute. My brain was basically on the verge of imploding just because it simply couldn't figure out how to process this. Even now, thinking about it, I'm not even sure it was real, maybe I was suffering from heat stroke, maybe I had some bad fish, maybe they were just really ugly women with Adam's apples. It just doesn't make sense, especially here.
We hung around for a while because the next show wasn't starting for some time. Meng's mother had tons of questions about the transvestites and I just sort of stood around in a stupor and sweated like a fat man eating chilli peppers. I'm sorry to say that after a short deliberation, we decided against watching the dancing show. My thoughts were basically that there were a few boats of soldiers possibly coming soon and I really didn't want to be in a little dance hall with 30 or 40 Chinese soldiers yelling nasty things at transvestites. Second, I'm not big on freak show atmosphere; not implying that trannies are freaks, but they were being shown in that kind of lightby whoever runs that island. Third, I'm not really into watching amateur dance performances; even if it is an amateur dance performance put on by men wearing short skirts, wigs and bikini tops.
Oh, and another random thing. There is a fair coming to town soon and there a huge billboard not too far from my house. It shows the usual things: families having fun, dinosaurs flying around, pictures of a few rides that are going to be there. Here is a picture of one ride that really caught my eye and I can't wait to ride it.
