Tuesday, May 15, 2007

You gotta burn incense.

Ririsu writes:

Back in January, during a particularly warm spell here in Wuhan, I had my bedroom window open a lot. The window is of the sliding variety and can slide in two directions. After having the window open for about a week straight, I tried to close it one night and it wouldn't shut. When a maintenance woman came to fix it, she jammed a screwdriver into a seemingly delicate area of the frame and forced the lock, then told me I should no longer use the window—under any circumstances. Then my room flooded and I was living in mildew hell and so I opened the window again. It REALLY won't shut now, and is stuck about four inches from the frame, which means there's a space of four x forty-eight inches in which all of the elements can find their way into my room. The two most heinous constant visitors are the smells coming from an open sewage drain below my window and the relentless mosquitoes of Central China. I keep the curtain closed, for the most part, which throws the mosquitoes off for about an hour but does nothing for the sewage smell. For that, I tape lit incense to the frame of the window and let the smoke attack and numb my nostrils before the human waste wafts in as well. Seems to be working sort of. I feel like I'm back in college because I accidentally burned a black scar into the window frame when a hearty stick of incese kept right on burning...