The other day while John and I went shopping for music CDs, I met a young woman who had frostbite. I’d never really seen it before except on like the IMAX Mount Everest movie. She worked for the store actually and while she was locating Tian Zhen and the 12 Girls’ Band for me, she kept rubbing her pointer and middle finger on her left hand. Her fingers were all swollen and red. They looked like bees had stung them. I asked what had happened and she said it was frostbite. She pointed to her lower ear lobes too… both puffy and somewhat bluish. It was so disturbing. She said she put some kind of ointment on them, but it didn’t seem to help. Apparently, she had gotten all of this before, but it was some years back before she moved to Shanghai. This winter though was especially cold and walking to the store and back for work was brutal. I didn’t know what else to say. I just wondered to myself… how cold and how long for someone to suffer from frostbite? Didn’t she have a hot water bottle or something? Does she know what happens in severe cases of frostbite? AMPUTATION for god’s sake! She was quite matter-of-fact about it and then went about helping another customer. We bought our two CDs and left. I re-bundled myself extra carefully this time: I even re-wrapped my scarf to cover my mouth and nose.

We’re a few days into the New Year now and people are still scaring the wits out of my pups with their artillery-fire explosives. When we took Remy and Martin outside yesterday morning, per usual, they got very excited watching the apartment pigeons in their glass coop. They jumped up scratching the glass door frantically hoping to get their mouths wrapped around one of those pudgy feathered creatures. Ears perked, tails straight up… maybe today would be their lucky day. Then a firecracker went off in the distance– a single low boom and that was enough to send both pups, tails between their legs, scurrying back inside for cover. Remy who is especially regular, drops her packages twice a day– once in the morning, once in the evening. She’s all off schedule now (and stopped up), thanks to the pyro-happy Chinese.

Yesterday, John and I went to JinJiang Hotel–one of our favorite stops for 1) a potty break 2) foreign bookstore 3) travel agency. While we were in there checking on airfares from SH to Hong Kong to Taiwan, the wind blew so hard, it swung the front glass door open, off it’s hinge, and sent the thing crashing to pieces. It was pretty surreal.